Harnessing The Power of E-Zines (AKA Email Newsletters)

Welcome back to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast. This episode, we're going to be using some terminology that may be slightly outdated, but the lessons that you will learn are anything but. Today we get to listen to Allie Brown as she talks about the power of ezines, or what we call today email newsletters. Now, she took her business from $80K a year to over $100K per month just through this one strategy. So we're going to hear her story. We're also going to hear how all this works piece by piece. Plus, you're going to learn the 3 S's of success. And yes, there are 3 S's in the word success, but we're not referring to those. There are 3 specific keys that Allie is going to be revealing for us with examples all the way through. So as you listen, pay attention, see how you can use it in today's world and see if there are any email newsletters in your market that you can tap into. Let's jump in.

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like.

Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless.

His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

Well, we've had a lot of discussion the last day and a half about the selling process. And one of the things about the selling process you've got to look at is you've got to look at all medias. And there's no question at all that when you are selling, you want to use every media you can to your advantage. There's one media that I would tell you that everybody should be using who's involved in sales in any way As we know, as we talked about the other day, everybody's involved in sales in any business they're in. One media that I would pretty much advise everybody to be jumping into is the online media. What we did is we asked Alexandria Brown to come here, the e-zine queen, who is not just about e-zines anymore. Ali Brown is about teaching people really on the internet today how to maximize the value on the internet, and specifically we asked Ali to come here and talk about how to use the internet to maximize your sales. You're in for a real treat here for the next 75 to 90 minutes. You get to see Alexandria Brown. Ali, come on up.

Hi. Hi. How you guys doing? This is a very long room, so I'm going to do my best to reach out to all of you. So are you all getting the idea that there are a lot of different ways to do sales? Yes. Different philosophies, different styles, different schools of thought, and they all can work. That's the wonderful thing. They all can work. And the great thing about this is now you guys have options because you can say, you know what, of all these, you can reach out and choose the ones that fit best for you and your business. But here's the trick though, once you choose that system that works right for you, you got to work the system. So, I've been happy that everyone's been talking about systems up here because the system is your solution. And what I'm going to talk about over the next hour or two is the system that I've developed over the last several years that has brought me more online sales than I have dreamed of. Really exciting stuff. And doesn't only work for me, but hundreds of my students who are mostly solo entrepreneurs, and several of them are in this room. You're going to hear from them as well, which I love because then I get to take a break from speaking for a few minutes. You're going to hear from them later. But again, I'm Alexandria Brown. Please call me Ali. Bill and Dan asked me up here to talk about online sales, but I actually have a confession to make. I first took my business online several years ago because I was very uncomfortable with selling, actually. I had, you know, been exposed to sales in the traditional kind of the old school, sell 'em hard network. You know, when my dad learned I started my first business, he kind of slapped me on the back and said, "Go get 'em, pumpkin." You know, "Go learn all those ways to close 'em." And I would just not— I would feel sick. I would— my stomach would do somersaults when I would hear some of these sales tactics I was supposed to use when I'd be talking to clients. I was just scared to death. And so you'll hear a little bit about my story in a minute, but the wonderful thing about my fear of real selling, or, you know, in-person selling, is that when I went online, I actually found ways to sell automatically and have clients and customers come to me instead of the traditional prospect chase them and, you know, kill them, kind of hunt them down, sales weapons, you know, all this talk. So this way was much more comfortable for me. It was more natural. And what I love now is I've developed a lot of passive income income. So even while I'm standing here talking to you or on vacation, the money's coming in the website and I don't have to be actively pursuing the people. Does that sound good? Alright. So over the next, you know, hour or two, I'm going to talk about specific proven strategies that I've used and my students have used online to create these kind of results. So let's first talk about what you're going to learn. Actually, I'd like to give you a little outline here. What we're gonna cover. The first thing is basically how I took my business that was doing about $80 grand a year in in-person sales, okay, so that's me running around actually having to sell on my own, and transformed it into what is now $100,000 a month plus each month in sales using email on the internet. I'm having a lot more fun, I'm a lot more relaxed, I'm a lot more happy now. Number 2 is the 3 keys to making boodles of money online. How much money? Boodles. I made that word up. It just makes me happy. Number 3, easy and fun ways to trigger tons of sales naturally. There are actually some little things you can do that trigger those quick rushes of income, and that's really fun. And number 4 is the most lucrative, easiest online tool you're probably not even using. And this is something that's under your nose. You already do it every day, and I'm gonna show you how to turn that into a money-making tool. And number 5, where to get more help if you want it. I'm gonna start off with my story, not to talk about myself, but to give you guys a little bit of a background where I'm coming from. And because there's— I don't really want to be one of those speakers that comes up here and is like Moses coming down from the mountain, like I know it all and I was born the easing queen and you guys should listen to me because I know everything. I learned all this stuff the hard way. And actually, about 7 years ago, I had a job. I was still working. Isn't that terrible? I was working, and actually I was in New York City. I was just talking with Sydney— where's Sydney? There she is— about that New York was so much fun, but it was not fun when you had no money. It was a very hard city to live in. You do a lot of schlepping. We're talking about schlepping stuff around. And I was working at a little ad agency there. And it was an ad agency about 10 people. And it was probably the 6th job I'd had since college. I hopped job to job to job to job because I kept not fitting in. I was like the square peg in the round hole. And I thought that there was something wrong with me. But then I realized there wasn't anything wrong with me. I was an entrepreneur. I was just supposed to be on my own. I wasn't— I couldn't work for anybody else. And so this last job, I was kind of getting the idea that it was time to go off on my own. But I had worked my way up to being a combination of a copywriter and an account manager. So I did both write copy for clients, and as Bill explained, copywriters write the copy. They write the words, the ads, the newsletters. The brochures for the clients. And then I had some account management stuff. I was on the phone with clients as well. So I'd kind of been getting a taste of what it would be like to work with clients, and I decided to make the big jump. And I was in for a very rude awakening because I had mistakenly thinkin', thinkin', thought that when I left that my number one job owning my business would be doing the skill I was good at, would be working with the clients. But actually, what was my number one job? Oh, you guys get it, of course, you're just like, well, duh. But most people, you know, we don't know this when we start the business. We usually leave a job or start a business because we're good at doing something. But then we realize that something isn't really what's going to make the money. And I tell my clients, the marketing is more important than the mastery. The marketing is more important than the mastery. You can be the best consultant, best accountant, best financial planner, best coach, best best speaker, best author, but if you do not master the marketing, not only will this wonderful message you have to share never get out and your products and services never reach these people, but you will never really make the money and the big wealth that you want to generate. Does that make sense? So I had to learn this very, very quickly. So the first thing I did when I wanted to learn about marketing is ask my friends who were other freelancers and who were broke how they got business. All right, I had no one else to ask. I didn't have a network like I do now. With everybody at Glaser Kennedy and all that. So they said, well, we go around to all these networking meetings. So I joined every networking group in Manhattan. And I was running around on subways, uptown, downtown, east and west. Has anyone done this? You start joining all the groups and you are running around, you are eating a lot of rubber chicken at those banquet dinners, talking to a lot of people you don't want to talk to. And about a few months later, I didn't want to meet another damn person. I couldn't smile anymore. I couldn't talk about my services anymore. This was so painful and so slow. It was marketing one-to-one, marketing one-to-one, marketing one-to-one, over and over and over. I was miserable. And it got to the point— I mean, Bill mentioned my story— that I got to the point that I was in between clients and things got so bad I really did go to take out a $20 bill. And I remember my balance. I'll never forget it. It was $18.56. And I couldn't get that $20. And that was a very, very low day for me because I had started my business with a dream and I felt that I had failed. And I walked back to my little tiny apartment in Greenwich Village. It was a 5th floor walk-up. That means no elevator. So if your day doesn't suck enough, then you have to walk up 5 flights of stairs before you can get into bed and cry. I said, you know what, I'm going to email my mom and ask if I can move home. Because obviously I am not smart enough to run my own business. And I booted up my computer. I had a crappy little hand-me-down, actually from my little brother, and wrote him and said, you know, I think I'm going to write mom. This is just not working out and all that. And for some reason, I actually looked at my email differently that night. And I said, you know what, I have not done anything on the internet yet. And I don't have any money and this is at least free. And this would be a way that I wouldn't have to run around so much and I can contact these people I've been meeting and follow up with them. But I'm thinking, well, okay, I can't just write about my business, that's spamming them. But I could offer them like a tip every week. So I started with a little like tip. I wrote a little bit about about my expertise, which was marketing communications, and then I wrote a little blurb about my services. And I asked the people I knew who would want to sign up. And 10 of them did. Started with 10 people. And that included my parents and my cat. And out of those 10 people, I just started this little newsletter. And a funny thing happened. Business started coming in. People were forwarding that little email around. Then people were writing me saying, "Hey, can I get on your list? My friend forwarded me your tips. I like your marketing tips. Can you put me on the list?" So I would just add them to my list. I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't even know how to use a list management tool or any of that. I was just putting them in my little AOL account. Then business started coming in. Within 6 months, I had clients on my list like Dun Bradstreet, New York Times Digital, and Scholastic Books.. And those are still names I use in my portfolio today. And I was blown away. So not only was this little email spreading the word about my business, but it had positioned me as what? An expert. They thought I knew what I was doing. Do you ever have that feeling? Oh my God, they actually think I know what I'm doing. So from that point, I wanted to learn more about this. My friends were asking me, what are you doing now? How are you doing this? I did some research. I went to the bookstore. Stores and I found a lot of stuff that was just outdated. I looked online and I, a lot of the marketing stuff I found online was too hypey. I was a business person. I couldn't use some of these strategies online. I would embarrass myself. And I took it upon myself then to write a short guide on how to publish what some of us call an ezine, which is just short for email magazine. And it's just a short colorful email newsletter. I'll show you some samples of it. And Then I bought an ebook on how to sell ebooks online, learned how to do that, and I had this little ebook ready and it was called Boost Business with Your Own Ezine. And I had this list over here and I'm thinking, well, maybe they'd like to know about this ebook. And so I sent an email to them and that was the day my life really changed because a few minutes later I saw the sales start to come in my email box. And here I was, not running around town, not working hour by hour for clients, not struggling. I had done the work and now I was getting paid, paid, paid, paid, paid, paid, paid. And it all started with that little email. And so from there I decided to make this a really fun game. And I said, you know, I'm gonna keep working with clients, but, you know, to make ends meet, but I'm gonna really get to know about the internet now and really just have fun with this. And I started to dream what my dream lifestyle what my lifestyle could look like using the internet to handle all my sales. These are the few things that over the last several years I've made come true, and I'm really happy. This is one of the benefits of selling online, is creating a business model like this. I wanted to work at home or from anywhere. Who here loves working at home if they do work at home? Who prefers an office and having people to yell at like Bill? Yeah. He's got to bark at somebody, otherwise poor Karen would get all that. I personally love working at home. When I wake up, I don't want to see anybody. I don't want to talk to anybody. I don't want to get dressed. I love rolling out of bed and checking my email and then having some breakfast. I really love that. I love being able to travel and being able to just check my work and check my sales online. Whether I'm traveling on vacation or speaking, I'm going to be speaking in Australia next month, or if I'm going to visit my parents, my parents are in Texas and my dad's pretty ill, it's so good to know that I can pick my work up and just take it with me. You know, we really take that for granted. And I'm so happy I don't have to say, you know what, I'm not sure if I can get out of work. If my dad's in the hospital, I can jump and go. And that's really, really valuable. No employees. I run my business, it's a 7-figure business with 5 virtual assistants. None of them are full-time employees. I don't pay, you do payroll taxes, all that stuff. There are 5 actually all stay-at-home moms around the country and they work for me and they do the admin and stuff. And you may choose to build a team, you may not. I've become really good at it, but I find that way they handle all the busy work and I can do all the fun stuff like we're learning today, the sales and the marketing. That's the stuff I love. Flexible, no long-term commitments. I really am always changing and evolving and I like my business to grow with me. And the great thing about selling online online is you can change things fast, you can send things out fast. If you want to take your business to like a different angle or different turn, you can change a sales letter quickly, you can come up with new programs very fast, and it can grow with you. Automated and systematizable, again, the system is your solution. So the great thing about the internet is I'm going to show you ways to leverage this technology to put to use for you, not to give you more headaches, but to actually create a business that you have to work less in and your sales are coming in a lot more automatic. No travel required. I like to travel for occasional speaking gigs. This is only the 5th one I'm doing this year. I really cut down and I only save it for, you know, really great events like this one. Last year I was at the Info Summit, which is a great event too, but I don't want to travel because I have to. It's all about having choices. No pantyhose required. Sisters, can I get an amen? Amen. Enough said, okay. No, really, when I'm at home, you wouldn't recognize me. I'm in baseball cap and flip-flops, and I'm a beach girl, and I love being able to be that way most of the time. I'm so glad I don't have to dress up every day. And let's have fun. Why are we going to business for ourselves if it's going to be like a struggle and be a lot of work? We can create this to be as fun as we want it to be. We want it to be. Remember who's in charge here. It's you guys. So let's have fun with this and remember that it's really also about the freedom. If we've created another job for ourselves, we may as well go back and get a job. In fact, most people when they start a business, they, they think they're gonna work less, but we end up working a lot more, don't we? Suddenly you're working weekends, you're working nights, you're not taking vacations, and it can turn into a nightmare. So I'm not covering this today, but one of the 3 areas that I coach my students in is lifestyle and taking care of themselves. And it's amazing when you make some shifts in your life that actually fuels you and energizes you to have an even more successful business. Entrepreneurs need more downtime. Okay, it's a fact. So use that excuse if you need it, but we definitely need more downtime to recharge and renew. Just a few little pictures, I wanna show you a few things about me. This is the beach home I purchased last year. I'd never owned a home before. It was my dream to live on the beach, and I thought I was going to do that when I was retired one day. And I bought a little pad on the beach, and I live in Marina del Rey, California now. It's a little peninsula just south of Los Angeles. And I love taking vacations. I pre-book at the beginning of the year— this is a good tip for you— 4 2-week vacations a year and block them out. So I Nothing else will get in the way. Because if you leave it open, stuff happens. That's me in Australia 2 years ago. That's me waterskiing in Cancun. And that is a sunset in the Caribbean, an island called Turquoise, which is one of my favorite places to go. One of the things I love most about generating so much sales online is being able to give back. I'm a big contributor to Make-A-Wish, is one of the charities I love. I personally like charities to do with children and animals because they can't help themselves. And I love Make-A-Wish because they grant wishes to children with terminal illnesses. And on the right, that's not me in the princess costume. That's a princess at Disney World. And the little girl on the left, her name was Jenna. She has a terminal brain tumor. And on the left side, the photo is Amber Hill. She's Make-A-Wish's Director of Corporate Development, and she was presenting me a plaque, and I, you can't tell, but I'm actually really teary in that photo, was happy because she brought me the plaque and photos of Jenna and her family had gone to Disney World because I sent them. And that was a pretty amazing experience to have, and I just encourage all of you to remember that you have the power to do these things, especially after you grow your business and as you're growing your business. When you do stuff like this, it gives you even more of a reason to be successful. So let's go into some nitty-gritty now. Let me just get some water here. And we're going to cover the 3 keys to making bootles of money online. Now, there's been a lot of talk about this, but I'm going to cover it. I bet you guys didn't think we'd be talking so much about stories, right? Your story is crucial. And I don't mean that you have to have a story like you were living in a van by the river, you know, or like that you're on food stamps. But having some type of story is good. So I'll tell you a little bit about how I've done that with mine. It's made my marketing a lot more powerful. Your story. And then your 2 is your strategies. And number 3 is your system. These 3 have been the key to my success moving forward so quickly and also that of my students. Key number 1, your story. When I started publishing my newsletter for the first few years, all right, this was a great little tool to bring clients into my funnel, bring them into me. I've been very, very professional and maybe it was because I was in New York, but I don't know, I was very little more buttoned up. I wore a lot of black, right, and was very protective in my easy and I didn't share much about me. I didn't share anything about about my personal life or even really where I lived or anything. And then a few years ago, when I moved to California, there was a certain day I learned to get more personal. And it was because of this little girl. And her name was Minxie. Now, I'd already had an older cat named Francine. You'll see her in a minute. And then I got this little kitten named Minxie. And it's funny because sometimes I push the button by accident and I can tell her photo comes on because everyone goes, Oh, but I heard a little of that. But Minxie was very cute, but she was a terror. I don't know if you had a kitten, but they are crazy. They're running up and down everything and all over the desk and running around. And there's one day I'm working on my newsletter and Minxie's running all over and the other cats are chasing each other and this is just crazy. And in the newsletter I started writing a little bit about the cat, just saying, my God, we got this new kitten and she's great, but what a handful. And anyway, here's this great article article on how to drive thousands of people to your website every month and great, some useful tips you can have. Sent out the newsletter, came back hours later, dozens of emails about what? The cat. They wanted to hear more about the cat. No one wrote me back about the article. I don't think they even read the article. They were writing me questions like, "What kind of cat do you have? Do you have a picture of the cat? What's the cat's name? How many other cats do you have?" People were sending me pictures of their cats. Some of them were in costume. These people were so excited. What do you think this was, this channel of communication that opened up? What was it? Call out some things. Personal. Trust. Connection, relationship. Human. Someone said human. Just like me, right? Point of common interest. Oh, she's a cat? I have a cat. I like her. Something like that. Or maybe I don't like cats and she has cats and I don't know. But it's a connection, it's something for them to think about and see you as a person. One woman wrote me and said, now that I know you love cats, I'm going to buy everything you have. Cat people are, you know, cat people, we are. And I still see to this day her name come through when something comes out. She's very loyal. I think we kind of forget people buy from people, right? And when we go online, it's funny. Sometimes we put up this wall, especially during the dot-com phase, you saw a lot of companies using the internet to look big and scary and corporate. But being a solo business owner especially, or using your personality, this is your advantage. Then you have no competition. There is no one like you. So sharing some simple things about you and your life will do more for your sales than anybody else. People buy from people they know, like, and Trust. The same goes online. In fact, even more important online. And I'm gonna give you— this is my formula for online trust. Credibility, right? People have to know that I'm credible. So that's why in anything you share online, it should be— there should be a lot of education. It should be educational-based. Share tips, share articles, things you know. These are all the things that I teach teach, but build up that credibility plus a little vulnerability. Be a little human, right? Build that trust with them. That builds trust, and the trust equals the sales. This is my friend Ari Galper. Does anyone here know Ari? Ari lives in Sydney. Yeah, a lot of you know Ari. Okay, great. I'm gonna be seeing him in Sydney next month. This is Ari and his wife Michelle and his sons Toby and Nathan. And Quick story about something Ari did in his newsletter that skyrocketed his sales and it had to do with this little boy. Toby's on the left and he was their first child. And when Toby was born, Toby was born with Down syndrome. And Ari never mentioned anything about his family in his newsletter. He really had barely mentioned that he had picked up and moved from California to Australia. But he, for some reason, someday, this day, wanted to write an article about Toby 'cause Toby Toby was this little ball of love and light. And actually he was just so fearless in the way he went up to other kids and played and just took on things in life. And he was so inspired that Ari wrote an article called "Lessons I Learned from Toby." And his newsletter is about sales. And so this was a big jump for him to do this. And his wife was a little hesitant. Michelle, if you meet her, will tell you that I'm not sure if I want him to send that out. That was kind of personal information about our family. Family. She said, I don't know if this is something we should share. But Ari sent it out anyway. What do you think the response was? Amazing. People were writing saying this is the best article you've ever had. I Xeroxed a copy for everyone in our company and it's on the wall. People wrote back with stories about their own families and their children. It opened up a huge, huge channel of communication for Ari. And that, since then, he shares photos all the time of his family. Their vacations, what's going on. And it really builds such a bond with his readers. And in fact, whenever he has a seminar, people come up and ask, "How's Michelle, Toby, and Nathan? How's the family? You know, I saw your vacation pictures. This is great." "Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter, and those who matter don't mind." Does anyone know who that is? Dr. Seuss. Good old Dr. Seuss. I love that quote. Because remember, the people who don't resonate with you are not going to buy from you anyway. And this is why your position is really your advantage when you have the courage to say what you think about things and share a little bit about yourself. Key number 2 is your strategies. Online, as you guys know, there are many, many tools and things you can be doing. I'm gonna first talk about the easing because this is what I'm known for as the easing queen. And this is the simplest, easiest tool you could be using right now. And it's funny, I know a lot of people I've seen with the same seminars over and over and finally you'll all hear like, "Ah, I finally started that easing." And I'm so happy to hear that because this is so simple to get started and can get you more sales than you'd imagined. What is an easing? Well, first of all, it's just any publication delivered via email, something that you publish regularly. It could be a short tip that's just text. Like, you guys get Dan's little email strategies like every 3 days or something. Okay, that could be considered an ezine. I personally publish in what's called HTML. I'll show you what that looks like. That's an email with color and graphics. It can be as simple as one short tip, like a tip of the day or a tip of the week. Or I prefer to give articles. I love writing how-to information, and so my ezine Straight Shooter Marketing, I write articles, but you don't have to. This is permission-based only. So this is where people sign up to receive your ezine. Alright, you're not spamming people. You're not just finding lists and sending this out to them. This is called permission-based marketing, opting in. This is when people have signed up. There are some people who have their ezines on the web, but we're talking about email today because this is what I am best at and this is what works. And we're not talking about PDF attachments. Sometimes people send out emails with their newsletter as an attachment. But what's the drawback with attachments? Viruses. Yeah, people don't trust them. You know, I don't know about you, but if I get anything that looks strange or unfamiliar, I don't— I'd rather risk— I don't want to risk, I just don't even even open it. So this is a copy of my ezine. Now my ezine is a little fancy, but of course I'm the ezine queen, so it has to be fabulous, right? But this is a sample kind of issue of what I do. And this came out just a few weeks ago. I'll walk you through this. The top is just a banner, all right, to get people's attention. It has the title of my publication, has my photo, and then I have a little table of contents, what's going to be in that issue. And I start every issue with a note from me. That is what pulls people in. I give a little update of what's going on. That's a little clip art of me on vacation there with the bikini and the laptop. And this was writing a little bit how actually as they're reading it, I am in Mexico, but I prewrote the issue. And that is what really pulls people in. Sometimes I have a little photo or a mention about, you know, my cat or somewhere I went on vacation. Then there's a good amount of content. I love giving away good information. You want to do that because that keeps people on your list. And so this is an article I wrote on how to write a kick-butt-easing ad that gets attention and action. When you're thinking of content you could offer, look at your business, look at your core expertise, and look at useful information that your clients and customers would like to receive. And a great tip I'll give is that if you can't come up with ideas, think about the questions your clients and customers ask you over and over and over. I'm sure you could come up with 12 of those, right, and make a little Q&A. In each issue, you could just have a question and answer and do that. That's a great place to start. But if you don't like to write, that's no worry. You don't need to write articles. You can do quick tips. You can do Q&As, I mentioned. You can do lists, you know, top 10 lists, lists of mistakes people make, all kinds of content ideas. Then make sure you promote yourself. Make sure you promote yourself. I have a little a section in every issue that promotes my ezine product, Boost Business with Your Own Ezine. And then I have a little recommendation for a resource that I use and recommend. It's funny that some people will pay me to review their ezines and say, this is really great, you know, we're getting great response, people like it, but we're not getting sales from it. Most often I'll find they're not talking about their services or products. They're giving good information. It's a nice mix, I like about 75% useful content with about 25% promotion. Sometimes I'll do the opposite, it depends. When you send out a solo email which is an email about a specific product or service that you're selling, you guys seen those, right? You know, you get like just an email about one thing. I call them a solo mailing. Those will get you about 10 times the response of an email newsletter. Newsletter. But here's the catch, they don't work without each other. The easing builds the relationship. It's the giving, it's the giving of the good information. And then when you blast out the promotions, they pay attention. Have you ever gotten on someone's list and then all you get is promotion after promotion after promotion after promotion, right?

That's irritating.

You feel like, what am I getting? I'm not getting anything here. They're asking, they're taking. You want to make sure you're giving some good stuff because it's just as important to keep people on the list as it is to get them on the list. So 7 ways an ezine will help your business, and I've seen this from everyone from actual— someone who was the funeral guy, is he here or no? No, but I have someone, one of my clients had a funeral or planning end-of-life business, to I have a sex therapist doing an ezine, we have a dog groomer, I mean it's helped every business I've seen start one. And here are the 7 of the ways it'll do that. Number 1 is grow a mailing list to market to over and over. And this is such an easy way to do this. And because we want to get away again from marketing one-to-one, one-to-one. And, you know, offline mailing is great, but it's expensive. I'm doing some offline mailing now finally. I started online and now I'm doing some offline. But I took for granted how cheap and easy this was to build build an email list online of my prospects and make money online. So don't overlook this. It's moving away from the smaller numbers to really large numbers and being able to market to thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. Number 2, sell tons more products and services. What I love about an ezine and how it sells is instead of bragging, I can just show them a little bit of my knowledge that builds the trust, that builds the credibility. I had an old journalism professor in college who said, when you're writing, think of show me, don't tell me. Give them samples of what you're offering. Talk about success stories from your clients. There's so much you can give in that little bit of space that will really bump up your sales. Number 3, promote yourself as an expert in your field. Now, even if you have like a brick-and-mortar business, you want to think of yourself as an expert. Your clients and customers see you as an expert. When I go to the dry cleaner, I think of that guy, I don't even know his name, but I think of him as the dry cleaner expert guy. If I had a question about dry cleaning, I would go to him. It positions you as an expert when you write tips and publish things like this. And I'll tell you, I never liked calling myself an expert, and I never really was comfortable with it until a few years ago. I was in my office and the phone rang one day, and I pick it up and I said, I said, "Good morning, this is Allie." And a man said, "Good morning, this is Andrew Blackman. I'm calling from the Wall Street Journal." And I said, "Andrew, you know, I had a subscription and I canceled it and you guys keep calling and honestly it's getting really irritating and I'd like you to take me off your list." And he was quiet for a minute and he said, "Miss Brown, I don't think I was clear. I'm sorry. I'm a reporter calling from the Wall Street Journal." And I'm like mortified. I'm like dropping whatever I'm working on. Oh my God, I'm like, "Good morning! How can I help you?" I just dropped everything. He said, "I'm working on an article for the Wall Street Journal on email marketing for small business. Would you have a few minutes for an interview?" I said, "Let me hold on and check. Yes, I do. Thank you." I said, "I have to ask you one thing though, Andrew. How did you find out about me?" I'm sitting there, you know, in my underwear and like a baseball cap, and I'm like, "Oh my God." He said, I found you online, I did a search, and on your website I saw that you publish a newsletter, so I got a few issues and I can tell that, well, obviously you're an expert. Okay, I never said I was an expert, but it's how you're perceived. You're perceived as an expert. That is what allows you to stay on top of mind awareness with people, to charge more, to be known in your industry, to have clients and customers to start coming to you. Stay in touch with prospects and customers. It's not their job to remember you're still in business. You have to remind them. And email is such a simple— I mean, the guys, it's just a no-brainer to set this up for you and just reach out and touch them every week or every 2 weeks with a little tip. Okay, you gotta do it. Otherwise, the next person that comes along, your competition, that's gonna be who's right in front of them. You want to be right in front of them all the time. Spread the word about your, whoop, your speaking and your business. Spread the word about whatever you're doing. All right, before I even had a website, I had clients in Australia, in the UK, all over because that little email got forwarded around. The great thing about email is it's so easy to forward and you can ask people to forward it and they will forward it to their friends, their clients, and colleagues. And there's ways to encourage them to do that as well. Capture the email addresses of your web visitors. This is huge. Now, those of you who have been online for a while, you know this is important. If you're a little new to this, this is crucial, right? If I find your website, I've taken the time to come to your website either through a search or a friend or an ad, and I'm at your website, am I valuable to you? Yes, don't let me slip away. You want to get me on your list. Now there are several ways to do this. You can offer a free report or things like that, but the ezine is the best way to get permission to contact them over and over and over and over. They expect and now welcome your message every week. It actually works really well in conjunction with offering like a free report or free audio download and then offering the e-zine as well. You wanna make it an irresistible offer for them to get on your list. And that's extremely important because 99% of your first-time web visitors will not buy from you. They will not contact you, they will not hire you, they will not do anything. Suddenly the phone rings or dinner's ready and boom, they're gone. They're gone. Don't lose them. You wanna make sure you have a tool like this set up to automatically capture them and follow up with them over and over. And you don't have to do the work. Cheap and easy. My gosh, I took this for granted until I started doing, you know, a lot of other marketing methods, that email is still practically free. And it's instant. You know, it takes a long time to get a mailing together and get the mailing out and wait for a response and all that. I'm used to email, pressing send, goes out minutes later. Seeing the sales come in. We just did a big, my team and I did a big like physical mailing like 2 weeks ago. It's so funny, it went out one day and I'm like, when do we get a response? You know, so used to being instant, we're like, when's the response coming back? When's it coming back? I have to be patient with that because I'm so used to the email. This is Miss Beth Davis, who already got a little promotion before. Where's Beth? There she is. I'm gonna have Beth talk in a minute, but this is Beth's easing I just wanna show you a few different examples of different businesses and how they've used this for them. You can see Bess has a template similar to mine. You know, my clients use my template, that's fine. She has a little what's coming up in her business, little update from her. I'm not gonna show you the whole ezine, but just the little banner at the top is what gets your attention, and then she has some great content for her readers. This is a guy named Lucio Crisalli. He's in Orange County, California. California. He's a big guy, I don't know if you could tell, but he's a health and nutrition guy, nutrition coach. And he and his wife Lisa run a company called Exercise and Nutrition Works. And when they had— well, they had a nutrition counseling business for several years and had not done any online marketing. And when they joined my program, I told them the first thing I want you guys to do is start an ezine. And he said, "Well, what about a list?" And I said, "Well, what about your customers you've been working with over the last few years. I mean, that's not as exciting as finding new people. People never want to look at that, you know, like, oh, start with my own customer list? Yes, because you know what happened? He put this together, he gave like a nutrition tip each week, he had a promotion for a certain product, put this together, sent it out. They had tons of sales that day. They did about $10,000 in that first week that they said, Ali, we would have never done that before. You know, we were mailing out postcards and stuff, but this And this got us just instant sales. And also they were planning for their wedding, so that was very handy at that time of year. And so now they do a weekly e-zine with Lucho's tips and all his advice on nutrition. This is Kim Duke, the sales diva. Kim had a business, she ran sales seminars actually offline and was doing all her promotion via networking. Can you imagine that? She was running around all those meetings promoting her seminars. We got her an online presence and it's so fun because she's such a character. She's just a real hoot. And some of you guys remember Kim, right? I think you met her. I'm not sure, some of my girls here. But this is how much fun Kim has with her copy. One of her sales letters starts saying, "Does selling hurt like a bikini wax?" That's how much fun she has. Some of the guys are like, "I don't get it." But the girls get it. Anyway, her market's obviously women. You know, so she had just had so much fun with her copy, with her sales letters. And here's the great thing, once she took her marketing online, she was able to sell— I have her testimonial later in the presentation here. She did $60 grand in 2 days. And she said, "Allie, it usually took me 6 months to fill up a seminar to sell $60,000 worth and you helped me do it in 2 days." It was just the effectiveness, the tools we used, and the speed. And putting it all together. And it's stuff she already had. We just got her to take it online. Christine Closer, where's Christine? There she is. We'll hear from Christine in a minute too. This is Christine's Easing the Conscious Business Connection. I'll let Christine tell you a little bit about that later. And there she is on the screen. A little bit about— you're seeing these templates that I have my students use because people read email just straight down. And a big mistake The other mistake I see a lot of people doing when they get into email and they realize they can design stuff is they start putting in columns and different sections and audio and video and a recipe of the day and an interview and a quote and they jam all this stuff in there. You want to keep it really simple and you want to keep it relatively short. Why do you think you want to keep it short? People read it, yeah. Do you guys have the "to read later" folder in your email box? Yeah, do you ever get to to it? No. Hundreds and hundreds of those easings and emails. But the short ones you read on the spot. So I recommend to keep the whole thing to— I try to keep mine to about 1,000 words total, no more. That's a few paragraphs. Even shorter if you want to do just a tip of the week. And just one column basically. This is a study done by Jacob Nielsen last year. And they tracked how people viewed email. They used like a heat sensor. And people really just would scan down. If there was stuff on the other side, they didn't even want to go over to the right side. It's not like a print publication where you can read and scan around. Just one nice path going down the page. That's why you see in websites too those long sales letters. It's just one path. It's easy to read. You don't have to jump around, click around. Very simple. Another tool that I use a lot is our blogs, not only for traffic generation but to to build the relationship with my readers. And this is where I share little things about my life because I found out some readers want to know everything about what's going on with me. And then some don't care and that's fine. The ones that want to know more, I drive them to the blog. And not only can I talk about little things in my life, but you can set up Google AdSense on your blog and be making a little cash as well. On the right side, you can't see it, but I also have links to my products of my services. And it's funny, my blog's become a little popular place for people to just go and read about my life and things. Now here's a tip though, whenever you talk about a personal thing going on, make sure you always lead it back into something to do with your business. So for example, I was mentioning my— this is my brother's wedding that was just in May. It was my family, there were only like 6 of us, like this little WASPy family and 100 Koreans. So it was a really great picture. You should see all the families together. We're in the middle kind of like, oh boy. It was a ton of fun. And that was in May. It was like May, yeah, in May, May 23rd is when I posted that. Now at the end of that though, I was saying, wow, what a whirlwind summer. And 'cause I'm also getting ready for my Online Success Blueprint event. So I always tie it back into something I'm promoting. Here's another entry I made. This was with my Platinum Mastermind group. We were in Las Vegas at the Four Seasons, and I'll write a little bit about our meetings and, you know, how much fun we're having. And actually, Rob, I think you're in that photo because you were there. Debbie, his wife Debbie, is in my Platinum Group. And, uh, see, I'll write a little about what we're doing, and I'll always be promoting a little bit leading into something. In your sales letters, I'm so glad that Bill went through a good sales letter template today because that'll save a lot of time. But you want to use your story in your sales letters.. And what he said is very true. You're gonna get tired of your story. You know how many times people ask me about the ATM story? And I'm kinda like, oh, they don't wanna hear that again, and I don't wanna talk about it again. But that's what people remember. People come up to me at my seminars and are saying, I'm so glad you shared that story about, you know, when things were really bad for you because I could relate to that. Or I'm so glad you shared the story about the cat. I love hearing that one over and over and over. People will say that. So don't get tired of it. Use it in your sales letters. And now there are times where you don't need a long sales letter and you may not need to go into your entire story. And a big question I get is, you know, when do I need a long sales letter? Well, here's an example. I'm gonna show you a sample for a sales letter that I did that is selling a $3,000 seminar. Okay, do you think that page is longer than the one that I'm selling a $20 book? Yes. Okay. The reason is you need more information. Okay, for people to make a decision to spend $3,000, do you think they need more information? Do you think they have more objections? Do you think they have more things going on in their head? You have to answer all their questions. Okay, that's the difference. So you need to put in some thought, you know, what questions need to be answered in that person's head? What objections do they have? What information, what, what, anything you could think of that they might want to know before making that decision has got to be in that letter. And that's why, you know, when I first saw those long letters too, I was like, what is this? Scroll, scroll, scroll down, you know, why are they doing this? And you realize that's just the way to do it because it works. It absolutely works. Never get tired of telling your story. Remember the credibility plus vulnerability in your sales letters. And I use a lot of pictures. I know not many people do, but people like the pictures. It makes it more interesting, and especially if you have a picture that makes a good point, you can use that. So this is a letter that's on my website right now, and Bill went through the template before, so I'm not gonna go into detail, but bold headline, headline that makes a bold, bold statement. Revealed how any time-starved solopreneur can use email and the internet to leverage their business and create an extra $5,000 to $25,000 a month in extra income easily and consistently. That's a bold headline, gets their attention, gets them to read on. And that's my assistant Liz, my main assistant in the picture there. I actually had the letter written by her this time because I've had this letter written by me for a few years now, so we mixed it up and had it written by her from her point of view, which made it a lot more interesting for people to read. And also, you may want to think about that. There's someone in your office or even one of your clients who is willing to have the letter written for from them can be very, very effective because then it's a third-party endorsement. This is where I tell my story again. I'm talking about how, you know, I started my business, I was burned out, I was working like 100 hours a week, I was jumping from my clients, I was miserable. This is where I tell the story because I don't want people reading that letter and thinking, well, you know, how does she know all this stuff? You know, who is she, who does she think she is coming down from the mountain here? So always give a little story. And if you have a company, your company can have a story. You know, tell a little bit about how you got good at what you do or why you do what you do. It's good to have a reason why in there. And I, again, like to show pictures. That's my personal preference. Here's where I make the general template, you know, really short version for a letter that I teach is just problem, problem, solution, offer. That's the mini, mini version. Problem, solution, offer. So there is the problem. I was talking about when you start your business, how you can end up, you know, working yourself to the bone and not getting anywhere. Here is the solution, the Online Success Blueprint, the strategies, the system, it's proven, easy to follow. So I'm introducing the solution. I give a lot of details in that. I'm gonna skip that over. Testimonials. When you are using testimonials especially online, you need to really give a lot of information about the people that, that you have helped, these success stories. So I always give a full name, you know, where they're from, I give their URL, I use a picture, sometimes I'll do audio or video, but I like to keep it simple most of the time. And the reason you want to give as much information as possible is, you ever look in the back of magazines like those weight loss ads? You know, and it's the woman with the pants holding out to here, and I lost 300 pounds in a weekend, and it says, you know, EB in Calgary. And you're thinking, that's not real. She's not real. This isn't real. You need those testimonials to appear real because people are skeptical, especially online. That's why I even give my clients URLs. And sometimes people will— some of my— you've been called, right? People have called you guys seeing you on the website. 'Cause they wanna check it out. People are so skeptical. And I warn people on my website, like, people may contact you and ask you if I'm real and if this stuff really works. And so I'm happy to give their contact information. Okay, I just wanna walk you, whoops, walk you through that. Valerie Young is in Montague, Mass. Who knew that? Montague? Montague, okay, thank you. Oh, okay, Montague, Mass. She is a coach and launched her first product last last year and did an additional $52,000 in product sales in 90 days. She's studying under a few mentors and I'm one of them. And she said what I have taught her has greatly contributed to what she's doing online now. That's Lisa and Lucio Crisalli, tripled their revenues last year to over $1 million. This is a nutrition consulting business. That was a big, big jump for them last year. They are They're very excited. They just got married too. Lainey and Alan Voivod in New Hampshire. They are consultants and thanks to what they've learned from my online blueprint, they're now making $150,000 to $200,000 more this year. The great thing is with no new clients. I show you ways just to increase current sales and use the internet to leverage the sales that you have. Roger Grant from Alberta, Canada, $40,000 in new revenues. Boosted response by 10 times. Do you guys see how— does that have a laser? How instead of making people read through all this, I pull out the meat of it up here. You see this headline? That's great to do because do people read everything on the page? No. So you want to make sure, like Bill was talking about that double readership path, if people were just to skim down and look at the subheads or little headlines like this, what would they walk away with? So you want to make sure make sure you pull out— when they told me that success story, I pulled it out of that testimonial. I put that up top because I'm very proud of that. I want people to see that my information is getting those kind of results. So be bold with those testimonials and pull out the meat so people don't need to read through them. Now that being said, I like having the details there too because people may read that and go, "Are you serious?" And they want to read the details underneath. Then I have my offer. I go through this, just outline everything they're getting. And then of course the call to action. I've gotten a much greater response offering payment plans as well. And I want to tell you guys that if you offer a product or service online, if there's any way to break it up into payments, you will get a great, great, greater response in sales. Does anyone have that experience with anything they're offering? Yeah. Big, big difference. And you'd be surprised, like I see some of my colleagues who are signing up for my stuff and I know they're doing really well but they'll still People still choose payments. People just like to watch their cash flow and spread it out. So look at ways you can offer payments over time. Let's look at ways to trigger those little bursts of sales. This is my cat Francine. She turned 20 last week. Everyone send her good energy. Isn't she— she is fabulous. She was actually born as a kitten in my house in high school. So we've been together, we've been through a lot. We've been all over the country, you know, through marriage, divorce, all this stuff together. She's still with me. It's funny though, I won't have more than one cat because guys, when women have more than one cat, she then risks becoming what? The cat lady. Yeah. The old cat lady that you won't date, right? So I've learned just keep it to one cat. Guys always ask, they're like, how many cats do you have? I'm like, just one. They're like, OK, cool. All right. If I said 7, you never hear from them again, right? Or just tell them you have one, right? So that's Franny. It's just me and Franny. Create occasions in your business. Create occasional special events or sales. And this is where you have a lot of fun. Like you saw Bill do his straitjacket crazy guy, you know, sale. And at first you're gonna think this is just ludicrous. You're like, my clients are gonna think I'm nuts. Why would I do something like this? People love this stuff, so create around holidays or, you know, special events in your life or special events in your pet's life. I'll show you that in a minute. You need a reason to have a sale. It makes it a lot more exciting and also believable for your clients and customers. You don't want to just be dropping your prices like Walmart. That's not who you are. You want to create an occasion about it. And again, I use pictures a lot. Pictures are worth a thousand words. Cards. Now I'll show you a little bit more about Franny. That's a picture of me hugging her. She's actually much cuter than that. She looks like, "Don't snuggle me," right there. But that's cute. Franny's birthday was coming up last year and we figured out she was going to be 19 on September 19th. So we decided to have a 19% off sale on my website for Franny's birthday. Now the trick was we had to get a hat on her. I don't know if you've ever tried to dress up a cat. Dogs are fine. Dogs are like, just put the— yeah, cats are like, what are you trying to do to me? So it honestly took about an hour. And the photo I'm about to show you looks like she's being hurt, but she's not. OK. I'm going to show you. This is how we finally got the hat on her. She was pissed. She's like, take the frickin' picture already. She's like, fine, I'll do it. It's time for Francine's birthday sale. Allie's cranky old cat turns 19 years old on Tuesday, September 19th, so let's take 19% off. Francine herself says, I can't believe Allie told you my real age, and in human years too. What's a girl to do? In celebration of my special day, we're letting you take 19% off any or all the 10 products on this page. And please hurry so mom will let me take off this stupid hat. Now when I sent this out, I'm thinking, maybe some people will think this is funny. I don't know how this is going to go. People sent Franny birthday cards and whipped up like another, like $10,000 in a few days because of her. Now this is just a great example. It just was something, people like humor, people like a reason to laugh during the day, they like a reason to feel happy. So create little occasions or events that you can have a sale around. And I'm telling you, if I can make money off my cat, you know, you guys can do something like this too. It's very exciting. She'll never forgive me for that.

She—

yeah. What's that? Oh, I could have, but it's not the same. Clipart of my cat? No, no, she's fine. She went along with it. Thank you. Yeah, Humane Society called later. They're like, did you hurt her? No, she was okay. Key number 3 is your system. Now I showed you a few tools to put this all together. There is a lot involved in marketing online, but email, blogs, and doing fun sales with personality like that have been the keys that I found that no one else was teaching that I put into place that have really skyrocketed the sales. And you'll hear from some of my gals in a minute too. And here's— I want to tell you a little bit about when I started trying to learn about internet marketing. Let's go back a few years when I was like you guys going to— I went to to almost every seminar I could go to. I was buying everyone's stuff. I was like a sponge and I was so excited, all these ideas. And you know when you're so excited you stay up at night and you're just brainstorming and you're looking at people's websites and you're like, "I could do this and that and I want to buy this and that." But the problem was it still wasn't coming together. I was getting bits and pieces. And so I was running around, it was very frustrating because I found that I was learning mostly tactics. I I was learning pieces but not a whole system. I was learning strategies and tools but not the big picture. And my friend Melanie Strick says most of us entrepreneurs, we suffer from what is called BSO, or bright shiny object syndrome. And if you— yeah, you guys have been there. You're running around and if one seminar gets kind of boring, you go to another seminar. And then if one thing isn't working, you jump to the next thing. We like to hop around whatever is new and exciting. And especially in internet marketing, if you've been to some of those things, you know, it's always the latest greatest technology. But it may not be something that you need or it's something that changes by the day. Some of the strategies I was learning in internet marketing, I knew I just couldn't use. They would actually be embarrassing to my business, like tricks about, you know, changing the deadline on pages and like scripts that would trick people and things like that. Personally, you know, I know they work, but there are some things I just didn't feel good about when I was really running a business and having clients. Technology that changes by the day. Some of the strategies that I invested to learn would be actually obsolete within a few months. There was one large seminar I went to a few years ago, and they were selling the latest thing to trick the search engines to get like instant listings. Well, that 6 weeks later they had to refund everyone who had bought it because the search engine had already changed, right? So the latest and greatest thing may not be what you need, okay? And I see a lot of people running around looking for the next holy grail instead of stepping back and looking at their marketing as a system. Long-term sustainability. When you're looking at a marketing system to put into place, you want something that's going to be around and usable for several years to come. And the stuff was just overwhelming. I didn't know where to start. That was the biggest problem. I didn't know where to start. I know of course it's best, as they say, to do everything at once. I couldn't handle that. I really needed someone to help me prioritize and put this in a map to follow. And so that's why I put together what I call the Online Success Blueprint. I'll actually show you guys a copy. It's really cool. I was really happy when Dan was talking yesterday. He was saying how some people respond so much better when you have something printed. I realized that I'd been kind of doing this stuff for a few years but finally mapped it out. And this is what I have on my wall now. It's my blueprint poster. What this does is outline your— my online strategy for my entire business. Step by step by step from identifying your audience to finding leads, like 8 different ways to bring people into your list, how you get them on the list, how you close a sale, as well as like 24 different streams of income you can develop from your business. But the reason this is so helpful is it's step by step.

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