Month: February 2008

There's this story that Seth Godin tells about a meeting he had a few years back with the brand new Internet department at WalMart.

This was back when WalMart was first strategizing about how they were going to bring their store and message online. Oh, and it was substantially after Amazon became dominant as the monster online store that they are.

Seth was meeting with them to discuss WalMart's web strategy.

Just as he walked in the door, up on the wall was a big banner that said…

What do you know about women?

Or more specifically, what do you know about *selling* to women?

There's something about the internet that appeals to women more than men — and this appeal is having a very important effect on their behavior.

By and large, women are more social than men, and the communities that have sprouted up on the web are mostly driven by women. And just as women are the major offline consumers in families all across the world (and particularly in America, according to BusinessWeek magazine), women buy more online than men do, too.

Uh oh.

If you didn't know that about your business, you've got a problem. That's because

I get requests frequently — usually at MarksHelpDesk.com, to help promote other people's products. I got one a few months ago that was horrible…really horrible. 

As near as I recall, it went something like this…

"Hello. My name is Joe and I have a product about X. I'm interested in a Joint Venture with you. What can you do for me?"

I was appalled. Really shocked at how inwardly this person was looking. "What can you do for ME" is not a good way to start a business relationship…or ANY relationship. 

I had to decide whether I should write him back a scalding email or ignore him altogether. I ended up taking the middle road, and let him know very kindly that Joint Venture relationships are best started with the opposite question to the one he asked. In other words, they should start with…

Chances are, you've been confused by this same thing that one of the members of the Squeeze Page Cash Machine webinar wrote me about.

It seems that there were lots of websites he went to — websites with squeeze pages — where he'd opt in. But if he didn't buy right away and came back a day or two later to make his purchase, he'd be forced to opt in again.

He wanted to buy, but couldn't!

Has that ever happened to you?

The people who own websites like that really aren't thinking about the customer. If they WERE thinking about their customer, they'd understand that she is unlikely to opt in a second time. In fact, it's likely that she'll be angry enough to never come back.

What you and every marketer needs to do is

I sent out a little survey over the weekend to the people who are submitting their sites for the Squeeze Page Hotseat, originally scheduled for this evening.

While some of them really thrived under the kick-in-the-butt to get their first squeeze pages done, most of them asked (very politely, I might add) for some more time.

So please put NEXT Tuesday, February 19 on your calendar.

The webinar will start at 5pm PST (8pm EST).

What does this mean for you?

Last week we had our Testing and Tracking webinar, featuring Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer.

The participants saw how powerful the Analytics information can be.

You can see where your customers come from, what keywords they used to get there, how long they stayed, and what they did there. 

You even saw how to set up conversion goals in Analytics so you can see how effective your marketing is — whether it comes from Adwords or not. 

And there's one feature which I showed you that can tell you whether your Adwords ads are more effective based on

Ever want to know how to install Google Analytics and Google Website optimizer on your website or squeeze page?  

Well…

Last Tuesday we started the Squeeze Page Cash Machine webinar series with the basics of FTP, HTML, Copywriting for Squeeze Pages (with a worksheet that made it REAL easy), and how to attach the page to your autoresponder.  

http://www.SqueezePageCashMachine.com/preview

This Tuesday we're going to continue with the basics of tracking and testing, and then show you step by step how to

One of my favorite uses for surveys is to help guide product development.

There's no better way to figure out what products to build, create, or sell than to ask your customers directly. The logic here should be apparent — find out what your customers want, and then give it to them.

They're much more likely to buy that way. But let's take that a little bit further.

* The Wrong Way to Develop a Product

The traditional way to develop a product is to say something like