playful marketing expedition – questions & answers

On this page:

  • Requesting money via PayPal
  • About testimonials & surveys
  • Increasing Blog Readability
  • Is it worthwhile to offer a class, even if no one signs up? (related topic: a quick note about list building)
  • WordPress versus Blogger (blogspot.com)
  • Can I repeat tweets? (related topics: timing & frequency)

 

Q&A about PayPal

PayPal is certainly convenient and easy to set up, but also limited. For our Expedition, I used PayPal’s recurring payments feature. I’ve also used it to send invoices to clients who want to use a credit card. It’s a very easy solution for straightforward transactions. You can upload your own graphics for the “Buy Now” buttons to customize.

If you want to sell a downloadable product with low fees, I recommend e-junkie.com, which is $5/mo. It’s very easy to set up. E-junkie allows for a very simple affiliate program (giving commissions) set up, but not much customization.

Most other shopping carts available “sit on top” of the PayPal technology, including 1shoppingcart.com. As your needs become more complex, you move up in fees. When you’re first starting out, however, it’s not necessary to pay for all the bells and whistles. Keep it simple. You can upgrade later.

With anything, practice discernment. What features will you actually use? Most services, especially ones with higher fees will let you sign up for a trial period.

Requesting Money via PayPal

When you’re in your PayPal account, click on the “Request Money” tab. f you want to invoice clients be sure to click on the “Create an Invoice” button to generate an invoice. Sometimes people get confused about the “Request Money” button, which is meant for informal transactions. When you create the invoice for the first time, you can create a template for future invoices, including the option of uploading your logo and customizing the form.

 

Q&A: About Testimonials & Surveys

If you were present on the first call, I mentioned that I’m essentially a nerd from a computer/science education background. I wanted to be a market research data wonk, after abandoning the idea I’d be working at the Federal Reserve as an analyst. (I interviewed there…and decided it wasn’t a good environmental fit.)

So, I loooove surveys. It’s fun for me to look at data.

As much as I like data, clients (even corporate ones) go waaaay overboard with the survey. Surveys are fun and very informative.

Two choices:

  • Survey Monkey (unrelated to Mailchimp): You receive 10 free questions in the free account. You are limited to what you can download as results. Presentation of questions and data is very nice. Easy to figure out.
  • Google Survey: If you took the midpoint survey of the Expedition, I experimented with Google. I found it very useful. It’s free. All data is captured in a spreadsheet, though for essay answers, you have to do a little spreadsheet manipulation. It’s fairly intuitive.

Thoughts on asking for testimonials/designing a survey:

  • You can ask anything you want, but keep it short. Depending on the audience, most people do not have time to answer all essay questions. So mix up response styles (multiple choice, essay, ranking).
  • Ask questions only if the answers will be actionable by you. It’s all interesting data in some way, but what can you do with it? For the busy entrepreneur, it’s time wasted unless it contributes to your understanding of your audience and/or gives you information to take some action, however small.
  • Ask questions in a way that you can receive the results. Help survey respondents help you. Most people won’t know how to answer (in a constructive, helpful way), “What was missing?” This can be eased by chronology (i.e. place that question later in the survey, after they’ve done though the other questions and have reminded them of their experience), or give them a multiple choice checklist. It’s fine to give them some parameters or suggestions. Help them help you.
  • Know that not everyone will complete the survey and trends you may read into the data may not be significant because of the small number of respondents.

Q&A: Increasing Blog Readability

One of the important things to remember when writing for an online audience is readability. You don’t have copy the Seth Godin approach of the super short blog, though it’s incredibly effective–if you have a strong point. It is good to mix up blog formats–short & long, a photoblog, etc. so people get a variety.
Even if you have a long stretch of text, there are things you can do to increase readability, which enables the reader to scan the blog or article quickly and still get the key messages:
  • Graphics: images, photos, diagrams
  • Using headers & subhead to break up long stretches of text and communicate key messages
  • Bullet points and numbered lists to increase “scannability”
  • Bolding key points–use sparingly
  • Using a “blockquote” for relevant quotes. My template doesn’t have fancy blockquotes but here is an example:
Let yourself be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love. ~Rumi
  • Create separate blog posts to fundamental topics or ideas that require explanation–then link to those as reference blogs. Think about keystone messages, or “evergreen” topics (topics that come up over and over). These should become separate blogs.
    • Example: If you chose a “word of the year” as an intention, you would write about why you chose the word and it’s meaning to you. Then write about your process and link to this original blog post for people who are new to you. This allows the reader to “catch up” without having to scour your website.
  • Other notes:
    • Convention is that you don’t use all uppercase letters, which is considered SHOUTING!
    • Ease off on the exclamation points!!! Important items can be emphasized using the suggestions above.

 

Q&A: Is it worthwhile to offer a class, even if no one signs up?

The original question was: Is it worthwhile to offer a class, even if no one signs up?
I would go back to the “why” of the class (or whatever form it takes, such as a coaching package, product, workshop, etc.) What were your original objectives? Is it purely income? Or are there other considerations, such as:
  • building credibility
  • building my mailing list
  • building a body of work or developing new content
  • generating testimonials
  • generating a “newsworthy” or “socially shareable” item (which then shows that you’re active and creating, which is good)
  • market research:
    • testing out new content you’re developing
    • experimenting with format: ebook, video, worksheets and other “teaching module” formats or combination
    • experimenting with and other variables
      • class length
      • meeting frequency
      • meeting format
      • class flow
    • pricing structure (e.g. low price/less access to you versus higher price/more access, low price + special priced one-on-one coaching package)
  • needing a deadline to create marketing systems to support clients or launch a new program
Often, especially in the beginning, it’s still worthwhile to offer something that may not meet conventional expectations of success. Your why helps determine your “metrics” of success.
If you offer a class and don’t see signups, is there a way to “seed” the class with yaysayers, or handpicked influencers who are willing to do the work and offer testimonials? What else can you do to make the situation work for you? If the class is a teleclass, no one will really know how many people are on the phone?
If you need to cancel the class for whatever reason, be sure to thank anyone who has signed up and helped you.

Related Topic: A Quick Note About List Building

This is a huge topic that could be a class by itself, but list building is a byproduct of all the marketing calendar activities. If you guest post, participate in a telesummit, one of the things you want to think about is how to get people interested in visiting your website and then how to get them to sign up for your mailing list, or like your Facebook page. You want them to take some kind of action so you can communicate with them in the future.

 

Blog: WordPress v. Blogger (blogspot.com)

There are many blog-based platforms out there, including Typepad, Blogger (blogspot), Weebly, Posterous, Joomla.

I’ve been strongly suggesting WordPress because many of the business-based blog platforms are based on WordPress. You can set up a website for free, without paying for a Premium theme (layout), and manage the content within it with minimal training. Being in the majority in this case means you’ll have access to more resources for help and for new widgets (mini-apps) that you can plug in to your site.

Other free blog-based platforms include Blogger. These free websites (run by Google) let you choose your own domain for free and look like this: [yourname].blogspot.com.

There are a ton of fun, creative blogs based on Blogger and Typepad. It’s a terrific and easy platform to learn, but people equate them with hobbyist blogs. That’s not to say there isn’t sophisticated marketing happening. Many blogs look great and I know they are adding more templates, but I steer my clients away from it simply looks more professional if you have your own domain without .blogspot.com (or any other suffix). There are also some limitations to the Blogger platform that look like Google is addressing this issue, so this may change. That’s really it.

 

Q&A: Can I repeat tweets?

If you want to promote a new service or class on social media, converse with people or post interesting/relevant blog posts from others so people know you’re there for true connection as well as doing business. If your timeline/Twitter feed is full of self-promotion only, people will be turned off. That said, there are several ways to repeat promotional this without annoying people:
1. Same content, different times in the same day: What I’ve seen people do on Twitter is to send original tweet [check out X at (link)], then pre-schedule tweets at different times of the day with a preface [for the afternoon crowd, check out X at (link)], [for the night owls, check out X at (link)]
2. Same link, different tweet: You could point to your new product, service or class page on your website, but vary the tweet content. Some ideas:
  • Use a quote from the class/product description/actual product
  • Talk about your early bird discount deadline, or time-sensitive offer
  • Ask a question that is relevant to the offer.
3. People are doing this a little less intensely, but you can repeat tweets as an early bird or deadline approaches: last day to sign up, only 12 more hours, 6 more hours, 4 more hours, 2 hours, 1 hour. This assumes you aren’t doing this kind of push all the time. As you are clear that you are a business making money, most people will understand. It’s definitely acceptable on Twitter. You can do this on Facebook–but I’d go back and delete the old posts (just keep one or two) to clean up your wall/timeline. Not seeing the frequency on g+ though.
I am still seeing “early adopters”–people who were very active on Twitter and Facebook a few years and months ago–migrating to g+, where there is still less marketing than either Facebook or Twitter. Of the three, I’m seeing them abandon Twitter more than the others. This may not be true for your audience but it’s worth noting.

Related topics about timing and frequency (applies to newsletters/blogs too):

Time of Day: It depends. Your unique audience may have a different schedule than the convention, which is morning between 7 am and 10 am Pacific. A slightly different crowd is online between 6-9 pm. I’ve had conversations with people at between 11 pm-12 am. You can see some of this now. Look at your mailing list and look at the statistics and see how many people opened it and when. On social media, experiment with posting things at different times of the day and see when/if people respond. I mentioned on one our calls that at one small startup, we were surprised to see people opened email on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday evening. (The major demographic was older, male retirees–that particular list was over 35,000.) In that case, we sent our newsletters late afternoon on a Friday!
Day of Week: Most people are on a schedule of posting new blog material early in the week. I get a LOT of new reading material in my inbox on Monday. If you are a regular new blogger, I’d try to do it later in the week so people read it. If you subscribe to particular blogs, notice when they publish. That may give you some information to make that decision.
Time of Month: (relevant to newsletters) Not surprisingly, most people publish during the first ten days of the month, then again around the middle of the month. I personally don’t think it matters unless you have a time-sensitive offer or newsworthy event that you are writing about (news event, holidays, anniversaries, etc.).

Caveat!

If you are a new social media/blogger/newsletter publisher, do NOT get bogged down on when the perfect time of day/week/month. Write and hit the publish button. You can play with being “strategic” on Twitter, Facebook, g+ and wherever else you have a billboard. I stagger posting to the billboards over the week, but that’s a personal choice, not a rule!