My friend and Social Media Marketing expert Catherine Daar sent me two great social media tools that I wanted to share with you.

KnowEm
Don’t let other people user your name in social media sites! This service allows you to reserve your name so no one else can take it.

SocialMention
Are people saying bad things about you and your company? Use this amazing tool to find out. You can set up alerts and get a widget for your blog or site. I love SocialMention!

How to Create a Killer Landing Page
This is an article that I wrote for StartupNation where I share tips for creating effective landing pages.

A few years a friend of mine and I were driving to my tennis club and I saw a huge hair recovery ad on a building. My friend is going bald, so I said, “Look, you should try that.”  He replied, “No, that doesn’t work.”  I asked him if he had tried it and he said “No,”  but it “looked like BS.”

That’s when it clicked for me. I felt that I finally understood marketing. My friend was going bald; he would’ve given anything to get his hair back and money is not an issue for him. The only reason that was stopping him from taking the first step was skepticism.

“Interesting!”  I thought. “If skepticism is the problem, then what is the solution?”  I realized that there are two things your marketing message needs to accomplish in order for you to succeed:

1. You Need to Provide PROOF that Your Product Works. By proof I don’t mean an anonymous testimonial from John A., NYC (which, of course, doesn’t include a photo). By proof I mean dozens of “before and after” shots, several video testimonials with full names and city, bank account statements showing how much money you made, proof of legal cases you won, etc. Don’t just TELL people you’re good. SHOW them.
2. Your Customer Needs to Come Out on Top Even If Your Product Doesn’t Work. If you sell pink wigs and you offer a 100% money back guarantee, it’s not enough. If people don’t like your wigs, they’ll have spent time ordering online and they’ll have to spend time going to the post office to send it back. Who’s going to pay her for that time? And what about the disappointment of getting something that doesn’t meet her expectations? How are you going to compensate her for it? In this case, I’d offer a 120% money back guarantee AND YOU GET TO KEEP THE WIG. If your product is a high-ticket item, offer a 110% money back guarantee, let people keep part of the package (like a pillow if they bought a mattress) and you should pay for the return shipping. Your prospects should be able to answer yes to this question: “If I don’t like this, will I end up better than I was before this transaction?”

For all those who are concerned about losing a lot of money by offering an outrageous guarantee, I have two things to say:

• Some people WILL rip you off. But, if your refunds go up by 25% and your sales by 220%, doesn’t this make sense? (These are actual numbers gathered by one of my favorite direct response marketers.)
• If you think too many people will ask for a refund based on your product quality, then you should consider offering a better product or switch to a different industry. You’re not getting anywhere with a mediocre product.

Think about this:

• If your customer wins whether or not your product works…

…and…

• You put that message in front of the right audience…

…then you have a winner marketing strategy.

Last month I recommended this idea to a client and she made a killing with it. I figured I’d share it with you.

As you already know, getting business from your existing clients is a lot more effective than getting new clients. One of the best way of capitalizing your existing clients is asking for referrals. The only problem with asking for referrals is that you’re ASKING for something and I’m a big fan of GIVING instead of asking.

There is a very sneaky way to ask for referrals without having to ask. This is how it works.

1. Give your current clients gift cards. They can be $200, one free month or whatever you want, but make sure they offer something of value. It has to be something free, not a free upgrade. Also, using a dollar amount is much better than offering a discount percentage. $200 has real value; 50% off the first month doesn’t have as much value.
2. Spend some money to get nice gift cards; a piece of paper with a dollar amount on it won’t do it.
3. Don’t give your clients 20 gift cards; give them two or three. Play the scarcity card here. If you give them too many, they’ll feel they don’t have value.
4. Give your clients a good reason to give them the gift cards. It could be because they’ve been with you one year, because they spent more than $x, whatever… just make sure it looks like you’re giving them something, not asking them to promote your company.
5. Your clients will give these gift cards to their friends and they’ll probably use some of these themselves.

This is a WIN-WIN-WIN situation. Your client wins because people like giving gifts to their friends, their friends win because they’re getting a gift and you win because you’re getting new clients.

ScribeSEO
If you don’t know anything about SEO but want to create SEO-friendly content, this WordPress tool will change your life.

Gist
This is one of the coolest tools I’ve seen in a long time. Social Media Marketing is all about networking with people. Effective networking requires you to know the people you talk to. What if a tool could check LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and 10 more sources and pull up information about that person you’re about to email? Then you could say, “Hi Sarah, how’s your daughter doing? Has she recovered from the cold she had last week?” Can you think of a better way to wow people? Gist rocks!

Jing
Do you want to take advantage of video marketing but are too shy to perform in front of a camera? No problem! You can use screen-capture software to create videos. You can use PowerPoint and your own voice to put together killer presentations. Or, you can do a demo of a tool or a piece of software.

Most screen-capture programs charge over $200 but Jing is free.

I spend several hours a week reading over 100 Internet marketing blogs. These are my 10 favorite ones.

1. Copyblogger. The best copywriting blog ever.
2. Search Engine Watch. A great way to be updated on what’s going on in the search engines world.
3. Top Rank Blog. Lee Odden is one of my favorite people and a real social media genius.
4. Search Engine Guide. Another great source for online marketing news.
5. SEOmoz. This one is my favorite. I can’t believe all the great insight they give away for free.
6. Search Engine Journal. Some of the most clever and practical blog posts I’ve read are here.
7. HubSpot. Fantastic blog; full of practical advice.
8. Mashable Social Media Blog. A great way to be up-to-date in the social media world.
9. Chris Bogan’s Blog. Chris is one of the most knowledgeable social media experts out there.
10. Yoast. Great blog on SEO, SMM and technology.

Honorable mentions:

• Dosh Dosh. This blog will make you re-think the way you do marketing and business.
• ProBlogger. If you’re a professional blogger, subscribing to this one is a must.
• Daily Blog Tips. Great blog on marketing and entrepreneurship.
• SEO Book Blog. Aaron Wall is one of the most recognized SEO experts in the industry.

Last night a friend of mine asked me “what are the top 10 Internet marketing books?” I asked her to give me a few minutes to think about it and I finally emailed her this list.

Trust Agents
This book is the social media marketing bible.

Crush It!
Gary Vaynerchuk teaches you how you can make money doing what you love. A must read.

Inbound Marketing
A very smart approach to online marketing, website planning and social media.


Duct Tape Marketing
This book will give you dozens of great marketing ideas for your business.


The AdWeek Copywriting Handbook
Copywriting is the most important marketing skill and this is the best copywriting book I’ve ever read. Enough said.

Guerrilla Marketing
Trying to grow a company on a shoestring budget? This book is for you.

Call to Action
This book will show you how you can transform your website into an effective marketing tool.

Don’t Make Me Think
Do you want to make an easy-to-navigate and intuitive website? You gotta read Steve Krug’s book!

The Expert’s Edge
A very good read that will teach you how you can position yourself as the #1 expert in your market.

Changing the Channel
This book talks about the importance of having multiple marketing channels and gives you a lot of great marketing ideas.

We do a lot of online advertising and we’ve found this is the best way to go about it.

Step #1: Test A LOT of Sites
When it comes to online advertising, it’s impossible to guess what websites are going to perform best. There’s only one thing you can do: test a lot of them. I use these networks:

• Google AdWords Managed Placements (you get to choose the websites where your ads get displayed).
• Google AdWords Content Network (Google shows your ads on pages that are related to them).
• AdBrite (the biggest ad marketplace on the web).

Step #2: Test Everything
These are some of the things you need to test:

• Websites (to see what sites work and which ones don’t).
• Text vs. image ads.
• Different sizes for image ads.
• Different headlines and calls to action.
• Different marketing approaches.

The keys to effective testing:

• Define your goal. Your goal should be conversions, not clicks or impressions.
• Split-test the same kind of traffic. Don’t show Sunday traffic one ad and Monday traffic a different ad. Sunday traffic is different from Monday traffic. The same concept applies for all the other variables. Make sure that when you run split tests you show both ads to similar audiences.
• Achieve statistical significance. This is a fancy term that means “you need enough data to be confident that the results you’re getting are accurate”.
• Be very organized and document everything. If your experiments are a mess, the outcome will be an even bigger mess.

Step #3: From CPC to CPM
When you get started, you’ll be using the cost-per-click (CPC) model. That’s a good way to understand what websites work and which ones don’t. Once you get a good idea of what websites are losing you money, get rid of them as fast as possible.

The next step is very important so pay attention. You’ll start using the CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions) model for those websites that worked for you in the past. You’ll get a lot more clicks and will pay less by using CPM instead of CPC. You can manage this through your AdWords and AdBrite accounts.

Step #4: Cut Out the Middle Man
Advertising networks only pay the publishers about 30%-50% of what they get from you. If you pay $2 for 1,000 impressions, the publisher will get anywhere from $0.60 to $1; the network will keep the rest. This is what you should do:

• Contact the publisher directly and negotiate a CPM price. Offer them 60% of what you’re currently paying. That will work out better for them and you.

Step #5: From CPM to Flat Fee
Take a list of those sites that are performing great and approach their webmasters. Negotiate a flat fee instead of CPM. They prefer this anyway and you can save a lot of money this way. Plus, your ads can be on their sites 24/7 instead of on/off. You won’t need to share the space with other advertisers anymore.

Step #6: From Flat Fee to CPA/Affiliate
Cost-per-action (CPA) marketing and affiliate marketing are great ways to advertise your products because your publishers will only get paid when visitors complete a goal on your site. The goal could be to submit a contact form, proposal request, download a free report, buy a product, etc.

When you get your publishers to become your affiliates, they’ll be a lot more motivated to make your offer work. They’ll be more likely to email their lists about your offer, advertise it in their newsletters and give your banners top visibility.

When you offer your publishers to become affiliates, tell them it’s on a trial basis and if they don’t make more money that way, you can always switch back to the flat fee model. Show them there’s nothing for them to lose and they’ll be happy to give it a try.

If you’ve been paying attention to my blog, you know that my favorite word is leverage. One of the best ways to use leverage is by taking advantage of other people’s networks. Strategic alliances are one of the best ways to grow your business fast and strong. This is how the whole process works.

Step 1: Who Buys Your Stuff?
I like using examples to make things easy to understand, so here I go:

Step 2: What Else Do Those People Buy?

Step 3: Create Strategic Alliances with Companies that Sell to Your Customers

• Work out deals with Harley Davidson dealerships so when the motorcycles they sell break, they buy parts from you. Work out deals with companies that sell Harley Davidson t-shirts so they give their buyers a $50 gift card they can use to buy your Harley Davidson parts. The other company wins because they’re giving their buyers something of value, the customer wins because he’s getting a gift card and you win because you’ll be getting business from them.
• Work out a deal with a local web design firm so they offer a free 1-hour consultation with you to their clients. In return, email your contacts and let them know this web design agency does great websites and that your friends can get a 10% discount by mentioning your name. You can do the same thing with local attorneys and CPAs.
• Work out a deal with your local coffee store so they give your brochure to people that buy Red Bulls and coffee all the time. In return, hold your company meetings at the coffee store and take some of your clients there (and don’t be cheap and order the less expensive coffee they have!)
• It’s all about building mutually-beneficial relationships. Now get out there, start working out deals and see your company grow!

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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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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