The Transcript

Lesson 10: Tech Components of This Email Marketing Strategy

Voiceover: Welcome to “Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing,” a free audio course presented by Unemployable with Brian Clark. For the full experience, head over to Unemployable.com and sign up for the Unemployable email newsletter, the week’s top resources for independent businesspeople, personally handcrafted by serial entrepreneur and content marketing pioneer, Brian Clark. That’s Unemployable.com.

Brian Clark: Hey there and welcome back to our tenth and final lesson of how to get more clients with smarter email marketing. I’m Brian Clark and as promised this is the technical lesson that will close out the course.

Of course you’ve heard me talk throughout about our Rainmaker Platform that we use to do all of this stuff. As promised, I’m going to show you how to do it with WordPress. I did take some time to get recommendations from very smart people who are still active with WordPress, because over the last two years, I only have one site left on WordPress, so I wanted to make sure I had the best current recommendations from people who know.

The Technical Components Needed to Execute This Email Marketing Strategy

Essentially the elements you need to execute on everything I’ve laid out for you is this:

• A mobile-responsive website; mobile traffic is too big to not have a site that adapts to whatever device is viewing the site.
• You’re going to need web hosting; in the case of WordPress, you’re going to want hosting that is specifically geared towards WordPress because of the way the open-source software works.
• You’re going to need powerful specialized landing pages or for your crucial moments when you ask people to take action.
• You need a membership gateway. Now this is basically a gated content strategy where you’re not charging money for access to the content, but you are asking for registration, which in turn brings the email address.
• You’re also going to need an online course builder or learning management system. Again, plenty of people sell online courses; in this case we’re doing content marketing with something that’s worth paying for. The whole idea behind this very persuasive course is for lead generation, but of course we’re leading with true value for the people who register for it.
• You’re going to need an email marketing service that supports tagging for segmentation and suppression. I covered a lot of the elements of this in the earlier lesson.
• Then finally you’re going to need marketing automation so that you can program certain events to occur based on certain interests, actions, and other things that you’re able to glean about the people who are taking your course.

Again, the Rainmaker Platform does all this; it does a lot more, including keyword research, SEO, content optimization, podcasting tools, on and on and on. I promised that I’m not going to make this into another pitch for the Rainmaker Platform. Do take a look at it and see the value that you get at rainmakerplatform.com.

The true strength here is one integrated platform that marries website automation and email in a way that’s integrated, one login, one support contact, not 10. No maintenance, a constantly improving platform that we’re making better every single month, and the peace of mind that comes with not worrying that a plugin is going to go out of date, you’re going to get hacked, and it’s going to be a big disaster. That s rainmakerplatform.com. Take the free trial.

On WordPress, like I said, I did ask some people what their recommendations were so I could get a consensus on it and to make sure that this stays up to date because things do change with plugins and themes and all of that kind of stuff. Things happen, things fall out of flavor, new products come out that are better. I’ve created a page at unemployable.com/email. That’s unemployable.com/email. I will keep that current with my list of recommendations, but you can head over there right now and see what the current state of the art is for building a WordPress site that adds all of these elements. Everything from design frameworks to themes, to the plugins you need to make these things happen. That s unemployable.com/email. I’ll see you over there.

I hope you’ve appreciated the course; I’ve enjoyed sharing these ideas with you. We can do more of this in the future, hopefully on different topics. For now, thank you for listening and keep going.

The Transcript

Lesson 9: Five Copywriting Tips for Email Marketing

Voiceover: Welcome to “Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing,” a free audio course presented by Unemployable with Brian Clark. For the full experience, head over to Unemployable.com and sign up for the Unemployable email newsletter, the week’s top resources for independent businesspeople, personally handcrafted by serial entrepreneur and content marketing pioneer, Brian Clark. That’s Unemployable.com.

Brian Clark: Hello there, and welcome back to the course. Today, we’ll talk about five copywriting tips. We’re implementing this email marketing strategy to get more clients — that we’ve been talking about over the last several lessons. The key point there, I think is, strategy.

Study Copywriting

Obviously, in this one lesson I can’t give you all the tactical copywriting knowledge that you need to implement the various copy that needs to be used in landing pages, the content in articles, the email messages themselves. I’m going to give you some tactical advice in this, but my first point is that you should study copywriting.

Now, don’t think that I’m telling you that I want you to write all your own copy. In fact, as we’ll see in a little bit, unless writing is your main thing I think you should outsource your copy because it will pay for itself. Even if you are a copywriter, you may want to outsource it. We’ll talk about that in a second.

It always cracks me up when I see an article that says something like, “5 Psychological Tricks That Will Improve Your Copywriting.” Guess what? Every aspect of copywriting is psychological. The psychology of people is what you’re dealing with when you write copy. You’re trying to communicate. You’re trying to engage. You’re trying to persuade.

I firmly believe that studying copy was one of the most valuable things I’ve done in my career. That would be true if I never started Copyblogger — I want to make that very clear — because copywriting makes you always keep front of mind that you have to put prospects, customers, and clients first, always. It’s marketing 101. Yet, this is where all the bad marketing and sales out there comes from — “we, we, we,” and “I, I, I,” instead of “them, them, them.”

Study copywriting, it’s a fascinating topic. You’ll become a better writer whether you want to write or not. Moreover, you’ll be more strategic and you’ll be more aware of what a successful campaign should look like, because even if you’re not writing the copy, you are the one in charge of the direction and strategy and positioning of your brand and of your personal brand. Never forget that.

Outsource Your Copy

Number two, outsource your copy. I just told you to study copywriting, but there are a lot of good reasons why getting someone else to handle it for you — someone who is a pro — would be well worth your while. If writing isn’t your main thing, it’s just a practical thing. You can’t do everything. You have to do what you do best and then get the next best person to do the other task. Copy, like I said, is incredibly important. It literally can make you more money if you get the right execution, and you probably will by going with a pro.

Even if you are a copywriter, you’re perhaps a little too close. I hear all the time from freelance writers and small agencies that they’re great at cranking out copy that’s compelling for their clients and yet when it comes to marketing themselves, they freeze up. They make the wrong decision. They’re too shy. Rarely is it that you’re too aggressive when marketing yourself. That’s just the way it works, I think, from the professional writers’ mentality.

When you’re marketing your own services and there’s a good chance you’re going to make more money than you spend by outsourcing that copy, that’s just a good business decision right there. If you disagree with the perspective of the outside person, you always have the ability to go in and edit, right?

As CEO, I have written all the copy for all our product sites. I’ve given away most of the email marketing copy, and I’ve just started outsourcing promotional landing page copy to an outside copywriter who’s done a wonderful job. Again, it’s that outside perspective.

I don’t have all the time in the world, and I’ve done my initial job, I feel, as the head of the company by positioning our products and services from the big picture standpoint. When it comes down to granular level — emails and landing page copy — the outside perspective often will find something that even seems like a discovery to me. It is completely worth it.

Finally, as I mentioned, good copy pays for itself, easily. Sometimes, great copy gives you a multiple that makes it a no brainer. Like, if you can make ten times more money because of attracting not only more clients but the right kind of clients, that, again, is an easy financial decision.

Signals of Trust

The third thing I want to talk about: signals of trust. When you finally get someone to sign up with you, whether it be for your free course, whatever the case may be — opt-in, registration — don’t assume they remember. You’ve probably faced this before, where you have someone who you know signed up for your double opt-in list. There’s no way you could have signed them up or it was a mistake, they just don’t remember. Then you’re the one who gets the angry message asking why you’re emailing them.

That’s rare, but you want to take it into account. You want to make sure early on in the relationship that you are not assuming that they know who you are. Make who you are matter as much as what the message or the content is about. You need to think about that.

At the beginning, you want to send from your personal name, perhaps. But you want to use something in your subject line to remind them of the brand of the company — if it’s not your personal name, obviously. If it is, you still need to take into account that seeing you as the sender may not be enough trigger, so make sure and think about that. You want that sender field to become the most important thing. That, because it’s from you, they open the message no matter what it’s about.

Now, there’s a perfect corollary to this. When I try to teach headline writing and subject lines that work to people, I’ll always get, “Hey, Seth Godin doesn’t do any of this stuff that you told me.” That’s a perfect example that actually proves my point, because you’re not Seth Godin. The guy started blogging 15 years ago. He started building his email list in 1999 when he released Permission Marketing, which is like the bible of email marketing.

Seth Godin can get away with any old subject line he wants. He is vague and he breaks all the rules, but he is Seth Godin. When you have that kind of relationship with your audience and that large an audience — let’s be frank about that — then yes, you have earned the signals of trust that get your emails opened. But if you were a different person and used Seth’s headlines, you would have a dismal open rate.

Keep that in mind. You want to be as close to someone like Seth Godin as you can get by building your authority, the affinity, all of that stuff. What does that name stand for? Just keep in mind, you’re not there yet. I’m not there yet. Let’s talk about headlines next since — that lead in.

Headlines, Subheads, and Bullet Points

Number four: headlines, subheads, and bullet points. If you’re good at those three things, you’re already on your way to being a really good copywriter, because they are the most important aspects of, I would say, scannable, actionable copy.

Now, there are a lot of other elements that matter, don’t get me wrong. But the way people read, especially online, they’re not going anywhere if the headline’s not compelling. The first 50 words of whatever it is — depending on the length of whatever you’re creating — they matter probably more than the rest of the copy.

Subheads and bullets are things that people scan down the length of the message or the page or whatever the case may be, and if they’re compelled then they go back up and they engage with the content at a more engaged level. Or they use those guideposts as ways to define and discover what’s important to them. Like, they’re sort of sold, but they’re looking for certain things like a money-back guarantee or this or that. Subheads, bullet points — very important.

There’s really one approach that I’ve always used. It’s called the Four U approach. I didn’t make this one up like I did the 6A framework. AWAI made this up years and years and years ago. I think when I first took their course — we’re talking like 15 years ago — that’s when I picked it up. I found it so useful I’ve been recommending it ever since.

In a nutshell, headlines, subheads, bullets should be useful to the reader, provide her with a sense of urgency, convey the idea that the main benefit is somehow unique, and do all of the above in an ultra specific way. If you can get three out of four of those, you’ve written a good headline. If you get all four, you’ve nailed it.

Now, let me say a word about headline templates, because they are a great way to understand why a headline works. They are not a great way to plug and play your keywords into something and just throw it out there. You’re really doing yourself a disservice by that plug and play approach. What you can do though, is take those templates, run it through the Four U’s. You’ll see each aspect and that is incredibly instructive. That’s an incredible education in writing compelling headlines, subheads, and bullets.

I must say that we have an ebook called Magnetic Headlines in My Copyblogger. It’s My.Copyblogger.com. You’ll also get like 15 other ebooks on various topics, including email marketing landing pages, and content marketing in general. If you’re not a member, that’s a free registration and that’s a concept that fits this strategy that we’re talking about today.

Finally, I want to talk about when do you violate the Four U approach? I think of it in terms of content headlines versus a pure email subject line. A lot of times, in my approach, they’re the same. I like to use the content Four U-style headline. I found that I get higher open rates. But every once in a while I’ll throw a curve ball in there.

This works really well for people trying to attract clients, because you’re using these compelling content headlines — remember, that’s what they signed up for, first and foremost. You’re getting more of them to open your emails, which means more people are interacting with your course and your access area. That means, just through the principle of commitment and consistency, more of those people are going to be viable candidates to work with you.

But what you might want to do when you get to a certain point in your email sequence is completely mix it up. It’s interesting that the most opened email during Obama’s presidential election subject line was simply “Hey.” That’s kind of amazing. It also came from Obama, so that’s an important person. But it’s also because it was unique in the sense that it completely went against the messages that people had been getting. That in itself is compelling.

I don’t know that you should try, “hey,” but how about if you’ve got their first name and you can use a personalized message tag in the subject line. “Brian, can I ask you something real quick?” That sounds like it’s coming directly from you, and maybe it is. In this case, maybe it’s automated, who knows? But the sheer contrast between your content messages and something like that will work. That’s when you would mix it up and violate the Four U approach.

Remember What You’re Selling

Finally, the fifth tip is remember what you’re selling. This is the key to action. It’s the key to great copy. That is, you’ve got one thing you’re trying to get them to do once they’ve opened the email address — or in different scenarios it’s not even that case. For each piece of content, for each step of the journey for them, what are you selling?

For example, you write that great free article and you’re promoting it on Facebook or Twitter, whatever the case may be. That article is selling the download. Let’s say you’re offering a free PDF at the end of the article, no opt-in required — that’s the action you’re selling. Next, at the end of that PDF report, you’re sending them to a landing page. That is where you’re selling the registration or opt-in.

Once they’re opted in, you’ve got content emails. You’re selling the click and access to your course — get them back in there. But you’re trying first to get them to open it, obviously. Subject line, sender, and then sell the click.

Finally, we have the “hire me” call to action, where we’re finally selling the thing you want to want to sell, but I see muddled messages when you’re really selling the click back into the course and then you’re like, “Or just call me now.” It’s better to sell the click. One thing. Get them back into the course area. After the lesson, place your “hire me” call to action there.

Just remember about context, why they signed up with you in the first place. And remember, “At each stage, what is the action here? What am I selling?” Remember also, that even though you’re dealing in free stuff, no obligation stuff, you have to convince more than you probably think you have to.

This is a great point for compelling bullet points, because some brief intro copy with a great headline and some bullets that represents what the course will provide without necessarily giving it away, the answers — those are called fascination bullets. If you can write those well, you’re also a great headline writer, you’re great subhead writer, those things really move the needle on getting more people to take the action that you want.

Okay, we’ve got one more lesson left. As promised, I’m going to walk you through some of the technical aspects of how we get this done, how it works. I will contrast the use of our platform, the Rainmaker Platform, with how you might get it done with a WordPress site, just to not to leave anyone out. That will be up next.

In the meantime, if you’re curious about the Rainmaker Platform, head over to RainmakerPlatform.com. It’s a powerful website. It’s email and it’s marketing automation all in one integrated functional package, and there’s a lot of benefits to that. We’ll talk about next time. Until then, thanks for listening and keep going.

The Transcript

Lesson 8: How to Get People to Work With You

Voiceover: Welcome to “Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing”, a free audio course presented by Unemployable with Brian Clark. For the full experience, head over to Unemployable.com and sign up for the Unemployable email newsletter, the week s top resources for independent businesspeople, personally handcrafted by serial entrepreneur and content marketing pioneer, Brian Clark. That’s Unemployable.com.

Brian Clark: Hey there, everyone. Welcome back to the free course that teaches you how to use email marketing to get more clients. We are on lesson eight, how to get people to work with you. That’s pretty much the essence of it, right? If we could skip all the rest of that stuff and just get people to call us, email us, and hire us, then that s what we want. But stick with me, we have to do the entire process. This is the final A of the 6A framework, it’s all about action.

Now, think with me for a second. You know how good it feels when someone contacts you and wants to hire you? It s still a bit of a rush, no matter how long you’ve been in business. At least it was that way for me. I always loved that moment when someone contacted me. I didn t knock on a door. I didn’t cold call anyone. They contacted me and said, “You re the choice for me,” or “I have one question before I hire you.” That opportunity is golden.

On the other hand, the feeling you get when you do a bunch of work at marketing — like I m trying to convince you to do — and no one raises their hand and says, “Yes, please. Help me.” Well, that doesn t feel good at all. Or maybe just not enough people are working with you or you go through cycles of feast and famine because you don t have a regular prospecting system that works while you sleep and while you re busy serving current clients. That s what we re trying to implement here.

Essentially, the difference between the two scenarios is simple: it s action. And that s what this lesson is all about. There are two components to action: action that happens in every piece of content you create and every step along the prospect’s journey to becoming your client, and then there s action content that’s specifically designed to get someone off the fence now rather than later.

Use Your Content to Inspire Action

Let s look at the first scenario. At every step of this process you are asking for action — or you should be. If you re not asking, that’s the problem. Think about it. Let s say you have a piece of valuable content at the top of the funnel to attract and you’re using Facebook ads in order to distribute that content. Your ad has to be designed to get people to click or nothing happens, right? A lot of that has to do with your headline, which is a part of the content itself, but it also has to do with the call to action you have in the ad itself. Let s say you re sending them to an article … No, let s say we ve gone way over-deliver and we are offering a free report that doesn t require an email registration. You’re effectively asking someone to click a button and download, but you still have to sell them on the action and then you have to have a call to action that gets them to download the report.

At the end of the report, after you’ve delivered exceptional value — it essentially works as a sales letter for the free course that you’re offering that does require registration and an email address. So they’re on a landing page. Again, it s free, but you’ve got to sell the free. This is copywriting — we’re going to talk about that, but you have to bring them down to a point of action to register and give you that good email address that s going to form the beginning of your relationship with that person. Now they’ve signed up and you’re dripping out your course over however many days or weeks it s going to take place.

Each email message that you send has one purpose — get them into that member area taking the course, consuming the content, and basically absorbing your authority and affinity. In the SaaS world — Software as a Service — the more you can get someone who is considering buying into the interface itself in the admin area, the more likely they are to buy. This is true with this approach as well. If you can get them back in there, they’re more likely to become a client of yours.

Finish With a Strong Call to Action

Finally, we’re at the point that we’re talking about now, which is you have to have calls to action that ask people to literally contact you — call you, email you, whatever the case may be. They’re probably going to have a question or two. They may have their mind made up. But this is what the term “inbound marketing” is all about. It’s really about content.

Before either of those terms came into being, I was doing both with my previous service businesses. It s all about getting action, because there is no way I was ever going to cold call someone, knock on doors, or go to networking functions. I m sorry, I m just not wired that way. But this way is a much better way. It comes down, again, to something in the world of copywriting we call “a call to action.”

It sounds very noble and valiant and epic, right? Well, to your business, it is. You need to tell your prospect exactly what to do, how to do it, and that you want them to do it right now. It really comes down to two fundamental rules for call to actions. The first one is, “Be specific.” Tell people exactly what they need to do. Now, there was a legendary guy in the world of copywriting named Gary Halbert and he was so ridiculously specific that it became kind of his thing when it came to call to actions.

Here s an example — this is direct marketing stuff — his copy would end with something like, “Call this 800-number. You ll talk with a woman named Robin in a blue sweater who will ask you, ‘Would you like the large size or the jumbo?’ Tell her you want the jumbo. She’ll ask you for your mailing address where you can receive packages and you ll give it to her.” Now do you have to go to those links? No, I don t think so, but it s a good way to think about it because confusion eliminates action. Ambiguity eliminates action. You want to be very specific about what it takes to do the next thing.

The second rule is “Be simple.” Now, you ll hear often that you should use short sentences, short words, and simple phrasing — anything you can do to get your message across in a way that is most likely to be understood. This is not because your prospects are dumb, and don t ever think that way. What they are is distracted. The different ‘D’ word. They’re not paying attention 100% at any time.

This has been true for hundreds of years of marketing and advertising and sales, but think about it today. These people are going in 50 different directions. That doesn t mean they re not interested — you’ve got them interested — it means that you have to be very specific. You have to be very clear and simple when you re telling them what to do next in order to get the thing that they’re after, the benefit.

Calls to action start universally, in my opinion, with an action verb — or you re not really getting it done. I want to make it clear that the end call to action … For example, you ll see buttons in emails and on sites that tell you to do the thing. “Subscribe,” which is terrible. “Submit,” which is worse. We don’t want to do those things. But you get my gist. The call to action actually begins before you get to the button. It s giving you the impetus to do it now. Don t think a button is all you have to do, like you can just abruptly move from one mode of communication into a button that is a call to action.

The call action is set up beforehand telling people why it s advantageous to take action, why they should do it now, and how to do it. Then you get down to the button, or just text, whatever the case may be, and that s when you want to focus on an action verb like get. “Get started today.” Grab, download, join, claim, click. Don t let anyone tell you that “Click here” doesn t work, just don t use “Click here” by itself. “Click here to … ” what? Specificity. “Click here to claim your free course.” “Click here to download your free report. No email address required.” Get me? Okay, how about find? “Find out more.” Discover, continue — always start with an action verb.

Create Scarcity to Drive Interest

All right, that s basically the essence of calls to action. Those are in play at every step of the process. Now let s talk about scarcity, that one element of influence that we haven t really touched on too much because it hasn t been at play. So far, we ve been giving away the farm. We’ve been gaining reciprocity, building authority, affinity, commitment, and consistency. Very powerful stuff.

I ll tell you, it s just the most mind-boggling aspect of the last, I d say, 18 years of my life watching human behavior. People are motivated — they want to hear about gain. They want to hear about benefits. They are motivated more by loss than by gain. It s maddening, and it s just the way we are. I m no different. You re no different. And your prospects are no different. Take something away from someone or tell them they re about to lose out on something and they’ll jump all over something they knew they wanted to do anyway but they just weren t pulling the trigger. That s why scarcity comes into play with action.

Getting someone to take action is almost always a function of avoiding loss instead of gaining. That’s not always true. For example, if we do some sort of promotion in my company for one of our software products, our themes, hosting, whatever the case may be, there are a lot of people that will sign up on day one. They’re like, “Hey, this is a great beneficial situation for me and I want it.” Yet, two to three times more people will sign up on the last day when we take it away. Why would that be? It s the same benefit. Human beings are just this way, we are.

Again, you can ignore this aspect of what I m trying to teach you and you will get clients from what we ve worked on so far, but you won t get as many. I need you to think in terms of scarcity in the way you position yourself and then also in terms of content that you can produce when the opportunity arises. First, let s talk about positioning yourself.

Remember when I told you how I was practicing law basically just to pay the bills, keep the dying business afloat, and I was super picky about who I worked with? I had people begging to work with me because of that. It’s scarcity. Basically I m saying, “Hey, I’m busy. I’ve got a lot going on. You may not be the right fit.” People are like, “Well, damn right I’m the right fit,” and they’re trying to win me as opposed to me trying to win in this.

When I started the real estate business I was taking everyone who came across the door, and that led to some problems for me. As I expanded the business, I let other realtors basically take the leads that I wasn t interested in, which is better than a lot of brokerages, frankly. I moved upstream and started working with another broker that handled the actual legwork and we started selling apartment complexes to investors. That was a way in that industry where the commission is basically fixed and paid by the seller to go upstream.

I didn t handle all of that as well as I would ve liked to, which I’ve alluded to. What can I say? I’m really good at marketing, not as … You get it. I corrected that. But what a nice position to be in, for yourself, perhaps, at one point to become the rainmaker and to perhaps have others do the work. Always keep that in mind.

Let s talk a little bit about scarcity content. The easiest example of this that you’ll recognize if you ve ever seen or heard an ad or a mortgage broker is they re always talking about, “Rates are historically low. Come call us and save money.” But the rush they really get is when they say, “Rates are about to go up.” I saw this during my time in the real estate industry. It was always a great way to get people to take action.

Now, this is going to be specific to your own industry. It will be news-driven. David Meerman Scott created the term “newsjacking.” It’s essentially finding a — tasteful, let me interject that — way to take news that s happening and use it to your benefit to attract clients. It s got to be news where something is changing, where people will lose something if they don t decide to do whatever their goal is right now.

Sometimes the scarcity is on the other side of the fence. For example, if someone tells an employee of theirs that they have to have a new website by September 15 then they re just motivated. They’re going to find the right person. They’re going to pull the trigger. Other people know that they need a new website and yet they’re just putting it off because they don t want to deal with it. When you think about it that way, that s exactly the objection that you have to overcome.

How do you get them to do that in the sense that they re hesitant to do it? That s exactly what the education you’re providing is supposed to do, but you need to be able to find that element of loss and be constantly tuned in to the environment. My final words on scarcity will be this: don t do fake scarcity. If you are going to only take two clients this week because that s the offer you send out, then that s what you do. Don’t lie. You know that, but if someone finds out that you are lying or you’re creating a fake scarcity situation, you’re going to lose all that authority and affinity really quick.

Utilize Positioning to Make Yourself More Attractive

However, from a positioning standpoint, raising your prices, going out of your comfort zone and saying, “All right. I ve been this much lately and I’m going to raise my prices to this, but if you sign up with me this week then you get my old rate. And let s face it, I can only handle three clients.” You’re going to get three clients. You’re going to have 10 to choose from, and that s the position you want to be in. Don t undervalue yourself. Don t advertise yourself like a convenience store, “Hey, I m open 24/7.” No, your time is valuable, your skills are valuable, and that s how you position yourself to make people feel like they re going to lose out if they don t work today.

Okay, that is action. That is all of the 6A framework. I want to do a couple extra episodes. This was originally supposed to be the end of it, but I want to talk a little bit about copywriting for the actual messages that you send out. And I’m going to talk, as promised, a little bit about technology. Obviously the Rainmaker Platform can handle all of this for you, and I would love for you to join us on the platform — that’s at RainmakerPlatform.com — but if not, I’m going to give you alternatives. This is not an all or nothing deal, anyway that you can benefit from this, I want to help.

If you benefited from this course and you can head over to iTunes and leave a review for me — it’s Unemployable.com/iTunes — I’d really appreciate it, I really would. All right. That is it. I will see you in a little bit. We’ve got a couple more episodes to go that’ll just really tie this all together for you and hopefully put you on the path to doing smarter email marketing. In the meantime, whatever it is that you do, keep going.

The Transcript

Lesson 7: Why Creating a Personalized Marketing Experience Lands You More Clients

Voiceover: Welcome to Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing, a free audio course presented by Unemployable with Brian Clark. For the full experience, head over to Unemployable.com and sign up for the Unemployable email newsletter, the week’s top resources for independent business people, personally handcrafted by serial entrepreneur and content marketing pioneer Brian Clark. That’s Unemployable.com.

Brian Clark: Welcome back to Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing. I’m your host, Brian Clark, and this is Lesson 7. Today we’re talking about why creating a personalized marketing experience is going to land you more clients.

The Right (and Wrong) Way to Create a Personalized Marketing Experience

Imagine with me for a second. A lady walks into a jewelry store and starts looking at the diamond case. An employee comes over and starts trying to sell her a watch from the other side of the store. She says, “Hey, I’m interested in diamonds.” He goes into how exciting it must be to get engaged — completely missing that she’s already wearing a wedding band.

She says, at this point with a bit of exasperation, that she’s looking for earrings for her daughter. The sales guy then goes on and on about the sale they have going on ruby earrings and making really obscure football analogies that are clearly not connecting with the prospect. He’s so absorbed in what he’s saying that he has not noticed that her attention has wandered and now she’s out the door.

That would be a completely and truly bizarre situation if it happened in real life, and yet online marketing has been a lot like that for a long time. Because, in person, salespeople have the benefit of an interactive conversation, for one, but also an adaptive conversation. Information is presented and then the salesperson is able to adapt based on that information to do the next correct thing — to point the person in the right direction, to give them the information that they need.

That’s really what we’re talking about in today’s lesson: the ability to adapt to information that we get about our prospects. Some of it we ask for, just like an in-person salesperson, and other we observe, which is also the hallmark of a skilled salesperson. Really, all they do is take in additional information and adapt by being helpful in the appropriate way at that context.

Adaptive in the context of email marketing and online marketing in general simply means being able to take information that is fed back to us in order to make the experience more relevant and more personal to that prospect. This is the aspect of this overall strategy I’m teaching you with this course that’s most unique to your particular business.

The Essential Elements for Building a Personalized Marketing Experience

Let’s do an overview of the elements that we’re talking about here because, even though that initial scenario I gave you was crazy, you can use current technology to adapt based on each of those different types of information that, that sales guy should have been picking up on.

The Autoresponder

First and foremost, we had the autoresponder. It’s been around since, I think, 1998 or so. All that means is that you’re able to create a sequence of email messages that go out to a prospect after they have opted-in to your list at certain intervals.

Some people call this a drip campaign. That’s exactly what it is. You’re dripping out messages auto-magically based on someone’s showing of interest in a topic that you have put out there. In this case, this could be the lessons in the online course that you have crafted for them.

Personalized Short Codes

Next up, we have personalized short codes. These are basically pulling — being able to pull with a bit of code from the database — information about that person in order to personalize the email. Now, of course, the most obvious one and the most used is probably first name. The personalization is only as good as the information that the prospect gives you.

Some people like to play games with that. I don’t get too hung up on that, but I do avoid asking for too much up front. Basically, with our registration and access concept, I only ask for first name and email address, the bare minimum to set up an account. That allows me, of course, to address them by first name in my messages.

Segmentation

Up next is segmentation. Now, I gave you an example of segmentation from my early days back when I was in real estate. I had one course that dripped out to first-time homebuyers, and I had a completely different one that dripped out to people who were relocating from another part of the country.

That’s a very, very simple concept of segmentation. Two lists because they’re two very different types of people. If I tried to talk to someone who is selling a house in Montana and moving to Texas the same way I talk to a local first-time homebuyer, I’m not going to do very well with that prospect. You get the idea.

Tagging

Next up is tagging. Tagging is something I didn’t have back in those days, which is why I had two lists. Of course, from what I know now, I could have had a multitude of different lists based on being able to segment at a finer and finer level.

The great thing about tags, they’re like — if you use WordPress or some other CMS — putting content into a category. If you’re talking about getting more traffic to your opt-in page for email, I would tag that email marketing but also landing pages, possibly SEO, social media marketing. You get the idea.

It’s the same things with tags — except, in this case, you are basically tagging, “Okay. This person is a first-time homebuyer, and this person is relocating.” Therefore, you have one list, but of course, you can go much, much, much deeper than that. Say, interest is what we’ve talked about.

Personas

Persona, often we have multiple buyer personas of characteristics of people that help us communicate with them more clearly. Their level of engagement — are they blazing through the course hitting every lesson to completion? Are they skipping around? Have they not shown up? All of that would merit a tag that later we can use to speak to them differently based on what they’ve actually done.

Demographics

We’ve also got demographics. I know people who craft their messages differently if they’re speaking to a female or a male, also based on age. Again, when you’re trying to be you — and maybe you’re going to make a pop culture reference — you might not make that same reference depending on gender, age, or other demographic concerns.

Existing Clients

Then, finally, something like your existing clients are definitely not going to get the same messages you might send to everyone else. It’s important that you’re able to identify them as that and then be able to include or exclude them at will.

Let me give you an example of something I’m about to do with my Unemployable email list. Unemployable is basically for independent business people, in that, in one way, we all have something in common. We work for ourselves in some manner, but there are all sorts of different variations on that. There are freelancers. There are professional services providers. There’s consultants. There’s entrepreneurs, product people, very different across-the-board, gamut type of thing.

I’m sending out a newsletter that picks out the most relevant and useful resources for people like us. For example, if you self-identify as an entrepreneur and you’re selling digital products, I should have never even mentioned this course to you. You’re not listening right now anyway, so you get what I mean when I say ‘you.’ That’s what tagging will allow me to do.

What I’m going to do in this instance is send out an email that says, “Help me serve you better and make Unemployable more relevant.” Then I will ask them to self-identify: “What do you call yourself? Do you call yourself a freelancer, a consultant, a solopreneur, an entrepreneur, a small business owner?”

It’s a very initial starting point, but you can imagine that, at that point, if I come across a great article for freelancers but it’s not relevant to everyone else, I can include that article in that version of the newsletter only for that tag. Everyone else will get something else that’s more relevant to them. You can see, especially in the curation approach like I’m doing, it really matters that I’m able to know who you are to a certain degree and then send you the most relevant information that I can.

Suppression

Next up real quick, suppression. For example, we’re talking about being able to send certain content to certain people based on tags. You also don’t want to send certain messages to certain peoples. Again, clients are the big one. Like for us and our company, when we do a promotion of a certain product, we’re naturally going to suppress owners of that product. That’s annoying, to be sold something that you already own.

Triggers

Next up, let’s talk about triggers. Triggers are basically actions, their behavior that tells you something important about where that person is in the sales cycle and, therefore, allows you to adapt what happens next in a very smart and savvy way as opposed to, again, this one-size-fits-all approach that not only isn’t as effective, but people are starting to get used to a more personalized experience. That’s really why this is crucial. If people expect relevance, you have to deliver it, or they’re going to go somewhere else.

Let’s see. With a trigger, say, for example, you’re a Realtor. You are doing a course for potential home sellers in your area of your farm. That’s what they call it when you’re a Realtor. Someone in your course that you’ve got up for them, educating them on everything you need to know about selling your home in Boulder, Colorado, right now. You have a lesson on what goes into a properly done comparative market analysis, or CMA. That’s basically looking at what someone’s house is worth based on comparable market activity.

Now, you have a lesson on that. Below that, you smartly have a link to a page that says, “Contact us now, and we will do a CMA for you on your house and tell you what your house is worth.” This is an incredibly effective marketing strategy. If you can get someone to do that, that is an initial reach-out, inbound contact where they’re coming to you. They’re raising their hand now and starting to interact with you.

Now, if they fill out the CMA information, which is basically all the stuff that they need to tell you about their house in order for you to do this CMA, then, at that point, you might go into manual mode in contacting them. From experience, I can tell you that, basically, you’re going to even have a trigger that automates a message that says, “Thanks for filling it out. We’re working on it right now.”

Savvy realtors will also then, a day or so later — and this could be automated or manual, but you can totally be automated — that says, “We’re just about done with your CMA, but I want to ask you one thing. Can I give you a call, or can you give me a call to discuss?” Or even, “Can we get together at Starbucks and discuss this?”

Not everyone’s going to bite at that, but it’s a great relevant opportunity to get in front of that person and do the more traditional in-face sales activity that we’re all used to. But remember, you’re priming people with the information that you give them before that even happens.

Now here’s the interesting scenario. What if they click over to that page but they don’t fill out the CMA form? Wouldn’t you want to treat them differently than everyone else at that point?

That’s a relevant action, so you might, at that point, in my scenario, send them an article you’ve written about how the worst mistake home sellers in Boulder, Colorado, are making is underpricing their home because homes are going to multiple bidders, going way over asking price. “If you price your home too low, you’re going to end up regretting it.” Then another call to action: “Let me do an analysis to tell you exactly what your home is worth.”

You don’t have to tell them that you know they went to that page. I’m going to go over this a little bit more in a little bit. Only point being that it’s relevant. They showed some interest, and that message makes a lot of sense, while it wouldn’t make as much sense to someone else who hadn’t engaged in that behavior.

Adaptive Web Pages

Then, finally, we’ve got adaptive web pages. Here’s something that annoys me. When I’m already on someone’s list and I go to their site from the email they just sent me to read an article and I get that pop-up telling me to subscribe hello? That’s just basic stuff. No pop-ups if you click a link from an email that shows that you’re a subscriber.

Also, on Unemployable, if you are a registered member when you come back to the site, you no longer see the registration form at all. Again, it’s the same as the pop-up. It’s asking you to do something you’ve already done. That is not relevant. It’s not hugely annoying, but why not put something else there?

For example, if I know that you’re interested in buying a home for the first time, and you’re already on my list, and I know that and you click over to the site for some other reason, I replace the opt-in form with information that’s relevant to you or something that calls you back into the member area so that you can continue the course. I’ll talk to you about why that’s important in our next lesson, but you get the idea.

This is really the final piece of the puzzle because when your website, your email, and your automation are all coming from different places, you don’t really have that integrated approach where you can even change your website. That’s true adaptive content at that point.

Brian’s Tips for Avoiding Overwhelm

I’ve got a few tips for you because, once you get into this, it seems somewhat overwhelming — and it can be. But most of the time, you only have to go through this work, for the most part, one time and then you could just make tweaks or you add to it. It doesn’t have to be a monumental project.

#1: Start Linear

Here are some things that have helped me do this. First thing, start linear. Craft it like an old-school autoresponder sequence. By ‘linear,’ I just mean one, two, three, four, five. These are the core things. This could be the delivery of the course lesson messages that gets people to come back into your member area.

#2: Start Watching

Then from there, start watching. Because, again, unless you’re just absolutely sure that you know of a scenario, like that CMA one I just gave you, where that makes sense, I wouldn’t spend a lot of time going through what if. Start, get it going, get people into the sequence, and then watch what happens. The information is real, and you can then act on it.

#3: Take it Step by Step by Step

You don’t have to sit down in an afternoon and create this entire dragon, hydra, tentacles of monstrous octopus kind of thing where it’s so complicated you can’t even get your head around it. It usually evolves naturally step by step. It becomes rather complex, but it doesn’t need to be right from the beginning.

In that regard, we use something called Lucidcharts to basically map out our sequences. Ours get a little more complicated right off the bat just because, like you know your clients, we have a good feel for our audience. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel with every sequence. We know certain things, and then we put it out there and adapt.

Any kind of charting software or mind-mapping software also works well for some people. That basically allows you to sanely keep all of this in focus and the visual representation of it is much easier than any other method that I have tried.

#4: Remember It Isn’t Just About Prospecting

Don’t forget that this isn’t just about prospecting. You can create sequences for existing clients as part of your referral program, getting them to recommend you to others. That’s a beautiful thing. In fact, you can just get them to recommend the course that brought them in the door in the first place. It’s a wonderful thing.

#5: Don’t Be Creepy

Finally, don’t be creepy. It’s a paradox because people are demanding a level of relevance and personalization that can only come through technology that’s watching them, more or less. But I ‘ve seen this weird thing, speaking of real estate, “Oh, I saw that you did this.” That’s creepy. You’ve worked so hard to build authority and affinity, and then you’re going to give someone a weird feeling.

I think it’s becoming common enough that people understand that sometimes this is not a coincidence — that I did this, and then I’m seeing this. But if you do it in a helpful way, a relevant way, you don’t have to say, “I’m watching you.” I don’t understand the compulsion for that.

Now, we often do that with people who we’re selling the Rainmaker Platform to because we have to tell them that we have these capabilities, and here’s a demonstration of it. That generally doesn’t creep out marketers and entrepreneurs. But regular people, they don’t like when you are just putting it in their face that they’re being watched.

Be tactful. Be creative in the way that you show up magically with just the right information at the right time. You’ll be viewed as a helpful salesperson that is facilitating their goals, the benefits they’re after — and you’ll win the business.

Up Next: Action

Okay, everyone. We’re moving on to action in the next lesson. Until then, start charting some things out. Start thinking these things through. How can you make it work for you? Above all, as always, keep going.

The Transcript

Lesson 6: How to Become a Likeable Expert

Brian Clark: Welcome to “Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing,” a free audio course presented by Unemployable with Brian Clark. For the full experience, head over to Unemployable.com and sign up for the Unemployable email newsletter, the week’s top resources for independent businesspeople, personally handcrafted by serial entrepreneur and content marketing pioneer, Brian Clark. That’s Unemployable.com.

Welcome back to “How To Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing.” I’m Brian Clark. This lesson is about how to become a likeable expert. We talked about authority in the last lesson and why the best way to get someone on an email list that also operates to quickly convert more of those people into clients is to demonstrate your expertise. To demonstrate your authority in the context of the six influence factors that we discussed at the beginning of the course. It’s very important the way this works, because you’re not claiming to be an expert. You’re not granted authority by the state or a school system or something like that. You’re demonstrating authority in a very natural way that draws people to you.

There’s another aspect here and, of course, that is in the term “likable expert.” We know plenty of people that are experts. We don’t necessarily like everyone just because they are smart or knowledgeable or experienced at something. Frankly, we like to do business with people we like. You may have had this experience as well. Sometimes we’ll choose someone we like even though they’re not the best choice from an authority standpoint. Perhaps you hire your buddy from college as your financial advisor. They’re definitely competent. Maybe not the best in the world, but you like this person. You enjoy talking to them as opposed to dreading it. Liking coupled with authority — that’s two out of the six psychological influence factors, and they are really powerful.

Use Affinity Content to Make Yourself Likable

Let’s zero in a little bit on liking itself. It’s almost one of the most irrational and unfair of the influence principles because it causes us to make decisions based on some things that may not be the best criteria. For example, social psychology research shows that we automatically assign good-looking people other favorable traits such as talent, kindness, honesty, intelligence, and we’re generally not even aware that we do it. Right there — if you are an attractive person, use it. When you’re creating your content, put yourself out there. It will help as long as you’re being helpful and otherwise not a jerk. I think that’s important.

We call this affinity content. It’s not really a separate form of content any more than all the content you create demonstrates authority. It’s an additional element that we’re adding in to make our content — and therefore ourselves — much more likable. Affinity is liking that stems from a connection where people detect similarity with you. You’re their type of person. It’s very important from an engagement standpoint to put yourself in your content. This is what a lot of people hold back on. They’re like “Well, I don’t want to offend anyone,” or “I don’t want to run anyone off.” What happens is you appeal to no one in your fear of alienating someone. What you need to do is appeal strongly to the people that have an affinity for you and don’t worry about the rest.

Remember, if you have a strong affinity with some people, it means it won’t develop with others. That’s okay. You don’t want to water things down to the point that you appeal to no one. The goal here is to get more clients than you would have otherwise. You’re never going to convert every prospect into a client, so don’t even worry about that. Resonate strongly with the people that you have an affinity with, and you’re going to demonstrate that.

The great thing here is you don’t have to be controversial or purposefully annoying or anything like that. If you take a stand for anything and just be yourself on the Internet, you’re going to annoy some people and they’re going to tell you about it. It’s not fair, but don’t really worry about it. What you’re going to live for are the people you really connect with. That’s really what’s at the core of the influence of liking, it’s connection with another person.

Add Affinity Into Your Course Content Framework

I’m going to give you a framework to where the way you create this course content — this authority content — you’re adding in affinity simply by making the content more engaging. There’s a way to develop strong affinity with people by the way you teach them. This is the intersection of marketing, social psychology, and instructional design, or the creation of lessons and course materials. That’s really what we’re doing here, all three things.

First of all, in marketing 101, it’s also instructional design number one and it has a strong social psychology effect: focus on them. There are countless studies that show that people will rate another person as more attractive, more agreeable, more likable because they actually listen to and/or focus on the needs of that person as opposed to the stereotype we get with authoritative experts that they’re all about themselves. Don’t do that. It’s the worst mistake that we can make. It’s easy to do sometimes when we are sharing our expertise, but just keep it top of mind. It’s about them. It’s about what you can help them with. They will come away with an impression of you that is much more likable and agreeable than a person who takes a “I’m the expert” type approach.

Second, you feel like you’re giving away information to people, knowledge. But you have to remember that people don’t really want information or knowledge for its own sake. Some people do, but not many. They want the benefits of knowledge. They want to understand why what you’re telling them matters to them. This is really a corollary of focusing on them. You have to bring in the fact that it’s beneficial knowledge that is going to make this person feel good about you and feel good about hiring you.

Here’s the next thing. From an instructional design standpoint, the best way to infuse your information with life and create affinity is the heavy and appropriate use of metaphors, analogies, and stories. This is called Whole Brain Teaching. Some of us think that “Well, it’s just the facts, ma’am. It’s just information.” But it’s not, of course, and you know this from your own experience. This same information can be delivered in multiple ways, one which is more engaging and interesting and one that is dry and boring. It’s not just about being entertaining or not boring.

The second type of information that we’re talking about here — the engaging things, when you explain things in the form of stories, you use analogies, you make pop culture references, whatever the case may be — you’re actually teaching people better. It’s not just that it’s entertaining, although that’s a big part of it because no one wants to doze off during your marketing materials. That’s what we’re trying to do here, but using these types of tools to get the whole brain engaged with your content also makes you incredibly likable.

This is one of the interesting things that I’ve found related to the use of these techniques — the word “charisma.” Everyone knows of the charismatic leader. I think of someone like Richard Branson as a charismatic person. It’s interesting, because there are many people who think, “Well, you’re just born that way. You can’t really learn to be charismatic.” Turns out that’s not correct. In 2011, research was performed in order to determine if they could take people and increase their charisma through certain methodologies. One of the main things that these people were taught to practice and get better at was the use of metaphor and stories.

A bunch of tool kits that we identify in charismatic people can be improved. It can be taught. This is the interesting thing about teaching, because really what you’re doing by teaching people is becoming a leader, and when you bring in affinity and you connect with people, that’s charisma. And people will say, “This is the person I need to hire.” Not reluctantly or halfheartedly. They’ll find their person, whatever the case may be. It could be design, it could be a realtor, it could be some other form of consultant. You’re making doing business with you attractive.

Share Your Worldview

Part and parcel to that, especially when it comes to affinity, is sharing a world view. The way you view the world is going to connect you with like-minded people. An example of this is Gary Vaynerchuk. Many people know Gary. If you don’t know, he originally broke on the scene by doing a wine show on YouTube that promoted the e-commerce functions of his family wine business. The short story about that is that Gary, through his video show, increased the revenue of that business from $3 million a year to something like $60 million. It was outrageous. There’s a great example of content marketing for you.

But what you may not know, is that at the beginning of that wine show Gary played it very straight, he was not being himself. Think about the world of wine criticism. It’s very uptight. It’s very stodgy. You’re supposed to behave in a certain way. Finally, Gary just decided, “This isn’t me. I’m a New York Jets fan. I’m a New Jersey guy. I’m loud and I’m enthusiastic, and that’s who I’m going to be.” That’s when he broke out, by being Gary. That is his way of viewing the world, a very brash, opinionated, New Jersey, Jets fan type of approach. That doesn’t connect with everyone, but it made the people it did connect with — they loved him, because he also understood that the stodgy world of wine criticism was off-putting to normal people. We’re afraid to make the wrong decision on wine or to order the wrong thing. He was finding, “You either like it or you don’t, that’s all it comes down to. And I’m going to tell you what I like about these wines and maybe you’ll like them as well.”

Share your world view. That’s one of the key aspects where you connect with people. Some people use politics, religion, all sorts of other things to connect with people at an affinity level. I like to do it within the context of the business transaction that we’re contemplating here. When we talk about digital sharecropping and how you should never build on Facebook or someone else’s land, that does help our business. We sell web publishing stuff that empowers people to do things themselves. There is that context of the business transaction, and yet there is an element there where like-minded people who feel strongly about that as well are the ones who gravitate towards us.

All of what I’ve just shared with you it makes for a great course, but affinity should be used with all content that you create. We’ll talk later about follow-up content for people who don’t convert to clients right away from the course itself. But always share “you.” Don’t be afraid of it. You don’t have to try to offend people. You don’t have to try to be overly outrageous or anything like that. Some people do that, and that’s great. I don’t think you need to do it though. You’re either going to connect with people or not. Double down on the people you connect with and don’t worry about those who are going to go off somewhere else. The key, again — grow the business, get more clients than you would have otherwise.

At this point, you understand that authority combined with likability or affinity are our two big things. But, again, we’ve got that reciprocity working for us, we’ve got social proof working when the people who love us share our stuff — that’s another aspect of authority and affinity working to spur social proof and some of these other things. Then you get people into your email sequence. You’ve got commitment. They’re going to act consistently with that commitment and a lot more of them are going to become your clients. That’s it for this lesson. Head over to RainmakerPlatform.com if you’re looking at things from the technology side. We’ve got a free trial that you can put through the paces with no obligation whatsoever. We will be talking about action in our next lesson. Until then, keep going.

The Transcript

Lesson 5: How to Demonstrate Authority with a ‘Lead Magnet’ Worth Paying For

Voiceover: Welcome to Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing, a free audio course presented by Unemployable with Brian Clark. For the full experience, head over to Unemployable.com and sign up for the Unemployable email newsletter, the week’s top resources for independent business people, personally handcrafted by serial entrepreneur and content marketing pioneer Brian Clark. That’s Unemployable.com.

Brian Clark: Hello there, and welcome back to Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing. I am your host, Brian Clark. Today is Lesson 5, and we’re talking about how to demonstrate authority with a lead magnet worth paying for.

Yes, we finally got to that point where we’re going to ask someone to get on an email list. It may surprise you that we did so much before we got to this point, but that’s kind of the key. Let’s get into today’s lesson because we’re really going to drill down quite a bit into turning you into an expert — not in your own mind, but in the minds of others.

Before we do that, I want to see if I could ask you a favor. If you’re digging the course so far, you’re finding value, getting some ideas, would you mind leaving a rating and/or review over at iTunes? Now I know not all of you use iTunes, but if you do, I’d greatly appreciate it. It really helps the show, the work that I do for free. It means a lot, and I appreciate it.

The easy way to do that, to get over there if you’re not in iTunes at the moment, is to go to Unemployable.com/iTunes. That will take you directly to the page that will allow you to open up iTunes and leave a rating or review.

How that works is a rating is simple, 1 to 5 stars, as far as your honest designation of the value of the work I’m doing. A rating would be even better, if you have the time, because I actually get to see what you have to say, what you found valuable. That kind of feedback really helps as well. Again, Unemployable.com/iTunes, and I would greatly appreciate it. I definitely check in and look at everything you guys have to say because it really is important.

Winning the Numbers Game Without Shortcuts

Okay. My favorite definition of content marketing is giving away free information so good that it’s worth paying for in order to sell something else. Now, I can tell you from personal experience, you can give away free information to sell other information, and you can certainly give away free information to sell software and other products.

But I will say that in my 18-year career, I don’t think it’s been ever as effective. I won’t say easy, but I almost want to because giving away really great free information when you’re a service provider is one of the most effective marketing strategies I’ve ever encountered. It’s really how I got into all of this.

You’re giving away something that you still get to keep, and no matter how much you tell people … remember, I told you, teach them as if they have to do it themselves. You do that, they’re not going to do it themselves. You’re still better than they are. People get weirded out by that. Maybe not so much anymore. They used to. Look, the goal here is to get more clients, not everyone. We’re playing a numbers game.

We want more clients. You’re never going to close everyone that enters your funnel, so don’t even think that way. Don’t worry if someone, I don’t know, for some reason thinks they can do it themselves. That’s usually not the reason why people don’t choose you. It’s usually something else. Maybe they decide not to do it. There’s other factors involved. It doesn’t matter. The key is, “Did I attract more clients with this approach than I would have with another approach?” — or in my mind, any other approach? It’s that effective.

I’m telling you this because many try to do the bare minimum to get the opt-in. For example, I see all the time web designers giving away free templates, maybe for landing pages or what have you. Those are incredibly attractive to people. People want that, and they will opt-in to get it with a bad email address that they never check after they download your free stuff. Some lead magnets get the opt-in but nothing else.

Sonia Simone likes to say, “Don’t take shortcuts. They take too long.” I agree completely. The last thing I want to do is come up with a marketing strategy and it has to change every month or every three months, or even every year. When I used a free-course approach back in my real estate days, I used the same two courses for four years until I left the business.

Now, I do want to let you know that I made tweaks. You can always improve things, but that’s not the same as something that just stops working or works to get email addresses but doesn’t result in clients. What’s the point of that? There is no point.

The Psychological Influence Factors That Convert Prospects to Clients

You’ve got to hit the two key things here with your free content in order to convert people to clients, and that’s a combination of authority, one of our six influence factors, and affinity or liking, which is another one of our six influence factors. These are the two big ones, and that’s why I call it the ‘likable’ expert.

There are plenty of experts out there who are not likable. I bet you’ve met a few of these. Now, get these by giving away something great, something that people would have paid money for. Then you’ve got reciprocity. You’ve got social proof from the sharing that happens.

And now we have, finally, commitment and consistency coming naturally along. Once people decide to register for your free course, they have made a commitment. As long as you do a good job of getting them to come back and actually consume the lessons, you’ve got consistency. All of a sudden you become the inevitable choice, psychologically and in reality.

It’s not like you’re tricking anyone. I just point out these psychological influence factors because they are how we make decisions. You want to position yourself to be the actual best choice along with the perceived best choice. In a perfect world, they would always be the same thing. Ah, we don’t live in a perfect world. You might have noticed. It’s not just content, and that’s why I and many others have struggled with this term ‘content marketing’ the entire time. It seems to almost give the wrong impression right off the bat.

How Teaching Helps You Become an Influential, Likeable Expert (and Expands Your Audience)

Before content marketing, we had educational marketing. It was a thing before. It just wasn’t a movement, if you will. It’s education that positions you as an influential, likable expert. You demonstrate that you’re both an expert and a likable person — never by claiming it, but by teaching. You may take it on just your own experience that teachers are some of the most influential people in the world. They literally change the way you think, and that’s what we’re trying to do.

In the past, the whole idea of content creating authority or expertise, or demonstrating it, was the book. Now the problem with the book is, statistically, most people don’t read. I think it’s probably getting worse. That’s not to say there aren’t readers. I’m just saying, if you looked at the entire spectrum of people you would want to attract as a client, there may be a lot of people who you couldn’t get to read a book, but they would listen to an audio book. Listening is a different concept than reading, but it’s the same information.

Then there’s a whole ton of people who will watch a compelling educational presentation. Most of cable TV is actually educational programming dressed up in very engaging, fun ways. The key here, give away something worth paying for. The online education market in the United States alone is $21.3 billion. A lot of people are paying for online education. Combine that with the fact that some people like to read, but most people don’t. A text plus audio and even video slide or talking-head presentation expands your audience.

You’re not excluding people that might be highly likely to choose you if they can consume even a portion of this online training that you’re providing for free. A lot of times, they’ll get through a couple of lessons and they’re like, “Yep, this is my person.” Others will go through the whole thing. Either way, at whatever their point is of being ready to hire you — and we’ll talk about that in a future lesson — you’re going to put yourself in a position to be ready for it at the time.

Now, you may be saying, “Uh, I don’t know anything about creating an online course.” There are lots of people out there that can help you. Again, we have an entire roster of certified content marketing specialists who … they do copy, they do courses, they do attraction content, the whole thing. I will share that URL with you before we finish this thing.

But here’s the way to get started because, ultimately, even if you don’t create the course yourself, it’s going to be done in collaboration with you. Remember, you’re the expert. Just because you don’t necessarily present the information word for word doesn’t mean that it’s not coming from you.

The Essence of Authority

Where I would encourage you to start is to look at existing how-to books in your field. They will have effectively gone through the process of knowing what are the problems that a person who knows nothing about this topic needs to know. Or maybe they know a little, and they need to know these are the things that they face as obstacles through having a greater understanding.

Let’s go back to our examples we’ve used in the past. When I did the two real estate brokerages, we positioned ourselves as exclusive buyer agents. That is an agency designation in the field of real estate brokerage that basically says you only represent buyers, never sellers, therefore eliminating the conflict of interest. I decided to start that kind of brokerage because I read a book on it. It didn’t just occur to me. By reading that book, I became very well-versed.

Now, yes, I had a background as an attorney. I understood agency, but it’s different when you see things from a market opportunity. That’s what reading that book did. But it also allowed me to express in my own words trust me, you do not want to plagiarize — never, never, never. We’re trying to build authority and likability here, and something that will kill both of them really quick is being a thief and a crook. We’re not doing that. We’re looking here for guidance. We’re identifying issues and pain points.

Now, you probably already understand all of this stuff, but this is an organized piece of already existing content that you can go, “Oh, yeah. I want to talk about this, this, this, this.” You’ve got an outline, and then whether you’re doing it yourself or enlisting the help of a content creator, you have got a roadmap right there.

Again, it’s easier to create a course like this than to write an entire book. You don’t have to cover the whole book. What you have to do is demonstrate to people by educating them that you’re a person they want to do business with. It’s really quite simple.

In the designer example I gave before, you would just simply talk about principles of conversion-driven design, which most people don’t know about, but it’s really easy to get them interested when you say, “If I design your site this way, you’re going to make more money. Here’s why.” The developer, talk about Agile software development for beginners. Tons of books out there. Easy, you already know it all.

Again, it’s your expertise that we’re ultimately going to draw on, but you’ve got an outline now. You’ve identified the key points that people have to know. If you teach them that, they’re going to come away smarter — but they’re going to attribute that to you.

That’s essentially the essence of authority, of expertise. It’s conveying information in a way that demonstrates you know what you’re talking about instead of just claiming it. That’s a crucial, crucial thing here because we don’t believe people who just claim things, do we? No — especially when it comes to expertise in the current climate. You’re going to want to demonstrate.

Going Beyond Information

A free online course that’s good enough for someone to have said, “Yeah, you know, I’d actually pay for that. But I don’t have to, and I’m going to hire this person because of it.” That’s what we’re trying to go for, but we have to go beyond information.

The principles and instructional design of persuasion, it goes beyond information. If you think about it, the expertise, the information conveyed by a very dry, snooty professor is very different from the super likable, friendly person who may not even be as smart as that professor, but we like to do business with people we like.

That’s why it’s not just authority. It’s not just expertise. It’s the reason why liking is one of those six powerful influence factors. The key here, though, is beautiful in the sense that you’re going to create that affinity, that liking, by using the very principles that make for a solid online course. That’s up next.

Check out the Rainmaker Platform. You can build online courses. You can create member areas. You can do podcasts. You can do pretty much everything, and that’s why we built it for ourselves first. We use it on all our sites, and I’d like to invite you to take it for a test drive for 14 days at RainmakerPlatform.com.

We’ll be up next with our affinity lesson. Please stay tuned and come back for that. Until then, start working on some of this stuff. See what you can put together, and we’ll keep going together. Take care.

The Transcript

Lesson 4: How the Access Approach Accelerates Your Email Marketing

Voiceover: Welcome to Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing, a free audio course presented by Unemployable with Brian Clark.

For the full experience, head over to Unemployable.com and sign up for the Unemployable email newsletter, the week’s top resources for independent business people, personally handcrafted by serial entrepreneur and content marketing pioneer Brian Clark.

That’s Unemployable.com.

Brian Clark: Hey there, and welcome back to Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing. I’m your host, Brian Clark.

This is lesson four: How the Access Approach Accelerates Your Email Marketing. Before we get into this, I got to tell you that this free course is sponsored by the Rainmaker Platform. You can do all of the technical wizardry that we discuss in the next few episodes yourself without a developer and even without a designer, if you so choose. Check it our for yourself at RainmakerPlatform.com.

The Psychological Impact of ‘Velvet Rope Syndrome’

Back in 2001, I read a book actually several books that were all about generally the same topic. The one that sticks in my mind is called The Age of Access by Jeremy Rifkin. There were others, such as The Experience Economy, that touched on the same subject. That was that we were moving away from ownership concepts to access concepts, that we would pay for experiences more than we wanted to own things.

This book did a really good job, for being so early on, of predicting the subscription membership concepts, such as Netflix, Dollar Shave Club, even software as a service. But more than that, I think it predicted the rise of things like Airbnb and Uber, where you don’t need to own a car when you only need occasional access to it. You don’t need to own a home in Laguna Beach or Des Moines, Iowa, if you just need to stay in one for a while — you get the idea.

This was a topic that I had become fascinated with really early on, and it had some interesting influences on me — not only with the way I think about paid products, but also our content marketing. There’s an aspect here that was really interesting to me over the years. You could call it ‘velvet rope syndrome.’

People value membership from a psychological standpoint. The membership experiences they have, in a way, spark a little exclusivity because those on the outside don’t have that same experience.

That’s a hint of scarcity there. I don’t want to overplay it because it’s very subtle. In fact, if you ask your prospect if they were influenced in that way, by access to your free content instead of some other concept, they’ll tell you that it had no affect on them at all.

Of course, we’re not aware of most of the reasons why we do what we do. We generally decide at an emotional level, and then we rationalize it with our logical minds after the decision’s already made. It is an influence that I’ve thought a lot about, and this velvet rope thing does have some merit.

I really started thinking about it differently around 2012 or so. This was after social media went mainstream. This was also the time when we had a lot of freemium software as a service out there, where you basically could register for a version of the software. Or of course, you could register for Facebook or Twitter, and you had to do that in order to access the experience that was being offered. Even though these are free services, I think the access aspect of it provides a psychological incentive that tells us this is something good.

Even beyond that, I think the fact that we have become used to the idea that we must register with an email address in order to have access to anything that’s really good on the Internet, even if it’s free, has a bigger effect than just psychological in the sense that, that’s just the way things are.

The Intersection Between Perceived Value and Actual Value

Around that time, around 2012, my hypotheses was that people are used to registering. They know they have to give an email address to enjoy the access that they’re being provided, and that’s a positive experience in the minds of your prospects.

On the other hand, after 10, 15 years of unscrupulous email practices out there by certain people — not everyone, certainly — the whole opt-in to our newsletter thing from a service provider such as yourself gives the perception of, “I’m about to be spammed, and I don’t want to be spammed.”

Again, it’s not fair. I doubt any of you are spammers, but we’re talking about perception here. Perception is everything. My hypotheses at that time was that we could create a space that is behind a member wall. It’s free to access, but that registering for this valuable information would act in a way that was more valuable, or at least perceived to be more valuable, than an opt-in concept.

If you look around today, it’s fairly common among journalism sites. For example, the Harvard Business Journal, you get four free articles, and then you’re prompted to register for free. Very smart. They’re not hitting you with a payment wall like some newspapers do. I think that’s a mistake. What they’re doing is getting an email address so that they can communicate with you on a regular basis with new content, but also to make offers to buy the subscription. That’s exactly what we’re doing here. You’ll be in good company with the Harvard Business Journal and people like that.

We’ve been doing this since 2013. It’s worked so well, I think, because we over-delivered with actual value — we’ve been talking about that the entire course — but we also enhanced the perceived value. I can hear some of you out there saying, “Well, if the actual value is so great, what does it matter about perceived value?”

It matters a lot. I’ve seen time and time again where there’s really good information just not being ‘sold’ correctly because people don’t realize you have to sell free in this day and age if you’re asking for an email address. This is similar to a social network or an application that I have to register for enhances the perceived value, and then you back it up with actual value.

Why You Need to Get Prospects Out of the Inbox

Here’s another thing. Even if you don’t buy into this free pay-wall concept that I’m giving you here, you want to get them out of the inbox. You should not publish, in my opinion, full body emails as your content. You should sell them opening it with your subject line and then sell them on clicking a link. Again, through our testing, I think the perceived value is less when they know you’re sending them to a freely available piece of content on the web, even if you have a hard-to-guess URL.

I’m going to continue to try to convince you that the access model is best. But at minimum, keep in mind and make note that you do want to get them to click out of the inbox into an environment that’s not cluttered with their to-do list, effectively.

Case Study: 400 Percent Increase in Email Subscriptions with an Access Approach

Some of you have heard me talk about this. In 2013 over at Copyblogger, we switched our entire email strategy. We went from an opt-in newsletter concept that promised one of those free courses where we send you a link and the lessons are just out there, accessible from the link in the email address, and we went to a content library concept.

The idea was that we could take a lot of our prior content, repurpose it into a better format in the form of ebooks that were available as PDFs, but also for the major ebook readers, and that, that would be our new call to action.

What happened exceeded even my expectations. We saw a 400 percent increase in opt-ins from the new strategy. That was not just short term. It persisted for years. I don’t know the exact percentage today, but we get hundreds of new email subscribers every single day on autopilot. It’s kind of amazing, which allows us to then implement sequences that highlight various products of ours.

For you, of course, you’re going to want to attract as many of the right people as you can with your opt-in offer — your registration and access offer, I should say — then, of course, convert them into clients.

That was our content library stacked with tons of high-value ebooks. Continues to work well from an opt-in percentage. What we’ve found since then is that a more persuasive approach — meaning not just how many people sign up, but how many people actually buy in the near term — is with an online course approach. It’s more perceived value. It’s more actual value. Most importantly, compared to other strategies that may get you an email address but don’t convert them to a client, you’ve got more influence.

Benefits of the Logged-In Experience

Finally, here’s the last thing from a technological standpoint why you really want to consider a membership concept — beyond all these psychological and value perceptions that we’re creating. From the standpoint of marketing automation, having someone who logs in as a member adds a crucial element to the marketing automation mix. And you’re hearing a lot more about people talking about the ‘identity level’ these days.

Typical marketing automation relies on cookies. You get set with a cookie, and that tells the software that you are this certain person. But what happens when you access this site from a new device? There are tracking links that you can use, but people go around that stuff all the time when they’re on a different device. You have no idea what they’re doing at that point.

They could have been doing serious exploratory searching from an information standpoint that tells you, “Wait a minute. This person is more qualified, from a lead scoring standpoint, than other prospects,” and yet you don’t know that. That defeats the purpose of what we’re trying to accomplish with marketing automation — which is determining what experience that prospect is looking for and then delivering it.

Cookies still have their place in part of marketing automation, but when you combine that with a registration and access standpoint, when they log in to interact with the content that you’ve provided for them, you can not only track the progress that they’ve made — for example, through an online course — you can also see what other behavior they may do on your general site, in general.

Think about that, the logged-in experience. It’s better from a psychological standpoint. It’s better from an influence standpoint, and it’s better from a technology standpoint so that you’re not seeing people fall through the cracks.

Of course, all of this is easily done with the Rainmaker Platform. I won’t give you too much of a pitch. Head over there, and try the free trial yourself at RainmakerPlatform.com.

Again, I promised you that I wasn’t going to teach you anything that couldn’t be done in other ways outside of the platform. I’m going to put together a list of plugins that you can use if you have a WordPress site that you can get all of this done as well. I’m going to do that at the end of the course because, frankly, I haven’t built a site with WordPress in a couple years because we use our own technology. So I’m going to make sure I get the best current recommendations out there, and I will share that with you.

Up Next: Authority Content

All right, thanks for tuning in. We’ll be back next time talking about authority content. This is really where we start kicking in that influential information-sharing that makes you the only logical choice for your prospects. Until then, stay cool and keep going.

The Transcript

Lesson 3: Attraction: How to Entice at the Top of the Funnel

Voiceover: Welcome to Get More Clients With Smarter E-mail Marketing, a free audio course presented by Unemployable with Brian Clark. For the full experience, head over to Unemployable.com and sign up for the Unemployable e-mail newsletter, the week’s top resources for independent businesspeople, personally handcrafted by serial entrepreneur and content marketing pioneer, Brian Clark. That s Unemployable.com.

Brian Clark: Everyone, welcome back to lesson three of our E-mail Marketing for Getting More Clients course. This one is called, “Attraction: How to Entice at the Top of the Funnel.” Back in the olden days, if you will, people who started out with early forms of Internet advertising — mainly pay-per-click and Google. Anyone remember Overture? That was Yahoo’s pay-per-click product. They used to be able to drive traffic right to whatever the product or service was and people would buy. Ah, the good old days. Right?

It didn t take long early into this century where pay-per-click pros started to realize that conversion rates were dropping off and that the way to bring them back up was not to drive traffic to the product or service, but to a landing page that would opt in to an e-mail list. Then, through the course of an e-mail sequence, sell the product or service that way.

These days — at least up until recent years — you saw the exact same strategy on Facebook, with people using Facebook ads to drive people to a landing page with a “lead magnet” to opt in. Even that is starting not to work very well at all. We’ve tested quite a bit of this this year, and our results resemble what we’re hearing from others, which is you can’t just go straight to the landing page. You can’t just go straight to the opt-in anymore.

Now, this is perfectly fine with me. Back in 2006 when I was really trying to build up the Copyblogger audience, about three months in I tried several things and I just didn t have the big break I was looking for. What I did was craft a free report on how copywriting and content marketing tactics could get bloggers more traffic. Now here’s the interesting thing. I didn t require an e-mail address for that report. I just put it out there in the wild.

Now, some interesting things happened there. First of all, I got tons of links, which is great for SEO, which is great for traffic down the road. It got passed around a lot, which drove a lot of click traffic back to Copyblogger. But the greatest thing it did was act as a sales letter for subscribing to Copyblogger, because I revealed a lot of stuff, but you can only teach so much, even in a 10-page PDF report. The call to action at the end was “subscribe to Copyblogger.” That was my breakout moment.

That s why, by the end of that first year, I had developed such a large audience. That was the catalyst. And effectively, it’s what we have to do now, I would say, in line with my comments from before about over-delivering. I think I’m just wired that way, but now we all have to be wired that way. You have to lead with content before the opt-in. From a persuasion standpoint, this is highly effective. After all, we’re not just trying to get an e-mail address. An e-mail address by itself is worthless. It’s the person behind that e-mail address contacting you and hiring you and paying you money, right?

Begin the Sales Process Before You Even Ask for an Email

What I would do in your field, at any given time, is start looking around at what your competition is doing. Don t be surprised if it’s pretty bad or pretty mediocre. You’ll probably find, though, there will be a handful of exceptional examples out there. The great thing about doing client services work is a lot of times you’ll be geographically centered, so you can look at people in other areas and get inspiration and maybe even a little more from what they seem to be doing and use that in your own area as well.

You could also be positioned differently from someone who doesn t have a geographic boundary. For example, you work with a certain type of client and they’re using their techniques with another group altogether. Just be careful about copying what someone else is doing, because you don t know if it’s working well. But it is a great way to get some indications of value and how other people are positioning themselves. Opt in to their feeds and check out how they’re doing it. They may not be doing everything perfectly, but that doesn t mean you can’t get some ideas from them.

The great thing about our over-delivering need these days of leading with content is that we’re really beginning the sales process before we even get the e-mail. That s a great thing because it’s completely invisible. What people are looking for is valuable information that addresses their problems and desires. If you do that, it does have the effect of beginning the sales process on them, but you’re beginning these pinpoints of influence that we’ve talked about, even before you ve asked them to do anything. The first thing you ask them to do is not to hire you, of course, it’s to register or opt in for some valuable information. Just remember, you’re trying to do more than just get the opt-in. You’re framing yourself as the inevitable solution, again, before you ve ever asked for a single thing from them.

Okay. Now what’s the key to making this high-value initial piece of content, the one that they first come across in order to become familiar with you and be presented with the opportunity to deepen the relationship with an opt-in? You ve got to identify the pain point that is at the very beginning of a buyer’s journey. Sometimes this is, “Who do I hire?” which, of course, you’re hoping to be that person. But sometimes it’s different than that. There are many situations where people need to be convinced that what they’re trying to achieve is doable in the first place.

Think about this. It’s very difficult to get a home loan these days compared to, I don t know, 2007, 2006. We know how that turned out. That s a problem where there are certain people — they may be first-time buyers, they may be relocating to a more expensive area, whatever the case may be — they’re not even sure if they can get a loan. If you’re a mortgage broker, you start by enabling the ability to believe that it’s possible. You don t jump straight into details that are farther along right there. If they don t make it past that, it’s not that they just don t hire you, they’re not going to do anything whatsoever. Keep that in mind. You have to understand who you’re going after and what is the first problem that they’re facing on their journey.

Now, of course, people want the end thing. If they’re buying a house, they want the house. If they’re looking for a web designer, they want a new website. We know this. But what do they also want? They want to have a great experience. They don t want to have a horrible time buying that house. They don t want to have one of those disaster stories that get passed around about how their designer was non-responsive and delivered a terrible website late.

Remember, experience is everything. And here’s the beauty of this type of marketing: you’re beginning the experience before you know really they’re even there. You’re beginning the experience with them with your marketing because your marketing is valuable and addresses the problem they have first. Their first problem is not whether you’re the right person to hire. It will always be something before that.

Position Yourself as the Prospect’s Advocate

When you’re thinking about creating this type of content, what I want you to do — and this is as important a mental adjustment as you’ll ever make — you want to position yourself as their advocate. You’re looking out for them, and that has to come across. It can’t be self-promotional. It has to be almost just giving for the sake of it.

That is difficult for some people — 15, 20 years ago, people were downright antagonistic to it. Now that we know content marketing is the way to go, more people accept it, but they still have a little trouble. You’ve worked hard to develop your expertise. You do know more than the people you’re trying to serve, but that doesn t matter. The key word is “serve.” Without them, you don t make any money. We’re all like this. We need the people who buy our goods and services to feel benefit from them, and that s why we’re in business. Never forget that.

The key here with this top-of-the-funnel content — tell the “why” and then promise the “how.” Let me explain what I mean by that. You’re telling why they need certain information to arm themselves, if you will, as they go on this journey toward whatever end result they’re trying to achieve, whether that be purchasing a house, getting a new website, getting their taxes done, whatever the case may be. Tell them why in the sense that, “This is why you need to look out for yourself and I’m here for you.” Then we can get to the point where we say, “And I’m going to tell you how to address all of these issues that I’ve just laid out for you in this initial piece of content.” That will be the opt-in content. Okay?

Very important that you teach them as if they have to do it themselves. This is the silliest objection I’ve ever heard over the years, “I can’t tell these people all this stuff. They don t need me then.” I’ve heard this from lawyers who are officers of the court. I’ve heard this from brokers who are licensed to do real estate transactions, which are, for most people, the most expensive and complex transaction they ever do. And yet you get people — even people like web designers. If you teach me what you know about web design, I still can’t do it. I still want to hire you. That s the point. This type of marketing is so effective because you aren’t holding back and you’re using the word “you.” You’re telling them, “Here’s what you need to look out for in this type of transaction,” not, “Here’s how I will help you in this kind of transaction.”

You may think that that s not very savvy marketing, but it actually is. What you’re doing is getting them to firmly convince themselves that they want to hire you and that you really had nothing to do with it. Now, we know that s not true. Even though we’re providing this amazing value, we are touching on these very powerful forms of influence. But, again, it’s invisible. All they see is that someone is addressing their problems, and they’re somehow coming to the conclusion that you’re the right person.

Okay. Again, this entire process at the top of the funnel with becoming their advocate and positioning yourself in a certain way is really a very subtle form of “us versus them”. “Smart people like you need to know this because you don t want X, Y, or Z to happen like it happens to other people.” In this case, the “them” is perhaps the service providers who won’t take as good care of them. That s the implication, certainly. The other “them” is the less-than-savvy consumer who made the wrong choice of web designer, real estate agent, or whatever the case may be.

This may seem a little esoteric right now. I’m going to give you several examples of this so that you can start thinking about how you’d like to position yourself. When you figure that out, these top-of-funnel-type articles, reports, whatever you decide to do, come into focus really quickly, and then we can move on into getting them onto an e-mail list and completing the process of turning them from a prospect into a client.

Okay. Back in the day with my real estate businesses, the “why” was agency. Let me explain what I mean by that. In real estate, if you just call the person on the sign in the yard, you are contacting a person who represents the seller. That puts you at a disadvantage right from the beginning. Further, even if you sign something that says they can co-represent you and the seller, you’re still at a disadvantage because the seller got all the good stuff up front and you’re coming in later looking for someone to guide you when you’re probably not going to get the best deal.

This was my positioning. I was heavily focused on, “Here’s what you need to know before you call that number on the sign in the front yard. What you need to do is call a buyer agent who represents you,” and gave all those reasons. Then I took it a step further. “You need to hire someone who is an exclusive buyer agent, someone who doesn t take listings at all. Because technically, if they have listings, they have a fiduciary duty to those sellers to try to sell that house to you even if it’s completely wrong.” Of course, what kind of agency were we? We were an exclusive buyer’s agent.

That was a way of using something so boring as agency law to really put up some red flags for people that, one, maybe they didn t completely understand. Or number two, they kind of understood, but you just made the implication of what that meant crystal clear and they’d now like to learn a little bit more from you and hopefully hire you.

Let’s say you’re a designer and you take the position — let’s say you ve got an article that says, “Web design is not just about pretty pictures.” Then you proceed to outline how some great websites — the whole Flash trend was a painful example — are just pretty, but they’re completely ineffective. A really savvy web designer is schooled in the principles of usability, of conversion. After all, if you have a business client, they are trying to develop business with that website. Again, you’re basically saying, “Some web designers are only concerned about aesthetics and coolness and being clever, and yet I understand that this is a business project and I’m looking out for your economic success, not just a pretty picture.”

Let’s say you’re an app developer and you write about warning people about all-too-common a scenario in which an entire feature-rich app is built in total seclusion without any feedback from anyone and it turns out that you ve wasted six figures and no one wants this app. You start with that horror story and then you lead into things like Lean and Agile software development whereby you build and iterate in smaller chunks, getting feedback along the way and making sure that if the project’s going to fail it does early and inexpensively, or you’re going to get it right with the right amount of feedback.

Trust me, that is a wonderful way to attract clients, when you put their best interest first. Again, you’re their advocate. “You could make an expensive mistake. I could benefit from that expensive mistake, but I don t want that to happen to you.” That s powerful stuff right there before they ve even given you an e-mail address. Keep that in mind.

Then, for the copywriters and content marketing freelance writers out there, please don t give writing tips. The people that you want to hire you don t care. In fact, they don t want to hire a writer if they didn t have to. What they want to do is increase sales. Understanding that, you need to explain how sales increase by providing value, by inserting these six influence elements that we’ve already talked about.

The same type of stuff that we’re talking about in this course, you have to teach to them. Notice we haven’t said one word about writing an e-mail yet, because ultimately we’re talking about trust, we’re talking about authority, and we’re talking about persuasion in a way that is wrapped up in independent value to the degree that no one really feels sold to. That s what we’re trying to do.

Enter the Conversation That’s Already Playing in Their Heads

Now, let me leave you with one thing that may surprise you. In my case, back in the day, 80 percent of the people that hired me — they understood the agency stuff. They understood that they could get screwed by calling the guy in the sign. I was entering the conversation that was already playing in their head and clarifying things for them that, “Yes, this is how it works. Yes, I’ve chosen to represent people like you and to avoid people like them out of good business.” See what I’m getting at?

Then 20 percent of people were like, “Ah, I didn t really understand all that stuff. Really, thank you for teaching me that.” It’s surprising how many people, how many clients of that web designer understand that they need to be thinking about conversion. They ve heard that, but they don t necessarily understand how it works in design. You become their person. The app developer — they ve heard of this whole Lean startup thing and the Agile software development, they don t understand what it means. You just brought it home to them in dollars and cents.

Then for the writers, again, you are showing them that you are not some frustrated poet that wants to get paid to scribble together some beautiful prose. You write, you create words — salesmanship in print that change the bottom line. That type of person knows that inherently, and they’re just going to be completely refreshed that they heard it from you. You want to enter the conversation that’s already playing in their head for the most part.

Think carefully about the kind of clients you ve had, the kind of clients you ve had the most success with. What was their knowledge level? What do you need to speak to them about? That type of person who’s out there as a prospect right now. It’s great that you have an existing business with clients because they are your greatest source of, number one, “Here’s the type of person I’d like to get fifty more of and here’s the other person I’d rather never work with again.” Then, figuring out what the commonalities are — especially from an information and knowledge basis — so that you can position yourself accordingly on a go-forward basis.

Speaking of the six influence elements that we touched on, we haven’t even asked for the e-mail address yet, but we’ve already established authority. We know what we’re talking about and that we’re an advocate for the prospect. Affinity or liking, your positioning. Like I said, when you enter that conversation that s already in their head, you have matched their worldview. That is a very powerful affinity concept which we’ll explore in more detail when we get to that lesson.

Reciprocity, of course, you ve given them something before you ask for anything whatsoever as opposed to the landing page approach, which is some clever copy and you immediately asking them for something so you can give them something. This flips the switch on that. Again, you may have gotten away with less in the past. These days you ve got to give first, and then you can go ahead and ask for the favor in return. When you think about it, the favor is, “Let me send you more great stuff like this,” which is weighted in their favor. But we understand that if they become a client, that is multiple thousand dollars in fees for you, and then you’re getting what you’re after also.

Finally, here’s something that we didn t touch on except for when I talked about that report back in 2006. When you share, even if you’re doing paid ads on Facebook, some people are going to like that post. They’re going to share that post. Some people will do that without even clicking and reading, it’s crazy. The people who are really interested will see that sharing and liking, and there is some social proof for you that this is some good stuff. If you really hit it out of the park with the people you’re trying to reach, you could get massive social proof and sharing out of it, which obviously extends your reach and will ultimately build a stronger and hopefully more vibrant e-mail list when we get to that point.

Okay. This episode, as all, is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform. It’s the best way to get a powerful website, powerful e-mail, and sophisticated marketing automation all in one completely integrated, secure, and maintenance-free package. Check it out at RainmakerPlatform.com and take your free trial.

In our next lesson, we’re going to shift a little bit along the 6A framework from Attraction to Access, which is kind of a tech concept, but it’s really a psychological concept, and I’ll explain in detail why it’s important. Until then, enjoy and keep going.

The Transcript

Lesson 2: How to Create Persuasive Email Sequences

Voiceover: Welcome to Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing. A free audio course presented by Unemployable, with Brian Clark. For the full experience, head over to Unemployable.com, and sign up for the Unemployable email newsletter, the week’s top resources for independent business people, personally handcrafted by serial entrepreneur and content marketing pioneer, Brian Clark. That’s Unemployable.com.

Brian Clark: Hey, welcome back to Get More Clients with Smarter Email Marketing. This is Lesson Two and I am Brian Clark, CEO of Rainmaker Digital, founder of Copyblogger and the guy behind all things Unemployable.

The Art of Persuasion

Today we’re talking about how to create persuasive email sequences and the heart of this is really, What’s persuasion? What are we really trying to accomplish here? Before we write a word, before we create a sequence of compelling messages, how are we going to ultimately get to our end goal which is convince someone to work with us. I want to tell you a true story and this happened to me right after I recorded the first lesson of this free course.

For a couple of months now I’ve been getting back into general shape after letting things go a bit. Work gets in the way, you know how it goes. But I hadn’t done any kind of strength training at all for about a year. In fact between you and me I hate it, but it’s been about a year. So first day back at the gym and it showed, I’m sure. But while I’m over there doing my second set of deadlifts, one of the gym’s personal trainers was standing near by. When I finished he said, “Hey, can I show you a couple of things?” I’m like, “Yeah, I could probably use some help, I’m sure,” and he pointed out some things. He’s like, “It looks like that your hips are really tight and that’s affecting your form and that could not only diminish your results but also you could hurt your back,” so he’s got my attention.

He has me do a couple of exercises, really I guess they are stretches that loosened up my hips a bit and then I did my third set. You know what? The guy knew what he was talking about. It made a difference and of course that to me is important. He’s also a nice guy. He was pleasant to talk to. He didn’t rub me the wrong way. We got along.

The interesting thing next was that a client of his, a personal training client, politely interrupted to ask a question. They had a brief conversation that I listened in on. Seems like the guy was happy with the training he’d been receiving so far and that’s encouraging. Next up he said, “Hey, why don’t we get together in a couple of days and I can help you out with your next workout?” “Cool, I’ll think about it.”

At this point the guy’s not once asked me for money, brought up me hiring him, nothing, and then finally I’m like, “Yeah, how about 3:30 on Thursday?” And he said, “I can’t do 3:30 but I can do 2:30, does that work for you?” I’m like, “Yup.” In the back of my head I’m going, “Yeah, I’m kind of my own boss, so …” One of the benefits of being CEO. You’re thinking, “Okay, Brian, great, great story bro. What s that got to do with email marketing, content marketing, everything?” The point being that a personal trainer, and this was in person, sure, but a personal trainer is effectively an information business. It really is.

It’s providing guidance based on experience, knowledge, authority, if you will, that guide you to get the results that you’re looking for. It’s really not that different, and I want to tie all this together at the end of the lesson, so stick with me. But before then we need to talk about the fundamental aspects of persuasion and what that means. What does persuasion mean? It’s not manipulation. It’s not coercion. I’m a firm believer that without ugliness there is no way to make a human being do what they don’t want to do. What you can do is take a person who wants to do something and get them to choose you to help them do it. That’s what we’re trying to accomplish here.

The Six Elements of Influence

When it comes down to it there are six eternal elements of influence, of persuasion, and if any of you have read Influence by Dr. Robert Cialdini you know what I’m talking about here.

Now, let’s take a break here. Some of you are going, “Oh wait a minute, I’ve heard this before.” Have you heard it, understood it, and are executing on it? Then if not, stick with me. Maybe some of you have been taken in by some self-styled internet marketing guru who said, “I’ve got the new thing. The new, new thing.” We’re all wired for that, right, as human beings. And then you said, “Wait a minute. This isn’t new at all.” Hey, I’ll be the first to agree with you.

These things go back to the days of the ancient Greeks, to Aristotle’s Rhetoric. They simply observed human behavior and figured out how to influence people. In the 1970s social scientists in the United States did a whole raft of experiments and found out, “Yes, those Greeks were on to something and we proved it through our scientific method approach.” And that’s where Robert Cialdini’s book Influence came from. Then the only thing that’s new is that now we have neuroscience and we can literally do MRI scans and see these elements of persuasion working on people and see what parts of the brain light up when they are enforced, okay?

Other than that nothing new, but unless you understand these things completely and can execute on them, you don’t really have a shot at making a truly persuasive email sequence. So let’s go through this. The six elements of influence are reciprocity, authority, liking, social proof, commitment and consistency, and scarcity. Okay, let’s go through these each one at a time.

Reciprocity

Reciprocity. Basically you do something for someone, people tend to return the favor, and this is why content marketing at its very essence works. You give people something useful and in their brain they like you better already. Now, this is a different concept than actual liking you, but they feel like they owe you something back and this has been an amazing aspect of my entire career as an entrepreneur. I give and give and give but I am flabbergasted by what I get in return. And I don’t do it from some cynical standpoint. Giving to people, as we alluded to in the first lesson, over-delivering is just kind of how I’m wired I guess.

But it needs to be how you’re wired too, because no matter how much you give, what you receive in return is amazing. Reciprocity is like this foundational aspect of society itself, of civilization. We wouldn’t have even gotten this far if the innate need to return a favor wasn’t there, and trust me, this is the root of everything that will come back to you as an entrepreneur in multitude.

Authority

Next is authority. Now, people tend to obey authority figures and we think of the police or your teacher or your parents or all that kind of thing. And this is a different kind of authority because that type of authority, your parents, the police, the government, your teachers, that was institutional authority. It was bestowed upon them, you were in that system, and you had to comply. What we’re talking about here really is earned authority, demonstrated authority, not authority that you claim, not where you say, “I am an expert in so and so. It’s where you provide content, information, that demonstrates your authority. This is a very important point, and we’re going to come back to it over and over.

Liking

Next up is liking. We just like to do business with people we like. It’s almost a glitch in our personality. I mean, we tend to think higher of people that are attractive. We want to associate with people we like even if the guy down the street who’s unlikable is actually better at it, right? It’s one of those things that you just really can’t get around. We are not rational beings and being likable is a very important aspect of your authority. That likable expert is key in this day and age. Now, you may be thinking, “Wait a minute. It seems like no one respects experts anymore.” They do if they are their experts. That’s something we’re going to come back to when we talk about affinity content in the very near future.

Let’s talk a little bit about social proof. People do things that they see other people doing. They are influenced by, Is this something that other people find acceptable? Again, a glitch of human nature. It may not always cause us to make the right decisions, but it is something that we look for. You look in terms of testimonials. You’re looking in terms of what other people are saying about you more than what you say about yourself. That goes back to not claiming to be an expert. It’s much better if other people are saying you are.

Commitment and Consistency

Next up is commitment and consistency. Once people commit to something one way or another, they are more likely to follow through with that commitment and continue with it on a consistent basis. Now, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” The keyword being foolish. If you’re consistent just for the sake of it, you might be making a mistake. If you’re consistent in a good way with a solution that is viable then you’re just being a good reliable human being. We tend to actually appreciate people who are consistent in society as opposed to people who are kind of flaky and don’t do what they say they are going to do.

Scarcity

Finally, scarcity. The big one. Scarcity will always generate demand. Saying an offer is available for a limited time only encourages more sales. Taking something away from people works. In fact, we are wired to avoid loss more than we are to gain. Again, a glitch, but it’s just the way it is and if you ignore scarcity you do it at your own peril.

The Six Elements in Action

Okay, so after going through that, let’s revisit my interaction with the personal trainer. He offered me free advice. That’s reciprocity. I’m already feeling like this guy is giving me something for nothing and inherently, whether I like it or not, I feel a little obligated to this guy. He knew what he was talking about. That’s authority. If you demonstrate, not claim, he never once claimed anything, he demonstrated to me through the hip exercises that he knew what he was talking about because I felt it for myself. Nice guy. Liking. If he were unlikable it would have changed my entire opinion of him. You know that’s true.

When the client walked up and I can’t say that he planned it this way because that’s just not how it works. This was clearly an impromptu thing. It was really kind of mundane, but the fact that this guy clearly appreciated his relationship with the trainer … you could glean that. He didn’t say anything glowing. He didn’t say, “Hey, you should hire this guy.” It was just clear from a social proof standpoint that this guy had clients and they were happy with him. Now, the next thing that he did is really important and this probably is part of his client development repertoire.

He asked me to agree to meet him. No obligation. No cost but to meet him at a certain time for a session. Commitment and consistency, right? I agreed and I’m going to show up. Period. That’s the way it works. Unless he did something completely outrageous to violate the liking aspect and the authority aspect, I’m probably going to stick with him. Then finally, this was very subtle on the scarcity front, but I proposed a time to him and he said, “No, I can’t do that but I can do this.” Very subtle, but an aspect of scarcity. “My time is valuable, I can’t accommodate you at that time, but I can at another time.” Very important.

This is all of the kind of things that you’re trying to incorporate into the messages you give your prospects. Did I feel sold to? No. How did I spot all those things? This is what I do. Right? The only reason I spotted every element of persuasion in this interaction is because this is what I do for a living. Otherwise, not a hint of pressure, of salesy-ness, anything. Nothing like that. That’s how you want your content in your email messages to feel. You’re creating an experience of, “This is my person.”

Quality over Quantity

Here’s one thing I want to point out that’s incredibly important because we live in a world with people, these gigantic email list of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people. Copyblogger has something like 350,000 subscribers. You don’t need that. Back when I ran my real estate brokerage, at any given time I never had more than a thousand people on my list. This includes the relocation people. I kept in touch with those people for an entire year from the date they signed up. Never more than a thousand people and yet we were drawing in fifty grand or more a month in revenue. The right people, that’s who you’re trying to attract.

Let me give it to you this way. Why did this guy’s spiel work on me? Because in my mind I had already considered hiring a personal trainer. He did not convince me to hire a personal trainer. He convinced me to hire him. That’s what you’re trying to do. Get five of the right people and two of them turn into clients, that’s what you want. Okay? Extrapolate that into I don’t know, thirty very, very, very good leads a month and you are as happy as you can be. Do not think that list size matters. List quality matters. I’m going to leave you with that and then we will get it rolling even more in depth on Lesson Three. Until then, keep going.

The Transcript

Lesson 1: Get More Clients with Smarter Email Marketing

Voiceover: Welcome to Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing. A free audio course presented by Unemployable, with Brian Clark. For the full experience, head over to Unemployable.com, and sign up for the Unemployable email newsletter, the week’s top resources for independent business people, personally handcrafted by serial entrepreneur and content marketing pioneer, Brian Clark. That’s Unemployable.com.

Brian Clark: Hey there everyone, and welcome to Lesson One of Get More Clients With Smarter Email Marketing, an audio course that is brought to you by Unemployable.com. I’m your host, Brian Clark. I’m the Founder and CEO or Rainmaker Digital. Many of you know me as the Founder of Copyblogger. We’re also the company behind the Rainmaker Platform, StudioPress, Digital Commerce Institute , and lots of other great stuff.

I do need to tell you, real quick, that this special audio course is brought to you by the Rainmaker Platform. If you’re looking for a way to build a powerful website, do sophisticated email marketing that we’re covering in this course, and tying it all together with marketing automation, then you really need to head over to RainmakerPlatform.com. Check it out, take the free trial, and see if it works for you.

Now, I do want to make clear that this course is no way dependent on you using the Rainmaker Platform. We just think you’ll find that it is the easiest, most powerful, most cost effective way to employ an integrated and complete online marketing solution and strategy with email at the center. Again, if you want to check it out, RainmakerPlatform.com.

The Prehistoric Days of the Internet

Let me give you a little bit of background, because I have been doing email marketing for a long time. In fact, let’s go back to the prehistoric days of the internet, 1998. That’s when I first got started, founded my first company, published my first website.

That website, of course, was really a mechanism for getting people on an email list. Back at that time, before blogs broke out, people published content in ezines, which are really just email newsletters, and naturally, those are still around to this day. In fact, there are several venture capital backed email businesses that are sprouting up everywhere. Email is still that relevant and still that powerful, as we’ll explore a little bit in this introductory lesson.

That first business that I founded was completely built around ezines, around content published in email newsletter format. You may be thinking, if you’re familiar with my story, “Brian, isn’t that the one business out of the nine you’ve started, that failed?” Indeed it was.

Primarily, that’s because I was under the misconception, like a lot of people at the time, that the only way to make money from content was to sell advertising. It turned out that that’s a very offline concept that hasn’t worked as well as people would like in the online space. We all know the struggles that publishers have with banner ads and other forms of advertising, such as that, but it’s okay, because in 1999, I read a book called, Permission Marketing, by Seth Godin, and I really came to understand how the internet was different than offline, but also how it was the same. What was more analogous, it was more of a direct marketing medium. Not in the junk mail sense, but in the sense that you could establish a direct relationship without any third-party, any intermediary with your prospects, and then turn them into customers and clients.

At that point, I figured out that the only thing I really had to sell was my services. I was a licensed attorney, I was not incredibly fond of practicing law, but I was fond of eating. At that point, with the first business not really bringing in any money, I published another email newsletter, this one about legal issues related to the internet. Now, I was only a fourth year attorney, but a lot of the more senior attorneys, the ones who developed the business, the rainmakers, they didn’t know anything about the internet, and I was neck deep in it. Learning by trial and error, at that point, because there weren’t blogs, and conferences, and courses, and all of that kind of thing to tell you what to do. You had to figure it out on your own.

Anyway, I started sharing what I knew by email, and it was amazing. I started getting people wanting to hire me and pay me lots of money. In fact, I got so many potential legal clients that I was able to turn away the business that didn’t seem as enticing, or as lucrative, or interesting, frankly, and only focus on the best clients. I ended up working with a couple of lucrative clients on retainer. Now, this is an important lesson, in itself. For me, it was easy to work that exclusivity magic, because I honestly did not want to build a law firm. I did not want to practice law any more than I had to. I accidentally learned part of what makes for a service provider that has a great business and a great roster of clients, and that is turning away the least desirable clients and working with the best.

Now, you have that luxury when you’re like me, and you’re not trying to take too many clients or when you have so many prospects coming in the door, that you’re able to be selective. That’s the goal we’re trying to achieve here. After that initial success, I think that’s when I knew I was an entrepreneur. The fact that I could develop business by simply writing and publishing it in email form, on the internet, it was revolutionary to me. I set my sights, at that point, on doing something that involved not law, and not just selling my time. A more entrepreneurial endeavor, where I was able to leverage my marketing expertise and get other people, form an organization, and go from there.

I decided that the real estate industry was the way to go. In 2001, I set up my first real estate brokerage and it was, essentially, nothing more than websites. There was no real, physical location. There were no ads on bus benches. There was none of the typical realtor marketing stuff, because, frankly, that was distasteful to me, number one.

Number two, what I knew about online marketing and what I knew that the competition didn’t know, made it like shooting fish in a barrel from a marketing standpoint. I set this up and it was amazing because I was so motivated to succeed, you might say that I over-delivered with what I did and from a content marketing standpoint, years before we called it content marketing, but that’s the theme that I think is important for you to understand.

I was told by people, “Oh, you’re going to try to be a broker. Wow, it’s going to take you four years to make a living.” I was making six figure, ten grand a month, in four months. It’s the marketing, it literally is. That’s the key to everything. The point being that, over-delivering is your goal. Back when I did real estate, I shifted from a simple newsletter concept to automated dripped out courses, based on what type of home buyer that you were. This is an early form of what we call segmentation. We’ll get into more sophisticated instances of that, but that’s, in essence, the heart of it. It’s, “Who are you talking to? What are their unique concerns?” And give them only that information, so it’s a more personal experience than a one size fits all blast model, if you will.

I do want to stress this over-delivering thing, because the things I did in 2001 to 2005, are still fundamentally viable today, and yet it’s all about how you execute on this strategy that I’m going to share with you. The good news is, compared to the duck tape approach I had to take back then, the technology is amazing and you can do incredible things. Just keep that in mind. Even when I started Copyblogger, I took the same approach of over-delivering before I ever asked anyone for any money. That allowed Copyblogger to grow very quickly, relative to other people in the field at that time. I think it’s one of the secrets to my success, which is, “Give more than people are expecting in a unique way.” We’ll get into that in more detail.

Marketing Doesn t Need to be a Struggle

What I’m trying to do here is solve your marketing problem. For a lot of people, marketing is the struggle. You’re always worried if you’re going to have enough business in the next month. You’re hunting and gathering, instead of having a steady flow of prospects coming in. To the point where, as I said, you get to pick and choose whom you want to work with and on what financial terms. That really is the amazing thing about a good service business. What you’re going to do is create a lead machine that keeps you busy at all times. You’re never worried about where the clients are coming from. The only thing I would warn, at this point, from my experience is, make sure you’ve got your processes down, your onboarding, your client management, all of that stuff.

I was incredibly good at marketing with the real estate business, but I was bad at processes and management. Now, that doesn’t mean that I didn’t take care of my clients, I did. I just worked 18-hour days to handle it all, and I didn’t delegate, and I just did a lot of things wrong. I learned from those mistakes, and a lot of people make the same mistakes, but I’m telling you, if we can succeed here in getting you this lead machine, just make sure you can handle it or make sure you’re brave enough to turn away business.

Why Email is Still Relevant

We kind of alluded to the fact that email is as relevant today as it was 18 years ago when I started, but let me just share some stats with you to make sure that you’re on board with me, because it’s phenomenal how many times email has been predicted to be dead, as far back as 2005, 2006 and how wrong people have been.

Originally, RSS was supposed to kill email. Social media was supposed to kill email. Not the case, not at all. Here’s some data for you to chew on. “People are six times more likely to get a click-through from email than a Tweet.” That’s from Campaign Monitor. Email … This is one of my favorite stats here, “Email is forty times more effective at acquiring a new client than Facebook or Twitter. Email has the highest conversion rate for purchases at 66%, when compared to social and even the former holy grail, direct mail.” That’s from the Direct Marketing Association. Then, finally, I want to share this with you, because this goes to the heart of what we’re going to focus on in this course.

“Over 75% of email revenue is generated by triggered campaigns rather than one size fits all email blasts.” That’s also from the Direct Marketing Association. What do we mean by triggered? This means that you are sending a certain message, certain content at certain times, based on people’s interests, actions, perhaps demographics, world views, et cetera. This is the ability to tailor your communication with a prospect, based on who they are and what they do.

Again, what I alluded to earlier about segmentation, I had content for a certain type of person, but it couldn’t change. There was one sequence and until they clicked to contact me, to hire me, they basically got that sequence no matter what they did.

Today, we can do much better than that and we’ll cover that, in detail.

Identifying the 6A Framework

Finally, I want to go, really quickly, over the framework, the strategic framework that we will be examining in this course, in order for you to implement this on your own. Really, what we’re looking at here, I suppose, is the marriage of content strategy and technology. Now, from the content strategy end I can tell you that what I’m going to present to you in this course, is the exact same strategy that we teach our certified content marketing professionals over at Copyblogger. We have a certification program where we teach people, we test them, and then we certify them if they are acceptable.

Another benefit here is that you need to understand, as the business owner or as the principal, how this strategy works. If you need help with actual content, we’ve got a whole roster of people that we can point you to. I’ll make sure and link that up later on in the course.

This framework that I’m talking about, I call it the 6A framework. The six elements are Attraction, Access, Authority, Affinity, Adaptive, and Action. I’m going to go into more detail on each of those elements as we progress in the course. I think this is a good point to wrap up this introduction and hope you will stay tuned with me through the next nine lessons, because we’re going to take a really deep dive into how to make this work for your business.

Thanks so much for tuning in and, as always, keep going.