Archive | February, 2021

It might seem strange to think of icons as helping with your email marketing efforts. After all, it’s the message that’s important, right? But anything that can help you to better convey your message is something worth looking into.

Icons can highlight your company’s benefits and show the positive effects of your offer. They can demonstrate particular features or characteristics of your product or service. And they can be used to split email blocks, making the message easier to read.

What else can icons do for your emails?

1. Icons help organize the content.

No doubt you’ve seen this on webpages but perhaps not as often in emails. Imagine if your email has three options:

→ Ask a Question
→ Share Feedback
→ Get More Information

Each of these can have an appropriate icon that helps to organize and clarify the options. “Ask a Question” can be a question mark; “Share Feedback” might be a talk balloon and “Get More Information” could be a video icon, a book icon, a person icon or whatever, depending on the format of the information.

2. Icons help express ideas.

There are times when an icon can be used either in place of – or in conjunction with – a keyword to clarify the meaning in a more straightforward manner. For example, a play button icon is so universally understood, it makes more sense to use that than to use the word, “Play.”

3. Icons can replace heavy images.

Images in emails are great… until they aren’t. Images need to be downloaded, they can be blocked by email clients and unfortunately their appearance changes in different apps. While icons are less expressive, there are times when they are a better choice than stock photography.

4. Icons support your brand identity.

If you are using a particular set of icons on your website and advertising, it pays to use them in your emails as well to maintain your overall design and brand strategy.

I’ll bet there are certain businesses that you recognize by icons (for example, social media sites). If you received an email from them that did not contain those icons, it wouldn’t look authentic. In fact you might even suspect it was a phishing email to steal your info.

5. Icons reinforce interactive elements.

When it comes to things like call-to-action buttons, icons can reinforce the action you want taken by the reader. And they can also be animated to draw attention to something important, like the “Check it out” or “Grab your copy” button.

If you’re just getting started in email marketing, give icons a pass until you master the basics. But if you’re looking for a way to increase your email readability and conversion rates then I highly suggest you spend the next week observing how others are using icons in their emails while you devise your own strategy.

It’s surprising what a few little icons can do for your business!

If someone were to ask you what the #1 ‘secret’ to making money online was, what would you say? Any guesses?

Maybe you’d say it’s to find a starving crowd. Or to build and nurture a list. Or to get in on the beginning of a hot new trend. All of these are good answers. And all of these are wrong.

THE big secret to making money online is one that crosses all niches, applies to all markets and marketers, and works just about every single time to make REAL money. It’s how six and seven figure incomes are almost always earned. And it’s also how YOU can begin earning 6 figures in the next 12 months.

Now then – before I reveal this ‘secret,’ let me warn you that you might have heard it before. In fact, some online marketers have to hear this a dozen times or more before it really starts to sink in. That’s because the most powerful techniques often masquerade as something a bit boring. Or tedious. Or uninteresting.

After all, taking a wheelbarrow full of cash to the bank is exciting. Earning it is often something altogether different. Ready?

Here’s the ‘secret…’

“Find a profitable formula – and then SCALE it up.”

Yup. That’s it. Pretty simple, I know. Yet 98% of marketers will never do it. And 97% of marketers will stay broke because of it.

Let’s say you spend time making the perfect product for a super hungry niche. You tweak the offer to get it converting sky high. You bring on affiliates to help you promote. Everything is in place. You launch, you have an extremely profitable week…

…and then what?

For most marketers, they will turn their attention to creating the next product and doing the entire process again. And because of that, they will leave a tremendous amount of money on the table.

If your offer sells for $19 and you’re converting at 5%, then you’re making $95 for every 100 people you send to your site. This doesn’t even include the list you’re building and will market to over and over again.

Now then, if you can buy those 100 visitors for $40, you’ve just make a profit of $55. Buy 1,000 visitors and you’ve made $550. Buy 10,000 visitors and you’ve made $5,500. But wait, there’s more!

What if you add a backend product? Just one sale per 100 visitors of a $100 product increases your profit from $55 to $155. 10,000 visitors? $15,500 profit.

You can also add coaching, continuity (membership) programs, etc. for even more profit.

Are you following me here?

Let’s use an analogy: Someone invests 3 months to open a hair salon. They have a big grand opening with lots of customers. And when that dies down, they close shop, move across town and do it all over again. Yeah, that would be pretty crazy. Yet that’s what 98% of online marketers do.

They create a product, launch it, have a great week and then start all over again. And they wonder why they are still struggling. So what’s the takeaway?

→ Invest time in building a profitable, high-converting funnel.

→ Test it out and do the math – how much can you spend on advertising and still make money?

→ Start by investing small and ramp your way up.

→ Don’t forget to build your list – your funnel is your upfront money, and your list is your “go to” money. That is, whenever you need funds or simply want to boost your income, you can go to your list and make them an offer.

What will derail you in this process:

→ Getting lured away by the glamour of creating another new product funnel when you should be scaling up the one you already have.

→ Fear of spending money to make money. Yes, spending $1,000 or more to make sales is scary. That’s why you want to start small, make sure your entire funnel is working, and then scale up. And up. And Up.

Your biggest mistake – would be brushing this advice off. Fortunes have been made simply by creating a profitable funnel and then scaling it up.

FORTUNES.

As in nearly 7 figures made from one ClickBank product…

Per MONTH.

That’s right – 6 Pack Abs at the pinnacle of its success was earning over $11 million per year.

Your results will vary.

Are you doing offline marketing, or would you like a second income in the offline world? Here’s how you can make it drop dead simple and super profitable.

First, build a simple website with a menu card on it. Not the kind of menu you find in a restaurant, of course, but it can look like that if you choose. Your menu is going to offer all kinds of services to brick and mortar businesses.

For example:

→ Local SEO
→ Creating lead capture pages and setting up their autoresponder
→ Website creation
→ Writing blog posts and articles for them
→ Repairing their online reputation
→ Creating a professional looking video
→ Creating detailed reports on their competitors
→ Doing social media (this can be a wide variety of offerings)
→ And so forth…

Give them different prices – some low and some higher, to give business owners plenty of choices.

Now here’s the 21 day trick – through testing, we’ve found that you will actually sell MORE services when you extend the date by which you’ll have the services completed. Naturally you can do many of these things in 2-5 days. But if the client believes you’re working on it for 3 weeks, or even a whole month, the perceived value is much higher and you will sell more.

Yes, human nature is a funny thing, isn’t it?

Now then, before you panic and think you can’t provide all these services, realize that all you need is to visit Fiverr.com. There you’ll find people who can do all of these things for you, rather inexpensively. You will need to pay more than $5 for most of these, but that’s okay because your profit margins will still remain sky high. Typically, you’ll pay $5 to test the gig out, and then somewhere between $50 and perhaps as high as $200 to get your job done.

Meanwhile, you’re selling services for $300 to $1,000, depending how much work it involves. You are the ‘middle man or woman’ getting the orders and then having them fulfilled.

So how do you get the clients? All of the usual methods apply, of course. Also, LinkedIn and Craigslist can be great places to get clients with a little practice. Also look at potential client’s social profiles and websites to get an idea of what they might need, and then contact them directly via email or even phone. When you’re ready to take it to the next level, you can also put together a mailer that incorporates your menu and send it to likely prospects.

This is perhaps one of the easiest businesses you can start and almost immediately begin making money. Because you are outsourcing all of the work, you can focus solely on getting clients, making them happy and gaining repeat sales.

And by the way – once you choose a method for client acquisition, you can outsource that as well. Then your only job will be to send orders to your outsourcers and send the completed work to your clients. Not a lot of work for a $5,000 or more a month income…