What do you think Mike and Lil’ Stevie can teach you about internet marketing?
Let me be more specific, what do you think they can teach you about “sticking points”?
Now I could have said this little report is all about “greasing the shoot” and “optimizing your selling process” — all true, but hardly fun. No, instead I’d like to draw your attention to the small guy in the movie still. Mike Robertson.
Mike is a world class trainer and powerlifter. He’s the co-owner of one of the best gyms in the world (as awarded by Men’s Health). He’s also a pretty damn good internet marketer and his blog at Robertson Training Systems is a fine example of what you can do with a little tweaking of the out of the box twentyten WordPress theme.
Actually, I could write a book about folks like Mike and Eric Cressey and how they’ve specialized their training business to target very specific audiences and niches – like shoulder health for physical therapists and trainers, or how to assess where your athletic weaknesses are (and fix them).
But no, this isn’t about Mike’s niche marketing prowess. Instead I want to talk about deadlifting.
The deadlift is the simplest of ideas – pick up something heavy off the ground. It’s the most “functional” of exercises you can imagine. We all have experiences of trying to pick up a box off the ground or helping carry a large odd object.
The thing is – there’s a lot of nuance to HOW you actually lift something off the ground and not get hurt. It’s not as simple as “bend you knees.” And as you’d expect, the heavier something is the harder it is to lift.
And that’s where Mike comes in. He’s a world class coach and trainer. He knows how to get someone to be stronger in the deadlift, minimize injury, and improve performance. Take a minute and look at one of Mike’s posts about improving your deadlift. That’s ok, I can wait a little.
Now, you may not understand all of what’s written there or in the videos. That’s because Mike’s audience – his personas – are trainers, therapists, and (elite) athletes. A normal shmuck like me subscribes to his list because I’m a gym rat that’s passionate about athletic performance. So even though I don’t fit into his main target audience, I “fake it” because of my interests. (this is a key part of the market funneling concept that you can read about here and here)
What you should have noticed in the article is that Mike is coaching you through the sticking points.
The deadlift is a process – it as a start and an end. If you have problems increasing your deadlift it’s because part of your “process” is stuck. You have a weakness somewhere.
Here’s the idea – if you address the weakness and correct it, you get stronger.
DUH, WINNING!
Do I need to tell you that internet marketing is the same way?
Here’s what I mean – as I mentioned in my Market Funneling Mastermind video you have to have a business system in place when you market online (or anywhere). Here’s a simple system courtesy of my buddy Andre.
This is about as simple an asset based system as you can get online. It’s been used by 1000s of marketers before Andre and it’ll be used by 1000s more after he and I are long gone.
You drive traffic to a squeeze page. The squeeze page promises to solve a problem (or at least give you a glimpse at the brass ring) in exchange for your email address. You get the person onto your list and then you use email marketing to promote offers to them.
So let’s say you believe Andre. You buy into the process he, and I, and just about every other marketer talks about. You implement this system and then… nothing happens. You aren’t making any (more) money.
AHA! This proves it! All marketers are liars. Dirty, rotten, filthy, pigs…
Not exactly.
Here’s the good news. You implemented a system – a process. There’s only a few possible sticking points. If we address the weakness and correct it, you’re more successful.
Sound familiar?
Just like Mike can assess your deadlift and then take corrective action based on your weaknesses, we can do the same…
1. Do you have traffic?
The bottom line here is that you have to get visitors to the squeeze page (i.e. the “lead gen process”). Without that, there’s nothing to talk about.
Let’s say you’re using PPC to get traffic to the lead capture page… The ad is the first sticking point. If you don’t get clicks on the ad you don’t get visitors to the squeeze page.
It’s the same if you’re using organic search. If your page isn’t ranking high enough in the search engines you aren’t going to get visitors.
2. People aren’t converting on the squeeze page…
Now this one is more complicated. It can be a few possible things:
- the traffic coming to the squeeze page isn’t targeted enough. If you’re using PPC or PPV or CPM then you have to look at the message to market match and probably the persona you’re targeting to come to the page.
- There’s a conversion problem with the page. This can be layout (the opt in box is below the fold), poor copy, etc.
So there’s multiple sticking points here. And these sticking points are valid whether you are trying to optimize the conversion – go from 25% opt ins to 33% say on cold traffic – or if you’re just getting started with the campaign.
3. Lots of “unsubscribes”
Again, multiple possible sticking points:
- The lead magnet (free report, solution to the problem, bribe, etc.) isn’t strong enough.
- Your “voice” in your emails isn’t working with the people subscribing – you aren’t offering them enough value to stay on the list.
4. Nobody’s buying
This one is the most complex because there’s a lot of things going on. You have traffic and you’re converting the lead gen process… but it still isn’t working. Why?
- Are your emails aligned with the lead magnet (free report, bribe, etc.)?
- Are your emails even getting delivered (this is HUGE)?
- Are people opening the emails? (they can’t click on the offer if they don’t read the message)
- Are people opening but not clicking? (bad copy in the email, mismatch of audience, etc.)
- Are people clicking on the email but not converting (bad landing page, maybe a mismatched offer, you might need to presell more, etc.)
Hopefully by now you get the point. By implementing a system – a process – there are very well defined sticking points. This is true for the deadlift and it’s certainly true for internet marketing.
Geeking out and learning the process is key here – or get a coach.
Identify the weakness ? Implement corrections ? make more money.
Pretty much, that’s it.
postscript: Sometimes metrics (numbers) are a good thing. Sometimes they shock and surprise you. I was talking with Dan John once and he mentioned that an “average” athlete should be able to deadlift twice their bodyweight. At the time, that shocked me and was a good indication of where I had to go.
For squeeze / leadgen pages I like to initially target 25% on targeted cold traffic. Again, this isn’t a particularly large or hard number to reach. It’s “average”. 33% is a figure others use. If you’re interested in working with me and others on sticking points and total world domination (lol) I invite you to check out my Market Funnel Mastermind.
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