Internet Marketing 101 by Brian Zimmerman

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners A Practical Guide to Growing Your Business

by Brian Zimmerman

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

Introduction Hi, I’m Brian Zimmerman, and I’m going to share with you the basics of Internet marketing. After reading this practical guide, you’ll have a better understanding of marketing, the Internet and how to utilize the potential of both for your small business. We’ll also discuss the psychology and mindset of potential customers, and help you understand how that relates to what you’re currently doing to build your business. Finally, we’ll wrap up by talking about how to build long term relationships with prospective clients and stronger relationships with current clients. Once you’ve completed this course, you can select from our library of advanced training services which can help you understand different marketing channels for your business like: PPC, social media, media buying, search engine rankings, email marketing and many more methods. I hope you enjoy this book and welcome your comments. Please visit the website at:

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Psychology

Chapter 2: Marketing Mindsets

Chapter 3: Marketing Strategy

Chapter 4: Irresistible Marketing

Chapter 5: Pulling it All Together

Contact Information

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

Chapter 1: Psychology Why Psychology? Psychology is the study of how our mental and emotional systems work together. As human beings, we possess a complex system comprising emotions and thoughts that drives us to do things that are, to say the least, very interesting. Many of the things we do don’t appear to make sense, but when viewed from the outside, all of a sudden things start to become clear. We understand that we can direct ourselves, but we can also direct others (ethically and unethically), so it’s important to understand how the mental and emotional systems work together to increase your success in marketing and in life. If you want to be highly successful at convincing others to buy your products or services you must understand how they are wired. Our wiring is part of us—it’s in our DNA, it’s from our parents and ancestors. We also get what is called “programming,” which means that when we’re kids we become aware of things that happen to us. We start to become like our environment and we tend to start acting robotic. Once we become robots to our surroundings, we do things unconsciously and develop patterns. You may be wondering what this has to do with marketing. The reality is psychology affects businesses in a variety of ways. You’ll begin to notice many things when it comes to generating new clients and getting to the next level. We not only get the wiring, but we also get the program. What many don’t understand is our thoughts build on each other, which can be beneficial or can slow us dramatically down in life. Once we learn how to combine marketing and psychology, we can use that knowledge to grow our business. Marketing Psychology Principle #1: Customers are Irrational So let’s talk about customers being irrational. I feel most people are irrational, including myself. It took me a few years to discover this. I

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

literally had to go flat broke to have a light bulb go off in my head. Our brains work through pictures, thoughts, fantasies, fears and impressions that are blasting through our heads all day long. These emotions and thoughts are what cause us to move in one direction Customers make decisions or another. The most important based on internal wiring and thing to understand about programs. As business owners, marketing and building your business is customers are we need to know our irrational. Our customers make customers’ biggest fears and decisions based on this internal frustrations. wiring and programs. As business owners, we need to know our customers’ biggest fears and frustrations. These irrational decisions are what cause customers to buy our products. Marketing Psychology Principle #2: Impulse and Emotion Customers act on impulse and emotions. If you want to prevent yourself from buying something, I’d recommend waiting thirty days before buying it. I would bet most people wouldn’t buy half the things they buy if they waited 30 days. Take the grocery store for example. Candy bars and magazines are at the checkout stand—because merchandisers are trying to appeal our emotions and impulses. When we market our products and services it doesn’t always make sense to market toward our customer’s logical side of their brain. Sometimes, we need to market toward their irrational minds. Most customers are confused and in many cases they’re lazy. They need to be pushed and you can do this by dialing up their emotions. You can’t do this by talking to them about how great you and your company are. Instead, you need to let them know how you’ll solve their problem. Marketing Psychology Principle #3: Don’t Confuse the Customer Customers don’t like to be confused. Too many choices cause confusion, which sometimes results in a customer opting not to choose anything. If

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

you learn how to not confuse your prospects, you’ll be able to market to them better than your competition. Websites are filled with features and information that has nothing to do with their specific benefits for a customer. What ends up happening is a customer shows up to the site and gets confused, so they leave the site. Marketing Psychology Principle #4: Customers hate to take risks Your prospects and customers hate to take all the risk. They may be skeptical of a typical “30 day guarantee.” I’d suggest coming up with big and bold guarantees so your customers can’t help but do business with you. What you want to do is take the risk away from the customer, or what’s called a risk reversal. For example, the customer can try a product for 30 days, and if the customer isn’t satisfied, they can return the product or service and they will receive $100.00. This results in the customer having no risk. Now most businesses will never do this because they don’t feel confident that their prospects or customers will keep the product or service, or they believe people will try and take advantage of the offer. Get over it. I’m not saying your prospects will never request the refund, but I promise that if you’re offering great value, products and services, you won’t see more returns than you’re getting currently. As an added bonus, you’ll most likely increase profits because more prospects will sign up for your products and services. When you take away all the risk for your customers, you start creating the ultimate home run. Marketing Psychology Principle #5: Express Value Customers need value translated into traditional types of marketing. Traditional marketing refers to what you read in most textbooks, or marketing that promotes creating fancy logos or graphics or putting up pictures that relate to security and happiness. The reality is most customers can’t translate the value by themselves— you must translate for them. For example, someone may sell a book for around $20.00, but if they translated the value better, they could charge much more for their book.

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

When you wrap your marketing around the customer’s irrational fears, the fact that they hate to be confused, and don’t like to take risks, you can frame it in a way that making the decision to buy is better than not buying.

Kevin Trader does this through his infomercials where he goes on live TV and talks about all the value his books will bring to your life. In return, he’s able to sell more to his market down the road. If I wrote a book on paying down debt I could translate the value by saying “If you pay your mortgage in bi-weekly payments and make a couple extra payments a year, you could save thousands of dollars and you’ll be able to pay your mortgage off in fifteen years.” Or, “In chapter two, I’ll teach you a technique that will allow you to call all your credit companies and lower your interest rates by three percent. This one technique could save you $10,000 in ten years.” What I’m doing is translating the value for them. Weight loss is a great example. I could say, “By losing this weight you’ll be able to attract your ideal mate or improve your current relationship.” These are examples of things that are going on in the prospect’s mind: Are you afraid your husband’s going to leave you if you don’t lose weight? What does it feel like to be overweight? The risk that she takes is greater than just losing weight. The key is to relate your products and services into terms that the customer perceives as value. When you wrap your marketing around the customer’s irrational fears, the fact that they hate to be confused, and don’t like to take risks, you can frame it in a way that making the decision to buy is better than not buying. Don’t talk about how great your business is or brag about what you do. Instead talk about your customer’s needs. Go through your sales pitch with a fine- toothed comb and talk about all the high points and benefits, and connect those with the customer’s irrational fears and frustration. You’re now translating it into terms they understand.

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

Chapter 2: Marketing Mindsets Now that you understand the basic psychology it’s important to understand the mindsets. Mindsets are a way to look at the world. Without the correct mindset it becomes extremely challenging to get anything to work. When you start with the correct mindset everything else in your business will come together better, including your marketing. I feel the challenge most business owners face is they want the techniques and tricks but they want to skip all the conceptual aspects. I discovered through trial and error that learning the correct mindsets can put you and your business way ahead of the curve. The way you view your business and marketing can dramatically increase your bottom line. Marketing Mindset Principle #1: Be Customer Focused. The first thing to think about with mindsets in marketing is not your product, it’s your customer. When most businesses develop a marketing plan, they focus on their product and how great it is. The marketing that I do doesn’t start out talking about the product. What I like to do is start out by talking about the fears, frustrations, wants and desires of my prospects or customers. I like to tell stories about my mishaps, which helps me connect with my prospects in a deeper level. I help business owners by talking about things they relate to. I don’t start my marketing talks by saying “Buy my products, buy my services.” I want to speak with the customer in a way that relates to them. My mentor, Eben Pagen, said that the path to success isn’t obvious and in many cases it’s counter-intuitive, meaning it goes against what we would think we should do.

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

Think about when you go buy something. You’re standing there looking at the item on the shelf…the first thoughts that cross your mind are how’s it going to help you, what’ll you do with it, and how many ways you might be able to use it. But sometimes as business owners, it’s as if we forgot all about that feeling of what it was like to purchase something.

On the stage are you, your company and your prospect...who will you shine the spotlight on?

In the psychology section, I spoke about how your prospects and customers are only thinking about themselves. Knowing that, you can see why it makes no sense to talk about how great your products and services are.

What I think happens is business owners get attached to their company, products and services. Business owners start spilling all their company info off to their prospect. On the other hand, your prospect is looking at your website, products and services thinking, “This has nothing to do with me and I really don’t care to be viewing this information any longer.” When you shift from talking about you and your company to talking about their fears, wants and desires, a trigger connects the prospect to the business. My question to you is this: picture a stage on which there are three—you, your company and your prospect...who would you shine the light on? I’d say most businesses would put it on their company or themselves. These businesses talk about how great they are and they talk about all the features of the products and services. They hype themselves up. Many companies also talk about how much better they are than their competition. I’d suggest shining the light on the customer and only talk about them. A technique to do this is stop using the words “Me,”, “My,” and “I” when creating your marketing and try to use the words “You” and “Your.” I’m not always perfect at this. Many times I still do these things because I feel so strongly about the benefits of my products and services. When we

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

use the words “You” and “Your” it forces us to talk about the customer and their needs. Remember, marketing is not about you or your products—it’s about your customers’ fears and frustrations. It’s about their emotions. I want you to understand it’s not that talking about your products or yourself is bad; I just recommend that you wait until later in the communication process. Marketing Mindset Principle #2: Let the Customer Buy—Not Be Sold. Customers love to buy from you but they don’t like to be sold by you. What many business owners do is what only seems natural for them to do—they push their products and services onto others. Many car salesmen like to push their product onto a customer. This technique turns the customer off because it feels like the sales person has an agenda. What if the sales person said, “Hello Mr. / Ms. xxx, what is the one frustration you currently have with your car? Why are you frustrated with that?” You rarely hear a sales person talk like this. If a sales person talked like this, the difference would be huge. It would not only change the perception of the sales process, but also improve the communication during the sales process. When we mass market, we talk to a potential market in terms of their overall market fears and frustrations. If people are showing up to websites and brick and mortar companies, they are showing up because they want to buy. When they show up and they sense hype and verbiage that doesn’t relate to them, they’ll leave and go elsewhere. The shift I suggest all business owners change to, is start giving customers and prospects everything they need to convince themselves they want to purchase your product. The only way to give people everything they want is to know their fears, frustrations, and the irrational process that they go through in their minds. You can use scrutiny and other sales techniques to attempt a sale on a prospect, but you’ll quickly learn that using my technique is a lot better. Give your prospect what they need to convince themselves.

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

Marketing Mindset Principle #3: Testing, Testing, is this thing working? Another big challenge that business owners face today is figuring out whether their outsourced marketing efforts are working. We spend a lot of money attempting to get clients, yet don’t really know what is working and what isn’t working. Business owners listen to friends and family too much when creating marketing plans. We like to convince ourselves that because we’ve seen a lot of ads and watched many TV commercials we understand marketing. We like to go to our friends and family for advice on whether something will work or not, allowing them to give us their input and support. When we realize that most ads don’t sell right away and it’s a constant change, test, and tweak to find things that actually work, that’s when we begin understand how not to get too attached to our marketing. It’s all about results and testing.

Many times business owners start a business and run an ad in the yellow pages or the newspaper. The ad rep says, “Great, we can run this ad for a week, that’s only $1,000.00—or even better, we can have you sign a contract and run this ad for an entire year which is only $40,000 a year. By signing the contract, you’ll save 30% plus etc., etc., etc.” The business owner justifies signing a year’s contract by believing they’ll save money. The ad then runs and nobody calls. Week after week this continues to happen. The business owner then calls the ad rep and the ad rep says, “You’ve only been running the ad for x amount of time, you have to be patient.” This cycle continues happening and the business owner is now tied into a contract for $40K. Around month six of the contract, the business owner realizes that the ad only guaranteed the phone calls, and he only had three sales out of that, which only brought in about fifteen hundred dollars. It dawns on him that maybe it wasn’t such a great idea.

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

I recommend businesses stop wasting time, money, and energy on marketing. Only do things based on marketing testing. When you’re marketing, you have to remember that everything is a test. Advertising is a place where business owners waste a serious amount of money and I’d like to help you save that money. So next time that ad rep shows up and attempts to sell you and tries to convince you to sign a long term contract, you’ll say, “No, I’d like to test a thousand dollars instead of committing to a long term contract, in fact do you have something smaller? If it works I’ll spend $1,000 a week. In fact, we’ll spend $10,000.00 a week if it works.” After you spend money in advertising you need to watch your numbers like crazy. Marketing is not a game of attempting to be cute. Marketing is about understanding your customers and what arises from their irrational fears, frustrations, needs, wants, and desires. When you see your advertising dollars pay you three, four or even five times the amount you spend is the only time you make long term commitments. When you do sign a contract, always make sure there is a clause in the contract that you can get out at any time because it’s very likely the traffic quality will change over time. Test small and only when you find a winner do you increase the deal to the next level. Marketing Mindset Principle #4: Market for response not for name recognition or branding. Many people see dozens and dozens of advertisements a day. What happens logically in our minds as consumers is the ads we see are done by big brands and we instantly think to ourselves, “That’s the way I should be doing it in my marketing.” This turns into a big mistake. The problem with this is the companies that are marketing like this typically have a different problem. First these kinds of companies have a lot of market shares and they have to defend their brand. They are not entering the market. They are protecting themselves from competition. In many cases, by spending a ton of money on branding they are just defending themselves, and this way of marketing costs a ton of money. What you want to be doing is getting your prospects to take actions. You want them to take action, you want people calling and buying from you. You will direct them to action. You say pick up the phone and call us.

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

Click on the link and order. Many people think that marketing like this is obnoxious and annoying, but don’t buy into that—if you want to be successful, you’ll have to market like this. You’re not looking for people to know more about you. You’re looking for people to take action and buy. Direct response marketing is not about you getting your name out there, it’s about getting their name in your business. Branding does have its place, but the way you do this is only talk about your company in terms that relate to your prospects and customers.

Key: Tie what the product does into a specific irrational need, want, desire, fear, frustration. Connect all your products and services names into what you’re doing.

When creating a marketing piece you could tie branding into the piece like……. If you are xxxx in fear or frustration then this xxx (marketing piece) xxx might be the most important xx (video) (ad) (read) xxx, you’ve seen in your life. Five short years ago I was xxxx (problem they are forcing) I learned a few little short techniques that if you used them also could save you xxxx. List benefits you’ve got that tie into what they are looking to accomplish. By starting off talking a little about your company and products and what you needed to do in order to resolve a challenge, you’re actually talking to them in a way they can relate to the story and how they want the same benefit you’ve received. After you relate to them, you can dial up the irrational mindset once again by maybe telling stories of others. You’ll then introduce your product or service. Now, you may wonder how you can tie this into selling your products and services. Whether you are a plumbing company, florist or home-based business owner, the fastest answer is you’ll easily just tie response marketing into what you do. People have irrational fears and frustrations just like they would with anything. It’s all about learning how to tie their fears and desires into what you’re selling.

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

Marketing Mindset Principle #5: The biggest long term profits come from long term relationships. New business owners and marketers make huge mistakes by trying to make one shot actions and closes. If you notice businesses that are really successful you’ll notice that they don’t attempt to close a prospect the first time that prospect visits their website. What they do is measure the long term value of a potential customer. They measure what the long term value is of the life of the customer. Many businesses actually break even on the front end of a customer. In fact, many will actually even lose money. They expect to make their profits later down the road. Many health clubs give away free memberships for the first month. We all know you’re never going to make money giving it away. So they make money based on providing great service and then they sign customers up on the backend. I don’t care what business you’re in, you can always do backend sales to make up and gain profits. The next thing a business must do is build relationships. Send your customers nice gifts. Provide them information on your industry and how things work, and information that can help them. Show them a personal side of you, so you can gain trust, which influences the emotional part of them. Building these relationships will result in free marketing and advertising later down the road. When putting all these mindsets in place, you’ll realize that marketing is not about your products and services, it’s about providing value and catering to your prospects’ irrational fears and frustrations. Customers love to buy but they hate to be sold to. By combining all these methods, you’ll build a business faster than you thought possible.

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

Chapter 3: Marketing Strategy What are the best modern marketing strategies? Most business owners in today’s world think by having a website online that people will automatically find them. The other side of this is many business owners think because they have a website that when customers and potential prospects do find it they’ll just pull out their credit card and buy, call, or take some other type of action instantly. The reality is customers who don’t know you or your business will need more comfort and hand holding. Business owners have to think of their businesses and marketing strategies as a romance and dating situation.

Instead of asking your customers to buy from you right away, you’re asking your prospects to try something first that educates them and makes them smarter.

All business owners have to stop thinking of advertising as a one night stand approach. When advertising our business, we have to remember our ideal customers don’t know us, so we have to build the relationship and earn people’s trust. When making a purchase, we usually buy from people and companies we feel we know, like and trust. I suggest thinking more about educating our customers just like you would educate and teach someone about yourself when you’re starting a new relationship. Think of marketing in stair steps. Offer your customers something of value that solves a hot button problem. For example, if you run a flooring company you could create a DVD or some sort of report title “10 things every home owner most know before hiring any roofing company.” Inside this report you’ll actually discuss your client’s fears

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

and frustrations, which you should know by working daily with these clients. Instead of asking your customers to buy from you right away, you’re asking your prospects to try something first that educates them and makes them smarter. Ice cream shops are a great example of this concept. They’ll give you a sample of whatever you want, which increases their chances of you buying something from them. By doing that, the ice cream shops are educating and giving value to their customers. Use education as a selling tool and teach customers something about your business. The power of modern technology makes it inexpensive to give away reports, training and education. Any time someone comes to your website or they call your business, with a click of the mouse you can instantly send them information through the Internet. They no longer have to wait for things to be shipped. The more value a business gives away, the more prospects your business will attract. I’ll eventually teach you how to actually have floods of traffic and prospects coming to your business. Think of something you can create that would help your customers that is worth $50.00 to $100.00 and give it away—remember it has to be something that provides value to your customer while at the same time hypes or talks about how great you are as a business. One thing that many offline businesses don’t do enough of is use autoresponders. An autoresponder is an online tool that will allow you to automatically stay in touch with your database through mobile marketing or email. An autoresponder is probably the most inexpensive and smartest marketing tool every business owner should be using. I’m sure you’ve heard of businesses that work for their owners even while they sleep. Well this is the kind of tool that will be prospecting and following up with your customers and clients even if you’re sleeping. It’s truly an automatic “set and forget about” marketing tool. Autoresponders have been around for years, but business owners just don’t know how to use the tool wisely. You may have been to a website where you can submit your contact information into a form on the site. These forms are generally the starting process of an autoresponder.

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

Here’s an exercise I’d like you to do in your business: 1. Outline a 3-step process to attract prospects, convert to subscribers, then convert to a first sale. 2. Start by offering a free valuable product or piece of information that you can give away that is worth 50.00 to $100.00. 3. Next build trust, credibility and value finally resulting in asking for the sale. Create an email auto responder series of at least ten follow-up messages. 4. Create a form code you can put on your website. 5. Set up the system. You can pre-program an entire series of communication with your prospects. Autoresponse tools will literally change your business forever. You can also preset the communication sequence so they go out only when scheduled. The starting price of autoresponders begins around $19.00 to $50.00. A new business would be just fine starting off at a small rate such as $19.00. Since all modern business owners should now have websites, the first thing that needs to be done on all sites is to capture leads and then follow up with valuable information, newsletters and promotions. The important information to capture is: first name, last name, email, and as a bonus, their phone number. Once you collect this information, you have the ability to follow up with this person for many weeks, months, and years to come. Let’s face it, we’re in a world of extreme competition and all your competition is fighting for the same prospects’ attention as you are. By collecting their information, following up with nice gifts and valuable information, you’ll be far ahead of your competition. I mentioned before that doing follow-up is dirt cheap and there are systems and tools in place that allow you to do these things on the Internet. This one technique alone will increase your business dramatically. Imagine if your prospects automatically had a business card sent to them. Next time they have a want or need for your services or products who do you think they will come to or recommend?

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

Chapter 4: Irresistible Marketing As business owners, the first thing we must start doing and understanding is how to move from a recognition form of marketing which consists of talking about us and our credibility to focusing more on what’s called response marketing, which is a form of marketing where we deliberately ask for information and in exchange we give value. If you had a choice between your customers knowing who you are or buying from you, which would you choose? If you were to pick up a phone book right now, you would see that almost 100% of all small business ads are more interested in people knowing who they are and less interested in selling. The mindset shift is that many modern business owners believe that recognition marketing and talking about how long they’ve been in business is selling. Although there’s a time and place for this, it’s not done in the way business owners think it needs to be done. Instead business owners should be marketing for response and not recognition. There are many philosophies and ways to actually market. You’ll hear about intuitional or brand advertising vs. direct marketing or direct response marketing. In intuitional marketing or brand advertising, the intention is recognizing and allowing people to know who we are so when people see our names they recognize us. The philosophy is if someone knows us and they see us, then they’ll come buy from us. We think that if we become well known then people will become more likely to buy. Intuitional marketing and brand marketing is what’s taught in most schools and college marketing courses. They all talk about brand advertising but they never really discuss direct response marketing. The problem with brand marketing is that it only works for a few businesses and these businesses are typically huge businesses. Unless you have about a billion dollars to use for marketing, you should using direct response marketing. The big brands

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

In today’s world of marketing and advertising, you need something more powerful to succeed. You need to work with up to date tools and ways of marketing. Don’t stick with Stone Age techniques and ways of marketing. Market for direct response and not name recognition. that successfully utilize brand marketing are brands like Coca Cola, Pepsi, Rolex, Starbucks, and Lowes, and these brands are enormous. They pay premium prices. Small businesses would never be able to compete with these larger brands. This kind of brand advertising is really ego driven and it can seem logical and the best way to advertise. Real estate agents market like this. That’s why it’s pretty simple to market to agents. All you have to do is tell them their picture and name should be on everything. Brand advertising is appealing to the ego. It appeals to people because we want people to know who we are and to the logical brain that makes us think we need to be everywhere in order to succeed. According to expert business strategist Michael Gerber and many other business strategist and marketing experts, most businesses that start will fail within the first three to five years, and the ones that remain will fail in the next five years. I think the reason so many businesses fail is because we get talked into intuitional and branding ways of marketing. It’s easy for business owners to be sold on intuitional ways of marketing through appeals to their ego. Then, when these ways of marketing are not working and we call our advertising agents to find out why, they tell us things like, “We need to keeping running these ads because your audience needs to see your name more than 7 to 10 times in order for you to succeed.” We then convince ourselves we need to run the ads which keep the dollars flying out of our business. If you’re a new business, you probably don’t have the money to spend on running ads this long in order to figure out if they’ll work. In today’s world of marketing and advertising, you need something more powerful to succeed. You need to work with up to date tools and ways of

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

marketing. Don’t stick with Stone Age techniques and ways of marketing. Market for direct response and not name recognition. How to create marketing that sells: What is copy and why is it important? Copy on your sites, ads and any other form of advertising is about action. Our goal is every time someone sees anything to do with your company we want them to take action. Action is only going to happen if you get emotional. The emotions that will trigger action form mental pictures and stories, which are created by words. Writing copy has nothing to do with being a good academic writer. In fact, many times the best writer in the academic world is the worst when getting someone to write sales copy. Great copywriters have a unique ability to trigger fear and desire. The definition of copy is words that triggers pictures and stories that trigger fear and desire. When writing content for your websites and other representations for your company, it’s important to remember to only focus on benefits and not features. For example, a pencil has a feature, lead, which allows someone to write. The eraser allows you to erase your writing. Advantages are what it offers, so the pencil will allow you to write your ideas and thoughts. The most important benefit is that you will not forget your ideas and thoughts because you were able to record them. What most businesses do is only talk about features. They push features on other people. When pushing features you usually create a disconnect with your prospect, and then they become confused and go elsewhere. This is why it’s important to understand our ideal prospects. When we understand our prospects we’ll know how to sell to them. Imagine you owned a copy machine business and you went into a company that used old copy machines to do a lot of their printing. Here’s how the conversation might go: You: Do you guys have any issues with your copy machines? Prospect: Yes, they jam a lot, but other than that they work well. You: Well, our copy machine has a feature called Jam Proof (which is a feature). What jam proof does is automatically clears all jams. (This would be the benefit). This machine on average only jams once a year.

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

If you can continue this dialog you’d maybe discover that by this company’s copy machine jamming all the time and your copy machine only jamming once a year, you could save them hundreds of dollars a year which would be the benefit to the company.

Here’s a winning headline formula taught to me by my mentor, Eben Pagan.

My point is that your customers don’t care about your features— what they care about is what they get out of using your products and services and how it satisfies their needs and desires.

Avoid Pain/Get Benefit - This allows you to use irrational things that either allow people to avoid something or get a benefit from something.

There’s a marketing analogy that says when people buy a drill they don’t want a drill. A drill is the feature. They want a hole, which is the benefit. Focus on the hole, not the feature. When you start linking all your benefits that selfishly to your customers, you will see your business grow. One thing many small businesses don’t have on their websites is an effective headline. When creating a headline you need to avoid being vague, cute or funny. Remember that fancy sites and headlines will actually do you more harm than good. Create a headline that promises a benefit or delivery. This will get your business ahead of the curve.

How to - How to headlines directionalize the mind to a specific, tangible, measurable result. It focuses people on getting the things they want.

Speed and convince - Your prospects and customers want something now. The majority of the world is instant gratification focused. We allow them to instantly get what they want. Specific time - Give your prospect an exact time frame they can expect the result. There’s a company called 3 day blinds which allows people to obviously get blinds in 3 days. Without risk/Guaranteed - Since our customers and clients hate taking risk, if you’re able to provide a guarantee your marketing becomes even more powerful. People don’t want to look stupid, so if you remove the risk they feel safer. Disclaimer- before making any claims you need to consult with your attorney or CPA who knows your business and can provide advice on these topics.

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

When writing copy use short words, sentences, and paragraphs but donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t be afraid of creating long copy. This makes it clear and easy for a prospect to understand. I spoke about not worrying too much about using text book English writing skills. You want your message to be as clever as possible so write the way you speak. The other thing is writing as if you were speaking to another person. Your prospects and customers who see your advertising and marketing are generally doing so by themselves so write in first person singular. Turn all your benefits into bullet points, sub-headlines, and other easy to read text.

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

Chapter 5: Pulling it All Together We’ve covered a great deal of information, so now let’s talk specifics. When it comes to marketing, the key is to market for results and not recognition. When growing your customer base, you need to take action with the chance of building a relationship and turning a prospect into a customer. So how do you do this? Since you’re marketing for results and action there are some things to consider. Focus on Prospects’ Fears and Frustrations Make two lists. On one list focus on irrational fears and on the other list focus on frustrations. Suppose you own a plumbing company. Ask yourself, “What are my customer’s irrational fears and frustrations?” On the fear list you may have something like They’re afraid to spend money because it’ll take away from groceries or they will get into trouble if they have to take off of work to be home when the plumber comes. These examples are irrational. They may be true, but the key is they trigger emotions that are going through your prospect’s head when making a buying decision. Another irrational fear for a plumbing company to consider when marketing is whether a wife’s husband might be concerned about what might happen if someone came over when he was not home. Your next list will be on wants and aspirations of your prospects: be as specific, tangible and clear as possible for all of your lists.

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

Focus on Action The next part of this marketing formula is to focus on getting a prospect to take action. Think of another list of the elements of your product or service that best matches the desires and fears of your prospects. You’ll now match your product or service items to match their fears, wants and desires. When wording this be as clear and specific as possible. Once you have this done you will test to see what pulls the best. One thing I’ll add is that most of the things you do will not work at first. You have to consistently tweak, test and do things over until you find winners. You’ll let your winners run and let the rest go. Marketing your business is almost like another business within the business. There are many elements that need to be considered. You cannot look at your marketing and think it’ll work right away. It’s a constant process. In many cases the difference could be one word that makes all the difference. Are you more interested in recognition or response? What are the selfish emotional needs that your prospective customer has that will drive them to take action? How can you push the hot button?

Conclusion If you focus on response and action, you will see your business grow exponentially. You will turn prospects into long-term customers by establishing trust and building relationships. You will create and offer value while you successfully sell products and services. And you will begin to enjoy a measure of success previously unrealized.

Internet Marketing for Small Business Owners

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