Josh Kerbel

Video killed the radio star.
Video killed the radio star.
In my mind and in my car, we can’t rewind we’ve gone to far
- Video Killed The Radio Star – The Buggles

We can argue the whether video killed the radio star or radio made the video star back and forth all day, but the truth remains……….people like to see stuff……..moving stuff………..no, not moving stuff on their food (cuz that’s just gross), but on their screen.  Internet peeps like video.  And with video sharing sites reporting hockey stick silly growth figures, you should like video too.

But when it comes to your sales message and lead generation, you shouldn’t like a pretty picture just for the sake of liking a pretty picture, you should like it because it contributes to your sales message.

The point of this post isn’t to bog you down with silly technical things like sitemaps and indexing, save that for your tech geek…………its to kick off our dive into the benefits for your sales efforts.

What you need to understand is the people search out for videos that help solve their problems (VIDEO IS BECOMING PART OF THE RESEARCH PHASE OF THE PURCHASING PROCESS).  So if you want to be the one they find, you need to be the one who produces the video…..bottom line, have you even considered how your sales process or product translates into video?

If not, you should………

Ted: OK wait. If you guys are really us, what number are we thinking of?
Bill, Ted: 69, dudes.
Bill, Ted: Whoa.
- Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

No dude, it’s not 69……….this is the Internet, oh wait, I guess it could be 69, but if you want more of that stuff you’ll have to find it on some other website.  I’m talking about the most important number when it comes to running your website………… visitor value.

What you need to find out is the average amount of money spent by each visitor to your website.

This is the mantra spouted by lots of people on the Internet and it is wrong.  It is wrong because it completely ignores that you actually have costs associated with running your business.  This is wrong, what you need to determine average amount of net profit per customer.  In fact, what you need to figure out is your net profit per customer before the cost of marketing (marketing is the variable you are experimenting with here).  Otherwise you end up spending too much money on marketing if you just look at top line revenue.  You do not break even by spending as much on advertising as you generate by selling your product (unless, of course your product has zero production and distribution costs).

Let’s put some real numbers to this so you get a better grasp (and I can finish watching Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure).  Say you get 1000 visitors to your site, you have a 2% conversion rate, so you get 20 sales.  These 2o sales produce $10 net profit before marketing per sale (on a $25 product) or $200.  $200 divided by 1000 visitor, so you have a visitor value of $0.20.  This means you can spend up to  20 cents to get a  visitor and still break even.  If you used total revenue to calculate visitor value, you would have gross revenue of $500 and you end up with a visitor value of $0.50.  If you used this number as the maximum you can spend to get a visitor your site, you could end up losing upwards of $0.30 per visitor that comes to your site.

Some would argue that $0.30 is just how you invest in your business, but I would look at it as quickly marketing yourself to broke……

So remember,  its not the average revenue generated by visitors that is important………its the average profit.

Not advertising, but M.A.R.K.E.T.I.N.G.

Say it with me now children………….marketing

As you all know, the bible had 10 commandments, but since marketing is a little less important, it only deserves 5 and 1/2.

Now place your left hand on your thesaurus and repeat the following 5 and 1/2  points until they have embedded themselves in your cerebral cortex right next to the name of your dog and first true love

1. Highlight the disadvantage of YOUR product.  No one is dumb enough to think your product doesn’t have any flaws or drawbacks.  Every product does….point’em out before your consumer finds out for themselves.  Make sure your customer is not set up for a terminal case of buyer’s remorse blues and you look like honest broker.  Chances are your customer already knows your shortcomings, just like your spouse does.

2. Marketing ain’t literal and unlike the real world, you don’t go to jail for breaking the law……..So:

• EXPERIMENT WITH diFFERENT forms of text
• Play with bullet points
• Add a little color to the mix
  

Do Not Bore Your Prospect To Sleep (But don’t over do it to the point of causing seizures in your readers).

3. Sales is a Burlesque Dance, Not a Hardcore Sex Show.  Do you know the difference?  A good burlesque dancer creates an aura of mystery, spins a web of desire, leaves a little bit to the imagination and makes the crowd want more.  Do you make the crowd want more? Or do you strip it all a way in one swoop like the girls at the local nudie bar.

Stop pounding your prospects with the cold hard facts.  Seduce them. Intrigue them.  Make’ em curious.

4. Love the Silence:  Just cause ya got a lot to say, it doesn’t mean ya gotta cram it to one spot………learn to work the white spaces.  Remember, humans are visual.  We like pretty things.  Look at the premium we put on design and I don’t mean practical Swedish design you can pick up at IKEA.  Look at what separates cheap and expensive products,  it often comes down to design (Rolls Royce vs Toyota…they are both cars aren’t they?!?!).  And on the Internet, design comes down to layout.  Use it appropriately.

5. Find A Pretty Face: Not too long ago, someone once told me I had a face for radio and a voice for the Internet….Unfortunately the Internet is now a multimedia channel……..ACK!!!  So what you need to do, even if you fancy yourself to be quite the looker, is find someone  to pitch your product for you.  Find someone who has an opinion that matters……USE CUSTOMER TESTIMONIALS………..A testimonial is the prettiest face your prospect will ever see, regardless of what your Mama tells ya.

5 1/2……….A logical person would have just said 6 (Is there really such a thing as a logical person anyways?)………Stick People In The Eye With Odd Numbers.  Why? Part of human conditioning.  The human brain likes things it can break down in to itsy bitsy bites of information and it does it FAST.  Odd numbers take a bit of time to analyze……..your prospect needs to spend some time actually thinking about your pitch before they store it away in their wet file (that’s brain for the uninitiated).

So there you go………6, I mean 5, I mean 6, OK 5 and half commandments of marketing.  Now go forth and spread the gospel.

The prerequisite of making money online is getting visitors to your site.  This means having promotional system in place that taps into the problems that people are trying to solve.  Take a look at some of these banners and PPC ads to see if and how they work.  Here is a sampling from around the industry.  It’s far from complete, but gives you an idea.  The point is to think of who this ad is targeting.  What you are seeing are ads that have been tested with lots of money and lots of page view, so even though these ads may seem explicit, irrelevant or offensive to you, they work.   These ads could be tested with upwards of $1,ooo,ooo worth of promotion.   Every word that is on the page is there for a reason.  Stop blushing and think about how this applies to how you can promote your auto supply business,  your  flower shop or your IT consulting operation that you are trying to get off the ground.

Have you found out the emotional hot buttons that move you clients?  Where there pain (or pleasure) is?   The first ad taps into someone looking for an escape from the grind of reality.   The second ad goes after people’s lack of knowledge of sexual activities and confronts the

awkwardness of discussing the subject of a lack of sexual gratification with your partner.  Talk about going after a PAIN POINT

The third screen shot shows some PPC ads , that, well, could honestly be better written, but some do attempt to address whole issue of discretion and online dating.

Click on the image to read the PPC ads.

Like I said, these ads, and the landing pages they send you are the product of a huge amount of time and testing.  Unlike many of the ads you see for doctors, lawyers, flower shops, concrete cutting,  a surprising amount of brain  and computer power went into them.

Next up, we are going to pick a site for Robert to sign up at and see the method it uses to extract money from his wallet.

If you find this topic distasteful, think about it this way.  You are getting millions of dollars of education for free.  Once we take a look at the conversion process, we will then shift our focus to the back end and marketing formula

If you thought I was going to get you all worked up, you were right.  But  it isn’t going to be with pictures of men and women in hot and sweaty compromising positions.   It’s going to be by showing you that while you are missing the obvious, an entire industry group that is branded by some as immoral, corrupt and destined for the 7th circle of hell has you beat hands down when it comes to running a business.

So say your “Hail Mary’s” in advance, hold on to your favorite religious tome and see what you can learn from the rouges of the Internet.

Putting all the lasciviousness aside, can you answer the fundamental question of  “What problem does porn/smut/adult entertainment/online dating/’insert your own term for it’  here solve?

Well without getting to deep into the sociological and psychological aspects of it, you can put forth the argument that it solves any of the following problems people may have:

• Boredom;
• Loneliness;
• Sexual curiosity;
• Want for adventure;
• Sexual education;
• Need for sexual gratification;
• Satisfaction of a sexual fetish that cannot be satisfied in other ways; and
• Many others that probably haven’t even crossed my mind and trust me, my mind is usually in the gutter, that is of course when I’m not thinking about my clients (Wow, I have some smoking hot clients, but I digress).

The take away point here is that the privacy and anonymity makes the Internet makes the sexual revolution of the 60′s and 70′s seem like an awkward first kiss.  The market is huge.  Estimates on the size of the online adult entertainment segments ranges from 20 to 50%   A quick search of Google Insight for industry related terms (sex and free sex)  and comparing them to the search terms (religion, god and Jesus) should give you an idea of the size of the market.

So if you can withhold your moral judgement, what this should drive home is that this industry knows how to market.

And you know how they do it?

By testing their marketing message over and over and over again.  They develop targeted messages – UNIQUE SELLING PROPOSITIONS (and my how they know how to proposition) and segment the hell out of the market.  They are constantly testing ad copy, landing pages and follow up methods in order to maximize conversions and extract money from prospects in such a way that they practically have a formula for doing so.  Let’s see this process in action.  We are going to sign up for an adult orientated dating site and see how they attempt to convert us to a paying member.

Before we do so, let’s set the stage.  First off, I am going to blur out the name of the site that I use for this experiment.  I want to make it clear I am not promoting any particular site.  Second of all, I am going to leave in all the language and copy that I am sent.  This is important.  It’s how they hit your hot buttons, your pain and pleasure spots.  You have to learn to apply these concepts to your business.  If the occasional off color or X rated word makes you blush or offends you, then don’t read any further.  If you can look at it as an academic exercise, then you should.

Let’t build the persona first.  Who is going to be looking for love, lust or some tawdry action online.  Let’s call him Robert.

Robert is 42 years old, lives in a metropolitan city, say Toronto, has been married for 20 years, has 2 kids, a mortgage and is a little bored at home and while he’s not looking to end his marriage, he is looking for some excitement.  Curiosity has got the best of him and maybe if he can learn a few things, he can spice up his love life at home or maybe he just wants to see what its like on the other side of the line.  He isn’t blatantly looking to engage in flesh to flesh carnal lust, maybe just some email/web cam stuff.

He’s a relatively good looking guy, may have a few pounds to shed, but isn’t an unshaven fat slob in a stained white tanktop looking to get lucky with some girl who has a preference for guys who are not as familiar with soap as they should be.

If this sounds stereotypical, its’s because it is and the reality is that for some sterotypes there is some truth.  But the marketing world calls these sterotypes something else.  They call them personas.

Up next, how Robert gets pulled into a site………..

Or if you are a little more conservative/uptight  in nature, you can call this article “Learn the Art of Conversion From the Masters of Perversion”.

Whether or not you want to admit it, pornography and adult entertainment drives Internet innovation – everything from streaming video, payment technologies, website optimization and marketing.  If your business is online today, you really should slip a $20 bill under the g string of the next stripper you see as a show of gratitude for all the adult entertainment business has done for you. (Ask not what your stripper can do for you, but what you can do for your stripper)

And while the front end of the online adult entertainment business may seem quite titillating,  its backend is so silky smooth  (in a systematic and numbers orientated kind of way)  as to make an Accountant or MIT physics major salivate.

So join along as I strip away the facade of bustieres, thongs and garters to reveal some hardcore Internet marketing action that leaves nothing to the imagination (and allows me to work in all the double entendres that I can).  At the end of it all,  hopefully we popped your Internet marketing cherry made you wise in the ways of the world and a  love making marketing machine.

Let’s take a walk through the red light district of the Internet and see what sort of venereal diseases information we can pick up.  I can promise you that these segments will not be family friendly, but will help your business procreate  customers left, right and center.

Part I  gets all hot and sweaty on the front end of the business,  Part II looks at the conversion process and Part III cools us down with a proverbial cold shower of marketing statistics and numbers.  So join me on the part of the Internet where the morals are loose, the lights are low and the money flows like water.

And no, it’s not Howard Schultz

It’s the 13 year old boy who walked in to Starbux surrounded by a gaggle of 12 and 13 year old girls, each one of them grabbing his cell phone and programing their numbers into it

It seems that he is the only boy in a summer dance course at the dance school across the street.

If that isn’t the best illustration of being where your competition isn’t, I don’t know what is.

It’s also a perfect example of why I will always regret not taking dance at university………

everyone who looks at your website wants to buy from you

Think of all the large ticket purchases you made in the last 5 years. When was the last time you made one:

• Without doing any research
• The first time you see a product that vaguely meets some of your purchase criteria

So now with this context in mind, look at your website. How do you think it performs given the two aforementioned ideas. Now take it a bit further. Imagine if your website was a showroom or store. Do you think everyone who walks into a store is there to buy on the spot?

Does that require an answer?

So how is your website set up? How does it separate the buyers vs the researchers? Are you even set up to help the researchers? Do you even measure researcher performance? Do you even know how? Do you have an objective with regards to researchers? Do researchers convert to buyers?

The one thing you should take away from this is that not everyone who comes to your site will ever buy/convert for you. Think of these people who bounce off your site in 10 seconds or less (Dealing with these people is a whole other topic/challenge) and remove them from your conversion calculations.

What you are left is are people you have a reasonable shot at selling too or at least engaging in the sales/research process. This should be your starting point for your conversion calculations.

OK, let’s disect one of the lead generation PPC ads on Google

These are for the top the ads on Google.

Do any of these ads speak to you?  Maybe the last one.

You know why?

It at least gives me some idea of the benefits.

Look at the first ad?  They are promoting a free live demonstration?  What, you mean I can actually see how a product works before I buy it?  Where do I sign up?  The second ad looks like it was written by someone who has no clue of who their customer is?  Tell me why it’s relevant that your app has 1,000,ooo users.  Lot’s of people use toilet paper too but I’m not sure I would advertise on it.

So what do 2 out the 3 ads posted here screw up?

They don’t understand how and why buyers are motived to make a purchase decision.

Do you know why anyone buys anything?

Backwards isn’t?

But that is exactly what you are doing when you use cold calling in an attempt to build up your business. You are shooting wildly into the air, hoping to hit something.

Even if you bought a great list from a reputable list broker.  This is the standard cold calling process.

Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret.  No one cares about your product.

Repeat after me……….No………..one cares about my product!

Not in the least.

Much in the way you didn’t care about that telemarketer who interupted your dinner last night or the salesman that called you this morning at 10:42am to discuss your firm’s printing needs.

And exactly the same way 95% who find my web pages don’t care.   But you know what the difference is between you and I?

I use the fact that 95% of the world doesnt care about my products to my advantage while you keep trying to get 100% of the people you talk to to like yours.

You know what people do care about?

Themselves!!!

People care about solving their own problems.  Doubt me?  Picture this scenario then:

It’s a tuesday afternoon and you are strolling through the automotive section at a the mall.  There is a saleperson demonstrating a new type of tire sealant for flat tires.  At that point in time, you really aren’t thinking about flat tires because it’s not really a problem for you.

Now, it’s 5 hours later and you are pulled over to the side of the road with a flat tire in the middle of rush hour.  What are you thinking about now?  How much would you pay for that new tire sealant.

A person does not know they need your product until they have a problem that could be solved by your product.  Most 20 year old girls don’t think about getting rid of wrinkles (When was the last time you saw a 19 year old in an Oil of Olay ad) and most 20 year old guys don’t worry about male pattern baldness…………but 20 years later, its a whole different story…….. I think you get the picture.

Bottom line……….make sure you know who you are talking to.  It will save you a pile of time and money.