Doing SEO without doing a competitive analysis is like trying to fix a car without knowing what’s broken: you’re likely to fix what’s working and you won’t fix what’s broken.

A competitive analysis is crucial to understand WHY your competitors are outranking you. Once you understand the “why” you know what you need to do to revert the situation.

NicheWatch is a great tool that shows you the search engine rankings for allinanchor, allintitle and allintext (they pull the data from Google).

allinanchor: this shows you where you’d rank for a keyword based on links pointing to your site. If your allinanchor number is lower than your regular ranking (a regular Google search), it might mean that you don’t have enough links pointing to your site with the keyword in the anchor text. If your allinanchor ranking is equal or higher than your regular ranking, incoming links is not the problem.

allintitle: this shows you your ranking based on your page title. If your allintitle ranking is lower than your regular ranking, you need to optimize your page title.

allintext: this shows you your ranking based on page text. If your allintext ranking is lower than your regular ranking, you need to optimize your page content.

Let’s take a look at the results I got from NicheWatch for the keyword and URL showed in the image above:

This is what I can see about the website I’m trying to rank:

• It has 23 backlinks, whereas most of my competitors have a lot more links.
• It has 7 pages indexed, whereas some my competitors have 1000’s.
• My regular ranking is #55, but my allinanchor ranking shows a dash, meaning I don’t rank at all for this keyword. This is a strong indicator that I need links pointing to my site with the anchor text “Seattle painting services”.
• Same thing for allintitle. The keyword isn’t in the page title but it should. I can get a nice push from creating an optimized page title.
• My allintext ranking is 31, which is better than my regular ranking of 55, but still not that great. I’d put the keyword in the H1 tag of the site once and a few times in the page content. (I use the IBP software for this but you can manually calculate the keyword density of your top 10 competitors and adjust yours to be within that range. A word of warning: don’t obsess over keyword density; there’s no magic number. But, if the top 10 websites have keyword densities of 5%-10% and yours is either 25% or 0.1%, you need to fix that.)

By doing all this (optimizing page text and title, and getting keyword-rich backlinks) this site will rank a lot better for this keyword. It’s not competitive at all, so a top 3 ranking can be achieved within 30 days without too much effort.

Do you see the power of diagnosing the problem before treating it?

I use several link building tactics, but there’s one that I prefer over all the others. This is how it works:

I Make a List of Sites that Link to My Competitors

1. First of all, this is what I mean by competitors: the top 10 ranking sites on Google for the keywords I want to go after. I don’t care if they’re direct competitors or not. I’m talking about search engine rankings competition, not business competition.
2. I use Tattler, a tool that gives me a list of sites linking to my competitors. It pulls the data from Yahoo! Site Explorer, but because it gets backlinks for each page of a site, it gets a lot more than the Yahoo! tool, which has a 1,000-link limit.
3. There are a couple of paid tools that let you see what websites link to more than one competitor. This is great because when a website links to more than one competitor, they’re much more likely to link to you too. I use Competitive Link Research Tool and HubFinder.
4. I create a separate list with the top 50 ranking websites for each of the keywords I want to go after. I use Google search (customized to show 50 results per page) and SEOQuake for Firefox to export the results to a spreadsheet.
5. I’ll end up with two lists: one will be a list of sites that link to my competitors and the other one will be a list of sites that are at the top of Google for the keywords I want to go after.

I Start Getting Links the SMART Way
People are sick of those emails saying “I saw your website and I love it. I’d like to link to you if you want to link back to me.” One-way links are a lot more valuable.

This is how I do it:

1. I use a broken link detection tool to find broken links on people’s sites.
2. I contact webmasters to let them know about the broken links I found on their sites. Their contact information should be on their websites or you can use DomainTools.com to get it.
3. If I couldn’t find any broken links (this rarely happens) I spend some time on their websites and send them a few suggestions, which shows I really care.
4. Once the conversation is started, I don’t spoil it all by asking for a link. I spend some time on their sites and offer to write an article about something their readers might care. Do you see the difference? I’m OFFERING something, not ASKING for something. I make sure that the articles I write for them are great.
5. If I’m dealing with a major website, I won’t even ask for a link (although they usually ask me for a byline and link back to my blog). However, this is not the kind of link I want, because the anchor text will usually be my URL. After sending them a couple of articles I ask them to start using my keyword as the anchor text, so the link doesn’t say “http://www.TheOutsourcingCompany.com/blog”, but “Internet Marketing Blog”.
6. If I’m dealing with a small website that doesn’t have a lot of visitors, I usually ask for a link the first time. Because they can’t offer me a lot of exposure, they’re usually happy to give me a link instead.
7. A word of warning: you’ll be managing 100’s of relationships at once, so don’t rely on your memory. You won’t remember all the conversations you’re gonna have. Use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool such as BuzzStream (my favorite) or HighRise.
8. Another tip: using the phone instead of email works a lot better. Think about it: if someone calls you to let you know a link on your site is broken, won’t you be surprised that someone actually took the time to do that? Phone is a lot more personal and a great way to differentiate yourself. I don’t call everybody; I only call when I see a great link opportunity (20% of the time) and I email everyone else.

This is a very challenging post. I’ll try to explain my step-by-step Pay per Click (PPC) system in one single article (and I want to keep it short). This is the same system we’ve used to get millions of qualified visitors for pennies. I’m really excited about writing this article and I think you’ll love it.

Keyword Research

• Use the Google Tool to get keyword suggestions for your site.
  
• Run the same tool on your competitors’ websites!
• Use the same tool for “Descriptive words or phrases” as opposed to the “Website content” feature.
  
• Use WordTracker to get more keyword ideas.
• Use SpyFu to find out what keywords your competitors are using and get ideas from their campaigns. Looks for the 800-lb. gorilla in your market and run SpyFu on their domain. They’re very likely to have a huge budget and a very optimized campaign. Let them do all the research, spend the money and learn from them.
• Get synonyms from Synonyms.com, Thesaurus.com and Quintura.com.
• Get misspellings using this tool. Almost nobody bids on misspellings so you can get clicks for very cheap.
• Bid on competitors’ URLs. They’re dirt cheap and extremely relevant. A lot of people do a Google search for YouTube.com instead of typing www.youtube.com in the address bar.
• Another way to get cheap clicks is by having geo-targeted keywords, such as “Seattle chiropractor”. Make sure that you only bid on the keywords for the areas you serve and that your landing pages contain those keywords. Otherwise, Google might think you’re not relevant and that will hurt your Quality Score.
• Bid on action keywords, like “FIND local chiropractor” and “BUY PlayStation 3″.
• Consider the buying cycle. “Costa Rica beach condos” will get you a lot less traffic than “Costa Rica” but it’ll be a lot more qualified if you rent beach condos. Because you’re paying for each click, you only want qualified traffic.
• Consider “side searches”. Side searches are needs that you can fulfill but so can other products or services. For example, if you have beach condos in Costa Rica, you might want to bid for “honeymoon destinations”.
• A lot of people recommend starting with thousands of keywords. I don’t think this is a good idea because when a campaign is too big, it’s really hard to manage it. Start small. Ten percent of your keywords will drive 90% of your traffic anyway.

Keyword Research for the Content Network
You’ll need a different approach for the Content Network. Some ideas:

• Bid on thought strings. If you sell weight loss pills, try strings like “[brand] didn’t work for me”, “has anyone tried [brand]?”, etc. Look for things people would say in forums, blogs and discussion boards.
• Bid on popular article titles. If there’s a very popular article out there called “The 4-Minute Formula to Lose Weight Eating Chocolate”, bid for it. Your ad will be displayed every time the article gets syndicated on a site running AdSense.
• Do the same thing with book titles.

Campaign Structure and Settings

• Have separate campaigns for search and content networks.
• Have separate campaigns for broad and long-tail keywords. You’ll want to pay less for broad keywords.
• Use the Google AdWords Tracking code to track your campaign performance.
• Choose to show your ads more evenly so it’s easier to split-test them:
  
• Choose the right geo-location for your campaign. This might sound obvious but you’ll be surprised by how many people ship products to the US only but advertise all over the world. If you are a chiropractor who serves the Seattle area, have two campaigns; one targeted to Seattle with keywords like “chiropractor” and “pain treatment” and another one targeted to the whole world with keywords like “Seattle chiropractor” and “pain treatment in Seattle”.
• Choose “Accelerated ad delivery”. The Standard option spreads out your ads throughout the day. That’s not good because when prospects search for your ads, they might not be there. By choosing Accelerated Ad Delivery, your ads will show every time until you hit your daily budget. That way you know when you need to increase your budget.
  
• If you know that most people will buy your product between 10am and 5pm on week days, use ad scheduling.
  
• I set my budgets as high as possible. If a campaign is making me more than $1 for every $1 I invest, I want to invest as much money as Google is willing to take from me. If my campaign is not making me money, then I just kill it. There’s no reason to limit a campaign that is printing you money. Only limit your budget at the beginning, when you’re testing the campaign.
• The best way to figure out how much you should start bidding is by using the Google Traffic Estimator Tool. Enter different amounts and see how much traffic you can get for each amount. Run your numbers and figure out what is the perfect bid. If you pay more than “the perfect bid”, you’ll be paying too much and you won’t make a profit. If you pay less than “the perfect bid”, you’ll be leaving a lot of profitable traffic on the table. There’s a sweet spot in between and Google’s tool will help you find it.
• Bids should end in 2 and 7 ($0.12, $0.17, $0.22), etc.
• There are two factors that determine how much you’ll pay for each click: your maximum bid and the Quality Score. The QS is a grade that Google gives to each of your keywords based on how relevant your ads and landing pages are to that keyword. The higher your QS, the lower your cost per click. You need to have your keywords in your ads and the best way to do this is by grouping your keywords into ad groups and writing one ad for each ad group.
• Ideally, you should have one keyword per ad group. But, this is very time consuming. If you have a lot of time, go ahead and do it. If you don’t, this software can do it for you. All the pros use tools like SpeedPPC, but if you’re on a budget you can do it manually the first time. If you don’t have time nor money, you don’t absolutely need one ad for each keyword, but try to group your keywords in groups as small as possible; don’t just throw all your keywords into one ad group.
• Put the three match variations of each keyword into each ad group. For example, in the ad group “Costa Rica Vacations” you want to have the keywords “costa rica vacations” (use quotes for phrase match), [costa rica vacations] (use brackets for exact match) and costa rica vacations (don’t use any special characters for broad match). More on keyword matches here.

Creating Killer PPC Ads

• Include your keywords in your ads (on every line if possible) for higher QS and lower cost per click.
• Use your headline to grab attention, the first line to mention the top benefits of your products and the third line for a clear call to action. You can use the URL line for including keywords and calls to action as well.
  
• Use Digg.com to come out with killer headlines. Look for the headlines with the most diggs.
  
• Tie your ad copy to current events.
  
• Always split-test ads. Have two ads that look almost the same except for one element. Find a winner and then write a new ad to beat it. Keep doing this again and again to constantly improve your click-though rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CR). Start by testing the big stuff (offers, guarantees, marketing message) and move down to the small details. Changing one single word can double or triple your CTR, so test everything. This is a nice tool that allows you to calculate if you have enough data to make a good decision.
• Avoid Dynamic Keyword Insertion (DKI). This is a feature that includes your keywords in your ads. I used to love it but then I realized that it made some of my ads look really bad if the keywords people searched for weren’t relevant to the ads. Stick to one keyword and one ad per ad group and you’ll do great.
• Use numbers and special characters in your ad ($, #, ®, ©, ¼, &, etc.) They’re a great way to get people’s attention.
• Call your readers. For example, “hey you, skinny man” or “hey you, bankruptcy victim”.
• Use negative ads. For example, “Is Bob’s New Book a Scam? Don’t Buy Bob’s Book Before You Read This”
• Try news-style ads. For example, “62 Year-Old Woman Happy with Husband’s Performance”
• Try tease ads. For example, “The One Secret to Reduce Taxes by 87%. Get It Here for FREE”
• Ask questions: “Are You Sick of Spider Veins?”
• When you write ads for the Content Network, you don’t need to include your keywords. Your goal here is to grab people’s attention, so get controversial, use weird characters and get their attention in any way you can.

The Perfect Landing Page

• Use landing pages; don’t just send people to your home page. The goal of a landing page is to capture leads. After that, you’ll need to do a good job to monetize those leads.
• Avoid big headers and navigation menus. If you need a navigation menu, you can have it in the footer.
• Have an attention-grabbing headline.
• Use bullet points to get your point across.
• Have 1 clear call to action. Make it clear what you want people to do.
• This post will give you copywriting tips.
• This post will help you understand how the subconscious mind works.

How to Optimize Your PPC Campaign

• The best way to ensure you pay as little as possible for your clicks is by using negative keywords effectively. Read this post on PPC negative keywords.
• Eliminate keywords with no impressions after 7 days.
• Eliminate keywords with no clicks after 14 days.
• Eliminate keywords with low conversion rates after 30 days.
• Eliminate keywords with low CTR or write better ads to increase the CTR.
• Eliminate keywords that don’t appear on the first page or increase their bids so they make the first page.
• Use the Opportunities feature to get ideas on how to improve your campaign.
  
• Put keywords with a lot of traffic in their own ad groups and write special ads for each of them.
• Use Google Website Optimizer to test elements on your landing pages (headlines, calls to action, graphics, bullets, guarantees, etc.) This is the best way to increase your conversion rate.
• Pick your winning ads and write new ads to beat the winners.
• After 45 days, once your campaign has built a good record of high CTR and QS, lower your bids by $0.03 every couple of days and keep an eye on your traffic to make sure it doesn’t drop. Most of the time, once a campaign has a good record, you can lower your bids without losing any traffic.
• Look for the “Campaign Limited by Budget” message. If your budget is limiting your campaign, set it extremely high. If you absolutely need to have a budget, lower your bids so you get more traffic for the same amount. Keep lowering your bids until the”Campaign Limited by Budget” message disappears.
• Look for new traffic segments. For example, if you’re a chiropractor and a lot of people see you for their back pain, create a landing page addressing that issue and create a new ad group with back pain-related keywords and ads.
• Compete with yourself. If your campaign is doing great, create a new website (in a new domain) and get almost twice as many leads/sales.
• Buy several domains. Some domain names get 2-4 times as many clicks as others. Keyword-rich domains always win. Domains are only $9/year, so buy a bunch of them and see which one has the highest CTR.
• Don’t limit your campaign to Google. Yahoo!, Bing and Ask.com also have PPC programs. They’ll send you a lot less traffic, but the conversion rates are usually higher.

How To Ensure an Excellent Quality Score
QS is extremely important. If you have a high QS, your ads could get twice as many clicks as your competitor’s while you pay only half of what he’s paying. In fact, having a poor QS is the reason why most people lose money with PPC, so pay attention and follow these guidelines:

• Have links to a contact us page and a privacy policy page on your landing page.
• Include your keywords in your ads as much as you can. This is where having one ad per keyword makes a lot of sense.
• Include your keywords in your landing pages, but don’t overdo it.
• SEO factors on your landing page are very important. Have a relevant page title, H1 tag, meta description and meta keywords.
• There must be a connection between your ad and your landing page. If your ad promises a downloadable report and your landing page tries to sell a widget, you’ll be in trouble. You can offer whatever you want, just be upfront about it in your ad.
• Avoid “trouble” words like “offer”, “guarantee”, “buy now”, etc. Put these words in images and call the images 1.jpg, 2.gif, etc. Don’t put the trouble words in the images alt tags either.
• For all those images that don’t contain any of the “forbidden” words, use descriptive alt tags.
• If you’re going after very different markets (such as “beach vacations in Costa Rica” and “ski holidays in Colorado”), have individual landing pages for each of your markets so you can keep your QS high.

I hope you guys enjoy this post. It took me a long time to put it together but it was a lot of fun.

TweetMeme
TweetMeme is a great way to use social proof on your blog. It shows how many people re-tweeted your post.

Sexy Bookmarks
In my opinion, the best way to get people to share your posts on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Digg and 35 other social networking and social bookmarking sites.

Add to Any
A great way to allow people to subscribe to your blog via email or RSS.

ShareThis
This is one of the most popular WP plugins out there. It allows your readers to share your content via email, Facebook, Twitter and social bookmarking sites. Its functionalities overlap with those of Sexy Bookmarks but I don’t see why you can’t have both, as some people might prefer one over the other. Another alternative is Sociable. They all do the same thing; it’s just a matter of which one looks better and is more intuitive to use (and I think Sexy Bookmarks wins those two battles).

DandyID Services
I absolutely love this plugin. It places a box in the sidebar with links to all your social media profiles (YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and 330 more). There’s no better way to get followers. Just enter your used IDs for each social network and DandyID Services does the rest. Social Profilr is a nice alternative that only supports the 14 biggest networks (which should be more than enough for most people) and it also allows you to put a personalized message for each network, such as “Follow Me on Twitter!” and “Check Out My Crazy YouTube Videos”.

PingPressFM
I don’t know what I’d do without Ping.fm. Seriously, they’ve saved me hundreds of hours this year. This is about the coolest service ever. Ping.fm sends updates to all your social networks at once so you don’t have to do it one at a time. PingPressFM integrates with your blog so every time you add a new post it updates Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and over 50 other social networks. It couldn’t be any cooler.

LifeStream
LifeStream is a great way to show your blog readers your activity in social media sites. It shows what you tweeted, what you posted to Facebook, the videos you uploaded to YouTube, the pages your bookmarked on Delicious and a lot more.

Interactive Video Plugin
This plugin goes beyond video embedding. You can record your videos on the fly, upload them or import them. It even allows you to edit your videos. If you do a lot of vblogging (video blogging), this plugin is a must.

Meet Your Commenters
Every time someone posts a comment to your blog, this plugin searches through the social networks so you can follow your commenters on Twitter, friend them on Facebook, connect on LinkedIn, etc.

If you enjoyed this article, please share it!

Tactic #1: Find Out Who’s Talking About You and Your Product and Engage in the Conversation

1. Set up BuzzStream with your name and keywords (e.g. “back pain”, “natural healing”, etc.)
2. You’ll get alerts every time someone talks about you or the stuff you offer.
3. Go there and engage in the conversation.

This tactic rocks! You find people who need what you have and help them. That’s what Social Media Marketing is all about.

BuzzStream is a paid tool ($49/month). If you want a free alternative, use Google Alerts, but you won’t get the same great results.

Tactic #2: Share Someone Else’s Content
Most people freak out over Social Media Marketing because they don’t have the time to write 100 articles and shoot 100 videos. It’s OK. Be a “resource sharer”. Those resources don’t need to be yours. If you come across videos and articles that your audience might find useful, share that stuff with them.

Tactic #3: Schedule Your Posts
Facebook and Twitter use timelines. The rest of the networks are moving to that kind of layout too. In case you don’t know what a timeline is, this is the short definition: a list of posts from the members of your network displayed in chronological order (from newer posts to older ones).

If you tweet 10 times between 2pm and 3pm, someone who follows a lot of people might not see your tweets if he checks his Twitter profile at 5pm, because many of his friends will post stuff after you, moving your posts down.

This is what you can do to prevent this from happening: schedule your posts. If you have 50 resources you want to share, schedule them to get posted every hour or two. HootSuite.com allows you to do this.

If you enjoyed this post, please tweet it; your friends will thank you for it.

One of the most common mistakes I see when I review websites is weak calls to action. Actually, I spent the whole morning going through some of the calls to actions on our clients’ websites and I re-wrote them. Here is what I did for them:

Takeaways:

• The word “Get” rocks!
• Get as specific as you can. Call to actions need to explain what people will get if they decide to take action. “Start My FREE Trial” is a great example of a specific call to action.
• Move away from standard and boring calls to action. Nobody wants to subscribe to anything. People hate subscribing (but they love being “the first one to know”).
• Some power words: free, get, instant, easy, fast, simple, now.
• The word “now” increases conversion rate by about 25% in average.
• The word “FREE”, when capitalized, converts 86% better than its small caps counterpart.
• Capitalizing the first letter of each word increases conversion rates by about 22% in average.

Just so you see that I practice what I preach, here’s my call to action: Please Tweet this Post (Your Followers Will Thank You).

This reminds me of one last thing: giving a reason WHY people should to do what you ask them to drastically increases conversion rates. Explain why they’ll benefit from taking action.

BTW, we added a new WordPress plugin that I absolutely love. It’s called Sexy Bookmarks and it’s awesome to allow your readers to share your content. Play with it (it’s right below this sentence) and please share this post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. Let me know if it works OK. Thank you!

About 82% of all startups fail within their first 5 years and I have a theory about why this happens:

• Most business owners think they know their business models when they’re starting new companies, but they don’t.
• They think they know what benefits people are more interested in (for example, they end up crafting their marketing messages around their great prices and premium location when people only care about selection and customer service).
• They think they know what marketing channels are the best to reach their audiences (for example, they end up advertising in the local newspaper classifieds and doing Social Media Marketing when the best way to reach their audience is local PPC marketing and strategic alliances with local businesses).
• They think they have the right product to sell (and they end up offering red circles when there’s no demand for that but high demand for blue squares).
• By doing this, BUSINESSES RUN OUT OF MONEY BEFORE HAVING ENOUGH TIME TO FIGURE OUT THEIR BUSINESS MODELS.

So, What Should a Smart Entrepreneur Do?
First of all, you need to be humble. Paraphrasing Socrates, “All I know is that I know nothing” is the right approach to starting a new business. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll need to make assumptions in order to plan, but keep your eyes open, listen to your market and correct the course as you go. Especially in the beginning.

Tip #1: Don’t Choose Your Business, Let the Market Choose It For You
I call the first stage of startups “discovery”, because it’s when you’re trying to figure out what the market wants. People spend money on stuff every day. They’re buying that stuff from you or from someone else. Learn what they want and give it to them. It really is THAT easy.

Tip #2: Don’t Put All Your Eggs in One Basket
When you think you know your business you’ll invest almost all your money buying red circles to sell to your customers and you’ll advertise your great prices in the classifieds. But your audience doesn’t read the classifieds. And, those people that do read them don’t care so much about price as they care about selection. Even if you have a large selection, they want a blue square, not a red circle!

The solution is to realize that at the beginning, you’re not trying to be profitable, you’re trying to find a viable business. You need to test different things with as little money and time as possible. Time is a very important factor because you have fixed costs and the longer it takes for you to discover your business model, the higher your chances of running out of money are.

These are some examples of smart things you can do as a startup owner:

• Instead of buying 100 red circles, buy 25 of them and 25 blue squares, 25 yellow rectangles and 25 green triangles. See which one sells best and get rid of all the others.
• Instead of getting a big ad in the classifieds, get a tiny one. Start a PPC campaign with $50. Do some Social Media Marketing. And, network with a few local business owners. Figure out what sends you the most business and take that marketing approach to the next level.
• Try different approaches in your marketing materials. Focus on your large selection first , outstanding customer service second and premium location third. See what generates more sales. When people come to your store and buy, ask them “would you mind my asking why you decided to do business with us?”

Tip #3: Watch Every Penny
When you’re starting a new business one of two things will happen:

• You’ll discover a profitable business before you run out of money. In this case, you’ll succeed.
• You’ll run out of money before you find a profitable business.

So, it’s important that:

• You test the business variables with as little money as possible.
• You survive for as long as possible while you’re trying to discover your business model. The faster you spend your money, the less time you’ll have to find a viable business. So, think twice before buying that fancy chair or getting expensive business cards.

What do you guys think? I haven’t heard this theory anywhere else and I’m interested to know if you agree with this or not. Please share your thoughts too.

Know the Person You’re Writing To
Who is she? How old is she? Is she married? How many kids does she have? What kind of personality does she have? Is she happy? What is her average day like? What does she have for breakfast?…

You can’t write an effective sales letter unless you know who you’re writing it to.

Talk to Your Salespeople
Talk to the salespeople and customer service staff at your company. What do people complain about? What are the most common objections your salespeople get from prospects?

Go to the Forums
Go to online forums and see what people are saying. What questions are they asking? What words are they using to describe their pain?

Risk-Reversal Tactics
Make a guarantee so good that even if your product doesn’t work your customer ends up winning. You could do a 110% money back guarantee + free return shipping, or maybe your customers get to keep part of your kit for having tried your product.

Test the Price
You never know how much to charge until you test it. If you’re charging too much or too little, you’re leaving money on the table. Use prices ending in 7 ($17, $27, $39.97). To test prices, start low and increase them from there. When the total revenues decrease, go back to the price that worked best.

Up-Sell and Cross-Sell
Up-selling is upgrading an order (as in “get the Premium version for $5 more”) and cross-selling is offering related items (if you sold a digital camera, sell them a case and extra batteries).

Use Benefits, Not Features
A feature is a characteristic of a product; a benefit is what that feature does for your customer. For example:

- This camera has a 10x digital zoom (feature), which will allow you to take close-up photos of small objects from a block away (benefit).

Get Specific
Specific data is more believable than general data. Don’t say “studies show that people taking this pill lose a lot of weight”; say “a study conducted in 2008 by ABC Labs Inc. shows that people lost an average of 7.32 lbs. in 8 days from taking this pill”. Don’t make stuff up though! Back up your data; show evidence.

Use Scarcity
Tell people why they need to take action NOW!

Use Social Proof to Overcome Objections
Find out what the most common objections are and find testimonials, case studies and expert reviews to overcome those objections. For example, if one of the most common objections people have is that if your product doesn’t work they won’t get a refund, put testimonials on your site from people who got fast refunds.

Use “Conversational Style” Copy
Write as you talk. Persuade people with strong arguments, not silly “corporate copy”.

Write Positive Copy
Keep a positive tone across your copy. For example, if you sell an acne treatment cream, talk about how beautiful your customer’s skin is going to look; don’t focus on how ugly it is now. Use positive photos too.

The Headline is Everything
If you can’t engage people with your headline, you’re out. That’s why top copywriters write about 50-100 headlines before picking a winner. This is my formula for writing headlines:

• I write a headline that includes the 3 main benefits of my product (e.g. “All the Cars in One Place, the Lowest Prices in Town and FREE Lifetime Guarantee”)
• I write a “How to” headline (e.g. “How to Get Rid of Acne in 6 Weeks Using Stuff You Already Have in Your Own Kitchen”)
• I write a qualifier headline (e.g. “If Your Car Insurance is from Geico, This Letter Is for You”)
• I write a “news” headline (e.g. “82-Year-Old Dutch Woman Accidentally Discovers Acne Cure While Cooking Lunch for Her Grandson”)
• I go to my swipe file and adapt some of the 100+ headlines I have there to my own products. Start putting together your own swipe file; every time you come across a great headline that gets you to read the rest of the copy, save it.
• I write 50 headlines combining all the different tactics I wrote before
• I choose 4 and split-test them
• I find a winner
• I write variations of that headline to try to beat it. It’s a fun game and some headlines can increase conversions by over 100%.

First Paragraph
In the first paragraph you need to say who you are and why you’re writing. “Credentialize” yourself (i.e. tell them why they need to listen to you and believe what you’re saying).

Use Bullets
They’re easy to read and a great way to highlight your main benefits. There are two different kinds of bullets:

• Open: this is when you give away the “secret”. For example: Why using cucumber oil can actually make your acne worse.
• Blind: this is when you tease your reader but don’t give away the secret. For example: The one thing you can get for free from your car mechanic, rub it on your nose, and never again get a pimple there.

You need a mix of open and blind bullets. Blind bullets tease your readers and make them want more; open bullets give away some of the information, which gets people to think “Wow! If this is what this guy’s giving away for free, imagine how great the paid stuff will be!”

Close the Deal
Don’t forget to ask for the order. Have a call to action in your sales letter. If you don’t ask people to do something, they won’t do anything.

P.S.
Use a P.S. at the end of your sales letter to summarize your offer and tell your readers why even if your product doesn’t work at all they’ll still come up on top.

Thank You Page
Use your order confirmation page to reinforce the fact that they made a great decision, congratulate them on taking action and let them know how to reach you if they want to.

Get 2 People to Read Your Copy Out Loud
This will help you identify the parts where your copy doesn’t flow so well.

Follow a Logical Path
Make sure that your sales letter flows smoothly from beginning to end and that each link of the chain is connected with the links that come right after and right before it.

Don’t Go Out of Your Way to Get Your Reader to Like You
Don’t try to be funny, charming or clever. Just say what you’re about to say, then say it and finally tell them what you told them. That’s it.

Avoid Adjectives
Use strong verbs and power words instead. These are some of my favorite power words:

You, satisfied, respected, knowledgeable, humiliate, outraged, pissed off, crave, squeeze, steal, stumble, shock, cured, astonished, killer, miracle, suffocate, liar, bribe, lure, rocked, infested, bandit, abandon, slaughter, tickle, inflame, coax, tease, blast, ridicule, slay, boost, implode, anger, wealthy, ecstasy, heaven, delighted.

Use Captions
Captions are those strings of text that go under images. They almost always get read, so make the most out of them.

Make Your Copy Easy to Read
Most people won’t read all your copy; they’ll skim through it. These are some tips to make your copy “skimmable”:

• Use short sentences
• Use short paragraphs
• Use bullet points
• Write at a 5th grade level
• Use simple words

Don’t Preach the Choir
Don’t tell people about their problems; they know them better than you do. Just give them a solution. This is an example of copy that preaches the choir in the acne market:

“I know how you feel. Acne is awful. Waking up every day and having to walk around with an acne face is no fun.”

What’s the point of writing something like this? People that suffer acne already know it’s awful and no fun. They just want you to help them get rid of it.

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Last year I was skiing in Aspen with some friends who live there and have been on skis since they were 2 years old. One of them said “let’s go do some double-backflips”. I thought he was kidding… He was not.

So we all went and I saw them performing these amazing double-backflips. They were all waiting for me. It was my turn and I was completely terrified. My heart was beating so hard it almost broke my ribs. But my friends starting calling me “chicken” (yes, they knew how to push my buttons) so I decided to go for it. I love challenges and this was a big one.

As you can imagine, I didn’t land it and I hit my back so hard I could barely breath. Luckily, I didn’t break anything, but a month later my back was still in pain.

I started looking for doctors and found one ad in the newspaper that caught my eye:

Ski-Related Back Injury?
I’ll make your pain go away in 3 weeks or you pay nothing.

“Wow!” I thought. This person read my mind. The guarantee was great, but the fact that she was treating back pain caused by ski wrecks was even more impressive. IT WAS LIKE SHE WROTE THE AD FOR ME!

There were other ads in the newspaper from doctors that promised to make pain disappear, but nobody talked about back injuries, let alone ski-related back injuries. Who do you think I called?

6 Reasons Why You Want to Position Yourself as a Specialist:

Higher Perceived Value
When you’re the guy “who does the taxes for small business owners in the health industry”, your services have a much higher perceived value than those from “the tax guy who does the taxes”.

You Can Charge More
I was more than happy to pay a premium for my back pain specialist. I paid about 30% more than the average doctor visit and it seemed like a bargain!

There’s Less Competition (or No Competition at All)
Do you know of another doctor specialized in back pain caused by ski injuries? If I ever hurt my back again, there’s no other doctor I’d consider going.

It’s Easier to Find Your Target Market
My doctor was born in Chicago, but there’s no much skiing there. She found a market that is all about skiing (Aspen) and gave them a solution to a problem they had. Smart, huh? When you find a niche market, finding your audience is a piece of cake.

It’s Easier to Push Your Customers’ Hot Buttons
When you find a niche market, you can tailor your marketing message to say exactly what your market wants to hear.

It’s Cheaper to Do Marketing
My doctor does just two things for marketing: the newspaper ad and a sign on the Aspen’s hospital billboard. That’s it. When people get hurt, they go to the hospital. While they wait, they’re exposed to the billboard. They’re bored and they read the sign. Genius!

A Great Idea
If you’re thinking “this is a great idea, but I don’t want to risk leaving out 90% of the market”, I have a solution for you. Split your business and target different niches separately. This is something we did for one of the companies I’m involved in:

• The company offers golf tours for seniors, field hockey tours for women and rugby tours for men (all in New Zealand)
• They had everything under one website
• When I started helping them with their marketing, we created three websites (one for each niche)
• The three markets are very different and they all need different marketing approaches, so we wrote new copy for each of the three niches
• Would you rather go on a golf tour to New Zealand with a company that specializes in golf tours to New Zealand or with a company that does all different kinds of tours and happens to do golf tours too?
• Since we started going after each of the three niches separately, the inquiries increased by about 250%

This is why I love building email lists: they’re assets. They’re always mine. If Google decides to change its algorithms and screw my rankings, I’ll still have my email list. If Google decides to start charging me $10 per click for my Pay per Click campaign, I’ll still have my email list. Nobody can take that away from me. And, I don’t know about you, but it makes me a little nervous when one of my businesses depends too much on one client, vendor or service provider (*cough* Google *cough*).

The beauty of email marketing is that if you build a great relationship with your list and they see value in the emails you send them, they’ll love you, respect you and do what you suggest they do. That’s a very smart way to build a strong business.

Before I tell you how you can build a killer (and huge) email list in no time, there’s a disclaimer: I failed miserably for 2 years trying to build a big list myself. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. That is, until I discovered what I’m about to share with you. I’ve perfected this formula over the last 5 years and I can tell you that this technique works in any market if you follow all the steps.

Step 1. Create the Content
You’ll need to give people something in exchange for their email addresses. These are my favorite bribes (in order of preference):

• Reports
• Videos
• Tools

Make the reports short (3-7 pages) and address one specific topic. For example, if you’re in the dating industry, instead of “All the Secrets for Successful Online Dating”, create reports like:

• The One Thing Women Want to Hear from Men on Online Dating Sites
• Safe Online Dating: How to Make Sure The Guy You’re About to Date Isn’t a Pervert

We did a lot of testing on this, and reports that cover specific topics have a much better response than general reports. Plus, this allows you to create a lot of reports around your topic.

Remember to make the reports short. Most people feel like “if it isn’t long, it isn’t good”. This it nonsense. Just make it short and right to the point.

The same advice applies for videos. Make them short (1-3 minutes) and cover a very specific topic.Tools are a little bit more expensive but not nearly as expensive as you might think. You can get someone on Elance.com or Guru.com to create a tool for you for less than $100. These are some tool ideas:

• Real estate industry: mortgage payment calculators
• Weight loss industry: calories calculator for different foods
• Legal industry: a tool that helps you figure out how much you should sue someone for

You get the idea.

There are two ways to get email addresses from a tool:

• Send results by email (this gives you an excuse to gather email addresses)
• Free and premium versions of the tool (the free one doesn’t require registration but the premium one does)

Make sure people don’t need to register before using the tool or that will kill your conversion rates.

2. Create a Landing Page
You’ll need a page where people can download your free report (or videos or tool) from. Two tips:

• What you ask people to do should involve as little commitment as possible (keep forms as short as you can [email address only is best], one-step registration, don’t require email confirmation, don’t ask for money, etc.)
• Although your stuff is free, it doesn’t mean you don’t need to sell it. You’re asking people to invest time reading your report, watching your video or using your tool. You need to give them a reason to do it. Use an attention-grabbing headline (include the word FREE in it) and use bullet-points to explain the benefits of opting in. Have an obvious and huge call to action and arrows pointing to it. There should be no doubt about what you want them to do.

Step 3. Promote Your Landing Page
These are some of the best ways you can drive people to your landing page:

• Your contacts: email your entire address book and ask them to spread the word for you. Give them a great reason to do it.
• Social Media Marketing: post to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
• Forums: post to the most influential forums in your industry
• Blogs: approach the most respected bloggers in your market, tell them about your free report and ask them if they’re willing to blog or email their lists about it. In most cases, you’ll need to go one step further: create an additional report and give it to the bloggers for them to give it away to their readers. You won’t get any email address in exchange for this report, but here’s a sweet trick: at the end of that report, mention that you have another great report and tell them how to get it. Most bloggers will be happy to give their readers a free report with no strings attached. Some “famous” bloggers will request the report to be exclusive for them. If the blog has a lot of traffic (check the number of comments, Compete.com or Alexa.com to find out) it’s probably worth it.
• Groups: use Facebook Groups, LinkedIn Groups, Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups to find communities built around your market and let these people know about your content.

Step 4. Treat Your List (Very, Very) Well
Respect them, send them great content and please don’t spam them all the time with your specials. A good rule of thumb is 95% content and 5% promotional stuff.

How to Know if Something Went Wrong

• Not a lot of people came to your landing page? Three things might be the cause of this: you chose a horrible title for your report/video/tool, the topic isn’t interesting enough and/or you haven’t done a great job promoting your content (step 3 of this formula).
• A lot of people visited your landing page but 25% or less opted-in? You need to work on your copy. Read this book or hire a professional copywriter.

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