So, we are Marketing for Owners, the small team, and we have been doing some stuff to build up our business.
There will be examples of what we did coming in 2016, it’s one of the things we’re going to change is to tell you how we did stuff in 2015.
So let me tell you how we did this year starting with e-mails. I think I’ve mentioned before that e-mails or building a list of happy e-mail subscribers who’ve given you permission to market to them or to talk to them to get them to know I can trust you.
That list is essential to any business, it doesn’t have to be huge, you just have to have a list of interested people.
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So at the end of the year or as I record this when I last looked, our total of e-mail subscribers is 3300; now that’s not bad at all.
That’s been built over the total of a year and of course many people have unsubscribed because what we are talking about is not relevant to their needs or no longer relevant. But we only want to talk to people who are genuinely interested.
We use AWeber currently for our e-mail and there is a very easy one click genuine “Unsubscribe” link on every single e-mail that we send.
Now, in ongoing, we aim currently and at our current level to increase our subscriber list by about 19 e-mails per day.
I can’t remember why it comes to that, but that is what it shows. We also use a free chrome extension provided by Bryan Harris of Videofruit and it is very clever.
Now we currently have 4 to 5 opt in opportunities on every page of the website. Now some may have more, couple may have less, but with advice from an expert with this, Tim Paige, we are going to increase that to 7 but you won’t find the pop-ups, because we don’t use pop-ups.
Now we may use an exit pop-up in the future but we are not currently and there’s nothing wrong with pop-ups, but just letting you know that we don’t have to use them and it still works. So everyone who says “Oh I’m not using pop-ups”, there are many other ways of doing it.
And when we say 7 opt in opportunities, they are mostly subtle and they are for things like cheat sheets, for joining a members club, or getting a download report, or for bits and pieces that we have; we may have live the training, but they’re not all for the same thing.
What Lead Pages has found is that when they increased the number of opt in opportunities per page to 7 they found a sweet spot and subscriber numbers doubled. Who knew?
So next thing, the podcast, this, we have a solid following peaking at around 400 per day downloading the podcast.
We want it to be more but we can’t all be John Lee Dumas or Pat Flynn. Now from January 6th in this new year, every single Wednesday episode is going to be an interview with an expert.
You will hear interviews from Tim Paige of Lead Pages, Rebecca Otis and John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing, Omar Zenhom of The $100 MBA, John Lee Dumas is coming on, Kate Erickson of Entrepreneur on Fire — all of these are fantastic people!
We’re going to talk to them about what they do every day to market their business. We are not talking about the fluff of “What’s your favorite book? “How did you get started?” and all this, but we are getting into the meat and we’re talking about what they do to become successful, how they market their business online.
And what little tricks and tips, in fact, some will tell us how to market off-line as well. That is going to be exciting.
It will just come on the normal podcast with your subscription, so if you just get on iTunes, subscribe, they will automatically be there.
I’ve asked every single guest at the end for an honest opinion and quite a few have said they very much enjoyed the interview because they are not pre-scripted.
I don’t give them the questions in advance and I have asked questions they’ve never been asked before.
So, let’s talk about the members, membership, and The Owners Club. Membership currently stands just over 600, so that’s pretty good.
The Owners Club is free on this level, just go to marketingforowners.com/join. If you’re not convinced by that, you can go on the menu at the top or if you’re looking on a mobile, just scroll across to the right and there is a bit that says “Start here” and I think that takes you to one called “Seven reasons.”
But people enjoy it. We give extra things there that are free for you —things like all our cheat sheet reports and all our checklists, that page has 50 something checklists and cheat sheets, you have to subscribe to get them.
But as a member just click and then download them, whether you want them or not. You can print them out, use them with their friends, pass them around the office, whatever you like.
So one things that people have been asking for, is that people want more. So in possibly the end of January, we will be starting up The Owners Gold membership.
Now there will be a cost to The Owners Gold membership that will open. But it will be an extremely low monthly price when it does.
When you join, you will be grandfathered into that price forever, so we’re not saying oh special discount, it’s just going to be a low price.
And for anyone who pays for the year up front, is going to be ridiculously low; it won’t be that for long, but it will start there.
All training will be included for free, every single training course that we are creating and we are pumping out the video training courses, the website101.co course, which has over 35 videos, all of that will be included.
The social media 101 that’s just coming out in February I think, that will be included, so will the lead generation and so will the persona, so will be the referral, so will be the e-mail marketing one. All included in The Owners Gold.
I will let you know, if you’re not currently subscribed to the e-mail list, go to marketingforowners.com/71, that has a very, very popular download book, over 3000 has been downloaded.
You can join as a member and you’re subscribed, one or other of those and you’ll be notified and get all the details of when The Owners Gold Membership site is ready to launch.
It won’t be a big fanfare but there will be live training, there would be monthly Q&A sessions where you can ask anything about your stuff.
But imagine that, live online training of how to do stuff, the latest updates. Those courses by the way, will be updated, so if Facebook changes something we’ll be updating it immediately. It’s all good.
Next, in this year we launched website 101, and it was very, very popular. This shows you how to put together a website that does set you up with your hub to be able to market online.
For those of you that say “Oh I have someone designing a website”, it’s not going to work. I’m not saying I’m some kind of miracle worker in teach you how to put a websites together, but the course is $299, you get to learn how to do it yourself or one of your staff, it’s click by click, it’s brilliant.
But the important thing is it sets it up to generate leads and it sets up everything, we show you how to set everything up from the start, not theoretically, not “Oh, go and sign up here” we show you how to sign up here and then we show you how to set it up, how to insert any code, there’s no technical stuff.
If you can use e-mail and Word, you can do it. If you’re going to use a designer, you’re wasting your money, the designer is building a website for you, not for your customer, the person that wants to use the website, think about it.
That is why 90% of websites are a waste of money; just saying. Tell me where you can get one for $299 and tell me where you can learn how to do-it-yourself.
And by the way, 60 day money-back guarantee, so if you don’t actually like it, if you think, “It’s not what I want”, just e-mail, you get 100% refund, no questions, no nothing.
Social Media 101 is coming soon. That is going to be the most comprehensive one because we cover everything; we cover Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, YouTube.
Tell me another course that goes into every single detail, click by click of how to set them up for a business. Yes! And all that will be in the members’ side as well.
Now content, we have been working on our content. At first we piled out a lot of content, but we’ve in more recent times, been reducing the content and upping the quality; that will continue.
We want every piece content that we put on the website, to teach you something; everything we write about is going to be like a free lesson, it’s going to teach you. That is what we are going to be changing.
We are also going to be doing more keyword research and some SEO experiments. When I say SEO experiments, these are not like SEO , meaning search engine optimizations to increase your rankings, these are not what you’re thinking, nothing to do with spammy stuf.
These are just everyday real life what Google would love you to do and when they work, we’ll tell you how to do it.
We’ll be doing lots of those and much of it based on our new influencer marketing strategy that we are also rolling out in more depth.
Then, Social Media, our final report card — Twitter following, 22,000, Facebook 6,200 or so when I last looked.
And those are the two we concentrate on by the way, the others we are on Pinterest and on LinkedIn, but we don’t actually concentrate on those because we find our readers are not there.
Our target market is not using those. We also we have an Instagram, we have Google+ and we have YouTube, but that’s where we find our people.
Numbers mean nothing and in 2016 one of our aims is to up the engagement; we have a good level of engagement, we want more because if no one is engaged, if what we’re putting out is no good, then numbers mean nothing, you must understand that.
If you are saying “Yes! I’ve got 22,000 Twitter followers,” but someone who’s got 122,000 says, “Yeah, whatever.” It means nothing.
If you have 200 Twitter followers and they’re all engaged and talking to you, that’s better, I would much rather have that any day.
So we’re looking for engagement, we will talk to the people that engage with us and talk to us and are of interest and everyone else is just there making noise.
That is our report card.
Drive Time Podcast
Now do you want a drive time podcast? Okay, I’m going to give you one. Today it is The Amazing Seller podcast by Scott Voelker.
Now Scott sells on Amazon and he does fulfilled by Amazon, Amazon FBA. I have a friend Eric who does his entire business that way and he’s brilliant at it, but Scott tells you how he does it, what he’s learned, brilliant, very, very, very popular podcast, I recommend it.
Go to iTunes, look up The Amazing Seller podcast. You can Google it, it will come up, he’s great, subscribe, give him a rating, tell him what you think.
They’re not long by the way, about half an hour and he puts them out every two or three days, he’s a good guy.
Also, while you’re at it, why not subscribe to this one and give a rating? If you do, come back to the website and go to marketingforowners.com/freebook, we will send you a choice of our book list of over 50 top recommended books, actually it’s probably 60 or so by now, anywhere in the world, brand-new, at my expense.
It will come from Amazon or Amazon sister company The Book Depository, brand-new guaranteed, I promise. Anything I say goes, it’s got my face on it.
If you ever want to ask the question jon@marketingforowners.com, I reply to every single e-mail, try me.
Otherwise, have a fantastic night tonight, don’t get too drunk that you can’t remember where you live and don’t make a fool of yourself.
Been there, done that, a bit old for that now. I hope you have good fun and I hope the evening brings you fun.
I’ll see you next year.
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What does your 2015 report look like?