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Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation

marketing automation email automation workflow marketing automation software comparison marketing automation examples https://www.emarsys.com/en/resources/blog/11-best-examples-of-b2c-marketing-automation/   copyediting and proofreading services copy editing vs...

Email Autoresponders

Email Autoresponders

Intelligent autoresponder email marketing campaigns can save you lots of time, while creating a solid engagement process for prospective customers just as they begin engaging with you. Your autoresponder emails are crucial for converting strangers into customers. Your...

Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing can be done well, or done badly. No matter how good you're doing, it could be really easy for you, or really hard. The easiest way to make sure your social media marketing is both easy and good is to follow the advice of people who have mastered...

WordPress Website Design

WordPress Website Design

A professional WordPress website design provides three major advantages to your digital platform:   WordPress Website Design Advantage #1: Updating your WordPress Website is easy. Getting an update to your website doesn’t have to involve lengthy...

Responsive Website Design

Responsive Website Design

Responsive Website Design changes the layout and size of website elements, for desktop, tablet, and mobile, based on the size of the screen resolution.

Membership Websites

Membership Websites

The advantages of a WordPress CMS are huge - you can easily upload new content, categorize it in your page structure, and organize pages and posts via tags. For premium content delivery, you can protect your best content from the general public by creating a...

Graphic Design

Graphic Design

Here at Stellar Platforms, where we work with the Rising Stars of Tomorrow, we like to make things look beautiful with professional graphic design. You can tell at a glance when someone has professional graphic design, and when they don't. It can attract or repel you...

Image Editing

Image Editing

Professional image editing can save you hours of time figuring out new graphic design programs. If you find yourself in a situation where you need: The background removed from your headshot A compelling graphic for a Facebook Ad campaign An eye-catching header for...

Video Production

Video Production

Video production creates a quick, digestible overview of an idea. Video marketing allows you to share your message on the platforms where your customer is already connected. A high-quality branded video will provide a professional image for your company, and establish...

Or, I guess, you were looking for funny gifs of cats, right?

marketing automation

email automation workflow

marketing automation software comparison

marketing automation examples

11 Best Examples of B2C Marketing Automation

 

copyediting and proofreading services

copy editing vs content editing

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/editing-vs-copyediting-under-100

copy editing services rates

http://www.the-efa.org/res/rates.php

 

Intelligent autoresponder email marketing campaigns can save you lots of time, while creating a solid engagement process for prospective customers just as they begin engaging with you. Your autoresponder emails are crucial for converting strangers into customers.

Your weekly email newsletter is time-sensitive, and trapped in the present moment. Your autoresponder campaigns are eternal, and progress at the pace of your prospect’s knowledge of you, and is not limited by what you happen to be saying, writing, and sending right now.

Autoresponder Example

Out of Office Autoresponder Message

You’ve surely received an autoresponder like this before. You email someone, and you instantly receive a reply, telling you about the details of their vacation and when they expect to be back.

They don’t take the time to send you this email as soon as you hit their inbox. The entire purpose is that the autoresponder communicates what you need to know, in your timeframe, with total disregard of the sender’s timeframe.

For converting strangers into customers on your website, an autoresponder email sequence is typically used in concert with the stages of your sales funnel.

Consider how someone is feeling and thinking, just after they have subscribed to your list, and write your email to the customer avatar as they exist in that specific moment.

Typical Autoresponder Email Sequence

  • Thank you for subscribing! Here is your lead magnet. Follow me on social media.
  • Did you like the lead magnet? Here’s a story of someone who had a transformation because of it.
  • Here’s another story, of someone who faced my customer avatar’s main problems, and how they were transformed.
  • Brief mention of services.
  • Educational email about the industry or current environment.
  • People with this big problem seek a solution. I have a solution, and I will tell you next time.
  • Hard sell of services.
  • Educational email.
  • Survey request.

The better ESPs (Email Service Providers) will allow you to segment your lists based on their activities. If someone subscribes to your list after becoming your customer, for example, you don’t want to send them the ‘hard sell’ email – they should be left out of that step in the autoresponder sequence.

Autoresponder Email Marketing Platforms

  • ConvertKit
  • Aweber
  • Mailchimp
  • Constant Contact
  • InfusionSoft

There are plenty of others available to choose from, but these are the ones that we typically work with and recommend to our clients.

For the fourth year in a row, I am am bringing you the Best Email Subject Lines of the year! You can read the Best Email Subject Lines of 2017, the  Best Email Subject Lines of 2018and the  Best Email Subject Lines of 2019 to see the winners of previous years.This year, I’ve listed the best subject lines for emails according to my personal email inbox.

How I Judge The Best Email Subject Lines of the Year

  • 3rd place – You make it on the list. Sometime over the last 12 months, I opened an email from you and said, ‘Hey, wow. Good work.’ I popped a label on it so you would be on this list when it came out.
  • 2nd place – You are on this list three times.
  • 1st place – You have written more subject lines on this list than anyone else.
It’s true, this list is subjective, and I subscribe to more digital marketers and sales trainers than most people – however, I follow these people the most, because they are the best at writing subject lines that capture attention and get opened.

3RD PLACE – Best Email Subject Lines of 2020

2ND PLACE – Best Email Subject Lines of 2020

David Newman

The author of Do It! Speaking is a CSP and member of the member of the NSA Million Dollar Speaker Group.

David’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2020

  • [Online Workshop] 7 Association Trends that will Impact your Business in 2020
  • You + me + 2 days together
  • our call tomorrow

Ryan Deiss

Ryan was the 1st place winner of 2019’s Best Email Subject Lines contest. He is the founder of digitalmarketer.com.

Ryan’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2020

  • diagnose ➡️ execute ➡️ measure ➡️ repeat ➡️
  • This 1 skill can 🚀LAUNCH🚀 your company+career
  • Re: the GREAT deal you just missed…

Steph Crowder

Steph is the host of the Courage & Clarity Podcast, and is a sales trainer and business strategist.

Steph’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2020

  • Omg did you see this? [REPLAY!]
  • Stop dreaming so big
  • Quiz: Where will you be in 3 months? 🤔

Marquel Russell

Marquel is the founder of Client Attraction University and works with coaches and consultants to scale their business.

Marquel’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2020

  • $97 Today, $197 Tomorrow
  • 5 Reasons Your Facebook Ads Are Failing
  • Listen Up, This Is Important…

Stefan James

Stefan is an internet entrepreneur and business coach and is the founder of Project Life Mastery.

Stefan’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2020

  • Read this if you want to start a YouTube Channel in 2021
  • If I had to start over again, this is what I’d do
  • Here’s why you’re STRUGGLING as an entrepreneur

Allie Bjerk

Allie is a digital marketer and the creator of the Tiny Offer Lab.

Allie’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2020

  • Re: Denied Refund Request – [Course]
  • The questions everyone is asking me. Finally answered publicly.
  • Re: Unethical Price Change

Jay Baer

Jay is an emcee and keynote speaker and the founder of Convince And Convert.

Jay’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2020

  • join me in 60 minutes
  • Need Your Help
  • how a community manager became global VP at Patrón Tequila

1st Place – Best Email Subject Lines of 2020

Donald Miller, Storybrand

Donald is the author of Building A Story Brand, and trains entrepreneurs and marketers in the Storybrand framework.

Donald’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2020

  1. we have a problem
  2. Real results from the StoryBrand Marketing LiveStream
  3. A better website in 60 minutes
  4. What your marketing is missing
  5. What the highest-paid people have in common…
  6. ignore your other emails and open this one
  7. What if you could read your customers’ minds?
  8. The 6-part checklist every business needs right now

What was your fave subject line in this list?

Click here and tell me on Twitter!

About The Author

Caelan Huntress is the father of 3 kids, and in his spare time serves as creative director of Stellar Platforms. He is also a writer, digital marketer, multimedia producer, and a retired superhero. He blogs about his adventures on https://caelanhuntress.com.

For the third year in a row, I am happy to bring you the Best Email Subject Lines of the year! You can read the Best Email Subject Lines of 2017 and the Best Email Subject Lines of 2018 if you’d like to take a look. But these, right here, are the freshest good subject lines for emails.

How I Judge The Best Email Subject Lines of the Year

  • 3rd place – You make this list. Sometime over the last year, I opened an email from you and said, ‘Hey, wow. Good work.’ I popped a label on it so you would be on this list when it came out.
  • 2nd place – You make this list more than twice.
  • 1st place – You have subject lines in this list more than anyone else.
It’s true, this list is subjective, and I subscribe to more digital marketers and sales trainers than most people – however, I follow these people the most, because they are the best at writing subject lines that capture attention and get opened.

3RD PLACE – Best Email Subject Lines of 2019

2ND PLACE – Best Email Subject Lines of 2019

Marisa Murgatroyd headshot

Marisa Murgatroyd

Marisa Murgatroyd provides done-for-you branding, website design, and training.

Marisa’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2019

  • $297 today, $497 tomorrow
  • We could really use your sick dance moves
  • how to tell an awesome mastermind from one that sucks

Erin Flynn headshot

Erin Flynn

Erin Flynn is a digital strategist and website designer. 

Erin’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2019

  • Have a second to help me out?
  • It’s time to make emails as easy as copy + paste
  • Where do you find web design clients?

Susan Pierce Thompson

Susan is an author, speaker, and trainer at Bright Line Eating.

Susan’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2019

  • 70 percent? Can this be true?
  • Can I ask you something?
  • Do this one thing, today, for me.

1st Place – Best Email Subject Lines of 2019
Ryan Deiss headshot

Ryan Deiss, Digital Marketer

Ryan Deiss is the creator of DigitalMarketer.com, and provides some of the best training tools and digital marketing certification programs on the web. It’s no wonder he is this year’s winner – this is exactly the kind of material he teaches.

Ryan’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2019

  1. [CLOSING] Unicorns pooping rainbows?
  2. I proposed on the first date
  3. This is awkward, but…
  4. I noticed your name still isn’t on the list, CAELAN
You may have noticed, when Ryan’s final subject line landed in my inbox, it displayed my name in all CAPS. This is because whenever I subscribe to newsletters…I always put my name in all CAPS. This way, I can immediately differentiate between automated and personal emails. When you have 395,911 unread emails in your inbox (like I do) you find some quirky ways to manage the volume, and this is one of them. What was your fave subject line in this list? Click here and tell me on Twitter!

About The Author

Caelan Huntress is the father of 3 kids, and in his spare time serves as creative director of Stellar Platforms. He is also a writer, digital marketer, multimedia producer, and a retired superhero. He blogs about his adventures on https://caelanhuntress.com.

I’ve been doing a lot of amazing work with Solopreneurs lately, and this fantastic group of people has given me a community

Working from home in New Zealand, I don’t get many opportunities to network with my peers – people who run online businesses, and support themselves through the content they put into the Internet.

I enjoy my work the most when I get together with someone on Zoom, and we get to dive deep into their business, their plans, their goals, and the mechanics of making it all happen.

When I said, “I want to be doing that more!” my coach said, “then you should just do that.”

So that’s what I’m going to do.

I’m giving away 20 coaching sessions to celebrate 2020.

Join the People First Project

20 Free Coaching Conversations for 2020

The People First project is something I’ve seen many others do over the years – from Shenee Howard to Andrea Leda, among others – and it has always struck me as a wonderful way to collaborate with one’s community, and to make an offer of service that is valuable to both the giver and the receiver.

With my particular skillset – sales funnels, website design, social media, and content marketing – my coaching sessions tend to focus on the following topics:

  • What big projects do you want to accomplish over the next 3 months?
  • What steps do you need to take to get there?
  • Who else do you need to reach with your message?
  • How can you reach them?
  • What content have you already produced that can be working for you in a different way?
  • What are the specific steps in your Sales Funnel?
  • How could we make the journey from Stranger to Customer even easier?

I’ve been asking these questions for more than ten years now, helping people promote and sell their content online. The results have been pretty good.

“Caelan has a great way of taking your vision and making it a reality. He works really well with visionaries – I speak it, and he makes it happen! His website design for The Aware Show really captured my personality, and his project management skills kept my entire team on track. The beautiful summits he put together helped us to grow our list and expand our audience. Caelan is always positive and keeps a positive outlook on life!”

Lisa Garr

Host of The Aware Show

I’m opening my calendar for 20 forty-five minute conversations during 2020. Once the 20 slots are reserved, they are gone, no waitlist.

There is no cost for this call.

The quarterly price for my coaching programs starts at $5,000, and this call has a $500 retail value.

I will record the call (if it is on Zoom, my preferred communication method) and provide you with the recording after. You can re-listen to our conversation as needed.

I will ask you challenging questions about what matters.

Some people come to me with questions about which email marketing platform to use, and leave with answers about their target market and what they should be selling instead. Don’t be surprised if we shake your business up a little bit.

I will give you tools and templates.

Over the years, I have accumulated a virtual library of resources that I use to create and promote content widely and quickly. Depending on your situation and your goals, I may provide you with some of these templates and resources, to help you in reaching your goals.

I will show up prepared, and I expect the same of you.

All participants in the People First Project will need to fill out a questionnaire prior to our call, so that I can come to our conversation prepared with ideas.

We will hit the ground running, and make a big impact on your business.

Are you ready? 

“Caelan is a talented digital marketer who is always in beast mode – always zoned in, every pixel, every letter, every plugin, every line. He will help you discover the online success you’ve been hunting for.”

Andy Horner

CEO, Outstand

Join the People First Project

20 Free Coaching Conversations for 2020

I waited for weeks. My client said she loved my work, and promised to give me a testimonial, but she stopped returning my emails.

Putting aside my imposter syndrome, I looked at things from her perspective. She was an interview host by trade. The whole reason she hired me was because she didn’t want to write her emails and sales pages.

By asking her to volunteer her time to write a testimonial, I was giving her homework. That’s not nice to do, when you’re asking someone for a favour.

So I asked myself: what’s the best way to collect testimonials from a client?

The answer is: an interview.

How to Collect Customer Testimonials with Interviews

I called my client and asked her, “Can I interview you for about fifteen minutes, about what it was like working with me? I’ll take a lot of notes, and write up a short paragraph based on what you’ve said, and you can approve it or edit it to make sure it’s perfect.”

She was happy to oblige.

Lisa Garr The Aware Show“Caelan has a great way of taking your vision and making it a reality. He works really well with visionaries – I speak it, and he makes it happen! His website design for The Aware Show really captured my personality, and his project management skills kept my entire team on track. The beautiful summits he put together helped us to grow our list and expand our audience. Caelan is always positive and keeps a positive outlook on life!”

 – Lisa Garr, host of The Aware Show

She used the phrases and wording in this paragraph – I just plucked them out of our conversation, and put them in an order that made sense. I also made sure to ask her about specific things I wanted to include in the testimonial, as well.

By interviewing her about the experience of working with me, I took all the grunt work on myself, so all she had to do was chat with me. It was much more respectful of her time and attention, and when we are asking a client to do us a favour, we should be more respectful of them, not less.

Below I’ve listed answers to some of the most common questions I get about how to collect testimonials from clients. But first, if you would like to use my step-by-step process for collecting testimonials with interviews, then you should enroll in my 5-Day Testimonial Collection Challenge: 

Frequently Asked Questions about Testimonials

Can testimonials be anonymous?

Technically, yes, but they are not as effective. Ranking the types of testimonials in order of effectiveness, from most to least:

  1. Testimonial with name and headshot
  2. Testimonial with name and position
  3. Anonymous testimonial

Where should testimonials go on a website?

The first home should be at yourwebsite.com/testimonials. If I’m ever doing any sort of web design for a client, I always make this page if they don’t have it already. This page can serve as the storehouse for your testimonials, so anytime you are making a piece of marketing collateral – designing a new brochure, or writing a sales page – you know exactly where to go to find your master collection.

In addition to having a dedicated Testimonials page (you can see mine here), you can also put testimonials on your website:

  • Below the fold on your homepage
  • In the footer
  • In the sidebar

I do not recommend you put testimonials in a slider. (Read why sliders suck here.)

Who can give testimonials?

Anyone who has experienced a transformation because of you or your work can give you a testimonial. If you are just starting out on your entrepreneurial journey, ask your former co-workers, or anyone who has worked on a project with you to collaborate.

What’s a good testimonial email template?

Personally, I’ve found that asking for testimonials over email has limited effectiveness. It might get you a few nice words with little effort, but that’s generally what they provide you – nice words with little effort.

While I do recommend the testimonial interview process laid out in Testimonials 101, if you are going to ask for a testimonial over email, here’s a sample script:

Hey there, would you mind sending me a few sentences that I can use as a testimonial? I really enjoyed the work we did together, and sharing your thoughts on my work would help me to find more clients like you. I’d appreciate it if you could mention [TOPIC] or how I [QUALITY]. If you could please send me a short paragraph by [DATE] I would be very grateful.

How testimonials help your business

Studies have shown that 88% of people trust an online review as much as a personal recommendation. Even if they don’t know the person who gave the testimonial, 88% of people trust those strangers as much as one of their friends.

The social proof of having a good testimonials page can sway someone to make a buying decision in your favour.

What questions should I ask to get a good testimonial?

I have scripted my 6 best questions for collecting testimonials out in the free workbook that is part of Testimonials 101. Opt-in here:

About The Author

Caelan Huntress is the father of 3 kids, and in his spare time serves as creative director of Stellar Platforms. He is also a writer, digital marketer, multimedia producer, and a retired superhero. He blogs about his adventures on https://caelanhuntress.com.

I did not plan on attending the National Speakers’ Association annual conference in Denver, #Influence19. But opportunity knocked, so I went through the door.

Just another weekly client call

One of my clients happened to be the co-chair for this year’s NSA conference. Mike Rayburn is the world’s funniest motivational comedian who plays guitar and talks, and we’ve been working together for more than a year.

At the end of our weekly marketing call, after we had discussed some new web page designs, and he showed me the printed brochure I had designed to promote his online course, the What IF? Challenge, I asked him, “How’s the conference coming?”

That’s when he told me, “I had a presenter break her kneecap, and I don’t know how I’m going to replace her on such short notice.”

“What’s her topic?” I asked.

“Monetizing Your Thought Leadership. I don’t know anyone else who speaks on that topic, and you’re in New Zealand.”

“What if…” I asked, because I’ve been steeped in his innovation and creative thinking material for a while, “What if I hopped on a plane tomorrow?”

“If you fly up to Denver from New Zealand, the spot is yours.”

Making the trip to the US

I made 10 videos on this trip, roughly 1 per day. You can watch them in the playlist above.

I write a lot more about the cultural shock of coming back into America in a separate post on my personal blog; many of the stories overlap, so in this post, I’ll stick to the professional aspects of my trip.

Presenting at the NSA conference #influence19

I only had 3 days to put this talk together, but thankfully, I had a template slide deck ready, and I’ve also got a deep background in performance and improvisation. That helped frame my expertise quickly, and the topic is the sort of thing I work on all the time with my clients.

“Without a doubt one of the one of the most worthwhile conference sessions I have ever attended.  Thank You!”

– email I received the next morning

The whole ‘7-Steps to Turn Your Signature Speech Into a Signature Offer‘ idea was brand new, but I had a long flight to work on it. The slides came out good, and I got to pilot some new IP that I’ve been working on, about the 4 levels of a Platform, and how the Cornerstones balance each other.

This new content forms the backbone for my new 90-day program, so it was good to see it getting some traction before a live audience.

One of the case studies in my presentation was Peter Cook, of the Thought Leaders Business School. I told him while I was flying across the Pacific that I was going to talk at the NSA conference, and feature him as a case study. But, I forgot my book! The Thought Leaders Practice is the best business book I’ve read in 2019. (Read my Book Review here.)

Peter offered to send 20 copies of the book to members of my audience who emailed him with something special in the subject line. So I told my session, at the beginning, ‘There will be prizes!’

After featuring Peter as a case study, and describing how his 4 signature offers match the 4 Offer Brackets, I offered a printed copy of his book to the first 20 people to email him with ‘NSA USA’ in the subject line, and send him their shipping address. ‘Get out your phones, everybody!’ I said, and assured them that if they weren’t one of the first 20, they would still get a PDF of the book.

60 people emailed him from my session, and as I hoped, the Thought Leaders methodology is spreading to more thought leaders in America.

Meeting clients in person

There were a number of current and former clients of Stellar Platforms who were attending this conference. I’ve made it my business to focus on authors, coaches, and speakers exclusively for a number of years, and I was lucky enough to finally meet a lot of old friends in person, and meet some new friends, as well.

Hugs and old friendships

One of the things I liked so much about attending the NSA conference was seeing all the hugs in the hallway. Old friends that had not seen each other for years would reconnect, and hug, and laugh, all the time.

It was such a commonplace occurrence that I was convinced that the longevity of this community was part of the reason people returned year after year. It’s a good community of nice and successful people, and I see why people remain so close to this community for decades.

Here are some pictures of me with my new friends:

Your heroes become your friends

I was sitting in on one of my favourite sessions of the week, expert webinar sales trainer David Newman’s presentation ‘Webinar Sales Mastery,’ when he commented about how his membership in this community has affected him. “One of the best things about being an NSA member for so long,” he said, “is that your heroes become your friends.”

I could see this demonstrated immediately afterward, when he said, “I’ve never had the experience of giving a presentation with Patricia Fripp taking notes in the front row, and I am freaking out right now!”

This got a good laugh, and a good photo. I was also in the front row, and I leaned out to the side to take a photo of the two of them, and posted it on LinkedIn.

After the session, I found myself walking next to sales legend Patricia Fripp, and I introduced myself to her as I said, “We met a few years ago, I saw you give a presentation to the Oregon NSA chapter.”

“That’s a very nice chapter you have,” she said off-handedly.

“I really like Fripp VT,” I continued. “The tech behind your business communications training LMS is really solid.”

“Thank you, it’s nice,” she said as she looked through the crowd ahead of us. I realized she got these sorts of random compliments from strangers often, and she probably assumed I was starstruck.

Just then Mike Rayburn walked over, and Patricia tried to get his attention. “Oh, hi Patricia,” he said, and then he started talking to me about an idea he had.

While we were talking together animatedly, Patricia was waiting to get a word in edgewise, and then Hall of Fame sales and leadership keynote speaker Connie Podesta came over and said “CAELAN!” and we hugged, since this was our first time meeting one another in person.

I think it was then that Patricia realized that I wasn’t just a starstruck fanboy, and I was quite gratified when I received a LinkedIn connection request from her later.

As David Newman predicted, your heroes do indeed become your friends.

NSA and Selling from the Stage

I went on a side project during #Influence19, to discover the official position of NSA on selling from the stage.

One of my clients (who was not present at the conference) told me once, “I’m a CSP, so I cannot sell from the stage.” A CSP (Certified Speaking Professional) earns this designation from the NSA and agrees to abide by a series of ethical obligations. When he told me this was his position, I was surprised.

Also surprised: many professional speakers at the conference. “Who told him that?” one Hall-of-Fame speaker said. “That’s true at NSA events, but not when you’re talking for clients,” another CPAE said. “You can sell at NSA chapter events, but not if you’re taking a fee,” said another CSP.

I was fascinated, because everyone I talked with had a different answer.

So I started asking everyone, “What’s the official position of NSA on selling from the stage?”

Eventually, I found myself eating lunch with a table full of older and semi-retired speakers.

(Pro tip: when you go to a conference, start conversations with your elders. They have the best insight, and they make the best conversation.)

I posed my question to Barry Banther, who has been around the NSA for a long time, and has served in many leadership positions over the years. During our conversation, he gave me the best and the clearest answer.

“We don’t permit selling from the stage at our events,” he said, “and anything else is up to the speaker, as long as it’s ethical.”

This, I realized, was why every speaker had been giving me a different answer: they were all interpreting the question according to their own personal ethics. Nobody gave me an answer that was unethical, but they were all different, because everyone sees the ethics of this question differently.

New Hall of Fame speakers

There were three new inductees into the Speakers Hall of Fame this year:

There was also a special recipient of the Cavett Award, an honor bestowed once a year to “the member whose accomplishments over the years have reflected outstanding credit, respect, honor and admiration in the Association and the speaking profession, and whose actions (in terms of sharing, guiding and inspiring other members) most closely parallel the illustrious career of NSA Co-Founder Cavett Robert, CSP, CPAE.”

When Phillip Van Hooser was awarded this honor, it was amazing to see a professional speaker so lost for words at the podium.

Jason Hewlett shaves his beard

One of my fave performances was Elton John impersonator Jason Hewlett for more than his early-to-late-stage impressions, but because he shaved his beard onstage.

Shaving a beard, by itself, is not anything that momentous. But it’s a rare enough action that with the proper introduction, it can be a momentous occasion.

Watch Jason Hewlett shave his beard on YouTube or read his story here.

Mike Rayburn brings down the house

One of the best parts about having a rock star for a client is he really knows how to end a party.

Inviting up many of his friends and colleagues, Mike Rayburn led the NSA closing party in a jam session that was just what I needed after a long conference: an opportunity to dance the night away.

All in all, this trip was a big win.

I had to postpone the launch of my new group program, the 90-Day Profit Accelerator, but I was able to finish up the sales page on the plane back to New Zealand.

Now I’m back in the winter, and I’m planning to help a dozen thought leaders elevate their platform in Q4. If you’d like to learn more about my program, you can click here to learn about the 90-Day Profit Accelerator.

The Thought Leaders Practice is the best business book I have read so far in 2019. This book lays out a solid method for thought leaders to build their business and scale up their revenue. This book is so rich in information and practical tactics, I’m glad I spent the time to dive deep into it.

I hosted a virtual Book Club for this book, so I could discuss it in detail with a few other entrepreneurs. Rather than tell you what I thought about the book, I’ll just share the notes I took every week on my Instagram account.

Week 1: Business Model

Opening questions: 

1- When is a business better than a practice? 

2- Out of the three, Message, Market, and Method, if you could only pick 2 to have solid, which would you pick as your weak leg? 

3- If you built your practice so you had $5 million in 10 years, what would your life be like? 

Key takeaways: 

  • It’s a practice if you love doing it. 
  • You need to enjoy interacting with your market. If you don’t like your audience, your passion won’t be there. 
  • To find your message: What are you willing to rant about? 
  • Live *into* it. 

Week 2: Your Message

Opening questions: 

4- Full spectrum ideas are Relevant, Thorough, Elegant, and Unique. How can you tell the difference between these layers? 

5- Can you test an IP Snapshot’s left-right balance? 

6- How can you tell the difference between one idea and a group of related ideas? 

Key takeaways: 

  • On a smaller scale, an idea is just an opinion. 
  • To test: Here’s my idea, can you repeat it back to me? 
  • You don’t have to have more ideas, you just have to articulate yours better. 
  • An idea is relevant to the market that will pay for it. 

Week 3: Your Market

Opening questions:

7- How do you discover unknown, unspoken problems?

8- What is your invitation right now?

9- Do all starter sentences apply universally?

Key takeaways:

  • Unspoken problems are often fears. 
  • First levels of problems aren’t the real problems. 
  • Being human with someone online creates a huge amount of trust. 
  • You can fish in the smaller pond or the bigger pond. 
  • Thought leadership is portable. 

Week 4: Your Method

Opening questions: 

10- Do any of the 6 modes *not* depend on results? 

11- What happens if you choose 2 opposite modes? 

12- What is your big word? 

Key takeaways: 

  • Impact is different than results. 
  • Masterminding with your peers is facilitation, and with up-and-comers it’s mentoring. 
  • A thought leader does not implement the solution, they stay in the realm of the problem. 
  • Thought leaders empower the fixers but do not implement the solutions themselves. 
  • Services are not thought leadership, but they are a common starting point for thought leaders to start from. 

Week 5: Steps to Success

In the final session of the #thoughtleaderspractice book club we discussed Section 5: Steps to Success. 

Opening questions:

13- What happens if you do the right things at the wrong time? Example: trying to have others sell your IP before you get to Red Belt. 

14- Can you identify a cluster by finding a common tribe of 150 people in your network?

15- thinking of what you sell, what price sounds outrageous for you to charge right now? 

Key takeaways: 

  • The point of leverage is not what you provide, it’s who you provide it to. 
  • Use the framework to get up the ladder, but be flexible on how you take the steps. 
  • 90 days is spent building a cluster, but selling & delivering is ongoing beyond that quarter. 
  • Exclusivity can justify outrageous prices.

This was a great book club, and I really enjoyed it. Big thanks to Kathleen Celmins, Jonathan Logan, and Michael Riscica for talking with me every week for the first session.The second session of the Thought Leaders Practice Book Club was recorded here:

 

About The Author

Caelan Huntress is the father of 3 kids, and in his spare time serves as creative director of Stellar Platforms. He is also a writer, digital marketer, multimedia producer, and a retired superhero. He blogs about his adventures on https://caelanhuntress.com.

Attention is so scarce online, you only have a moment to convert. That’s why a good homepage CTA above-the-fold can be so powerful – in first moment that someone lands on your homepage, they should immediately know who you are, what problem you solve, and how you can help them solve it. This article has 10 homepage CTA examples that use their above-the-fold content in the right way.

What is ‘Above The Fold’ content?

The term ‘above the fold,’ according to Wikipedia, refers to ‘the portions of a webpage that are visible without further scrolling or clicking.’

If you remember reading that old media interface we used before the Internet – the newspaper – then you probably know intuitively what ‘above the fold’ means.

“Most newspapers were sold from sidewalk kiosks,” as they say on OptinMonster, “folded in half so passersby could see the top half of the front page. If what they saw didn’t grab them, they’d keep on walking, and sales would be down. That’s why it was crucial to put your best, most interesting content ‘above the fold’.”

And what is a CTA?

CTA = Call-to-Action. This is the message that incites your user to do something specific.

Here are 10 lessons from 10 great websites that use their above-the-fold section to frame their CTA really well:

https://susanpeircethompson.com

Homepage Example 1: Susan Peirce Thompson

CTA: Take the Quiz Now

Headline: My name is Susan Peirce Thompson, Ph.D., and I want to help you get Happy, Thin, and Free.

Susan has a program that helps you decide in the moment when you should or shouldn’t eat something, with clear, bright lines.

What I like so much about Susan’s messaging is its clarity. She has a very well-defined problem she solves, and you don’t have to spend any time figuring it out. If you are struggling with your weight, she speaks directly to your problems, and you know exactly what you need to do next (take the quiz!)

LESSON: Clearly articulate what you offer right away 

https://problogger.com

Homepage Example 2: Darren Rowse

CTA: Subscribe to Problogger Plus

Headline: Become a ProBlogger

If you’re a blogger and you want to make a career out of it, you want to be a ProBlogger. Darren has been helping people level up their blogging game for a long time, and his advice is always friendly and helpful. (Read my review of Darren’s talk at WDS here.)

This homepage has lots of CTAs – join the Facebook community! Listen to the Podcast! Subscribe and Follow! Look at all these orange links! – but unlike most other target markets, this works for bloggers. We are a hyperactive bunch, and we know how to open links in new tabs, so I think he breaks the rule of ‘one CTA at a time’ very nicely here.

LESSON: Break the rules when it suits you 

https://tim.blog

Homepage Example 3: Tim Ferriss

CTA: Click to Listen

Headline: 300+ Million Episodes Downloaded

This blog is a vehicle to the podcast. Everything above the fold here is to convince you to get to the podcast – he’s got tons of social proof, the title of the latest episode (twice! In two different colors!) and any competing options are barely visible.

Tim Ferriss’ website does not exist to convince you why Tim is awesome – he’s beyond that point. Now he’s directing his audience to what he wants them to do next. He doesn’t want new website visitors to hire him for coaching (yet), or to approach him with VC deals (here), or to subscribe to his newsletter. All he wants is for you to listen to his podcast, because that is the strongest cornerstone of his platform, and the entry point to all his other offerings.

Lesson: Direct the top of your funnel to one destination

http://grantbaldwin.com

Homepage Example 4: Grant Baldwin

CTA: Join our Online Training

Headline: Want to Learn How to Find and Book Speaking Gigs?

Normally, your above-the-fold CTA should not lead to another website. When someone lands on your homepage, why would you want to immediately take them somewhere else? In Grant’s case, he’s got good reason. He has a very clearly defined Customer Avatar – public speakers who want to get booked and paid to speak. His signature course is promoted in his free course, which you find by clicking the ‘Join our Online Training’ button here.

This is a good looking homepage, and it validates Grant’s credentials and authority. If you happen to match his Customer Avatar, however, he wants to get you into his funnel right away, and his CTA button is a great way to do that.

Lesson: Make a fast lane for your Customer Avatar

https://www.melyssagriffin.com

Homepage Example 5: Melyssa Griffin

CTA: Click Here to Sign Up

Headline: Get my bangin’ blog business plan workbook for free.

This homepage includes an extra feature, something I usually see just a step or two lower down in the sales funnel: segmentation! By selecting the group with which you most strongly identify, Melyssa is gearing up a different automation sequence for you after you subscribe. Normally this is done in a follow-up email (as I typically handle it in the Stellar Email Template) but here it works seamlessly as part of the sign-up process.

The design of this hero section is bold and minimalistic, which helps offset the large amount of text in the selection boxes. I especially like the various options she presents JUST below the fold, encouraging you to scroll a little further (and to self-segment yourself again).

LESSON: Segment your audience at all the natural decision points

https://therisetothetop.com

Homepage Example 6: David Siteman Garland

CTA: Sign up for free training!

Headline: I help experts create and sell online courses

The hero shot here is really personable and engaging – I just wish it didn’t cut off his head! While I like the clarity and simplicity of his message – if you are an expert, and you create and sell online courses, you know that you want what he’s selling – I’m not a big fan of the color palette, and I think the ‘Get My Free Cheat Sheet’ CTA just above the fold is more compelling than the ‘Sign Up for Free Training’ in the green button.

What this homepage does really well is bolding out the big result his customer wants – CREATE AND SELL ONLINE COURSES – in a way that makes his Customer Avatar sure to dig deeper.

LESSON: Focus on the specific outcome your audience wants

https://socialtriggers.com

Homepage Example 7: Derek Halpern

CTA: Click To Get Free Updates

HEADLINE: Get With the FREE Program, Will Ya?

This is such a clear and simple homepage that it should be framed. The confidence in this hero shot – that is the confidence that Derek’s customers want to have. (Having your imagery visually convey the experience your customers hope to have is on the first page of the Stellar Homepage Checklist.)

While this could have been a very bland CTA – ‘join our weekly newsletter’ is in the start of the subhead – he’s put a very good set of copywriting twists on it that are intriguing, and make you want to learn more. It even says ‘free updates’ in the upper right, instead of ‘subscribe now,’ and that’s a good pivot. I also like how this homepage doesn’t celebrate the logo, but the logo’s typography still frames the visual experience. Instead of the logo being the champion of this website, it’s Derek himself, and that’s a much more authentic expression of a personality-based brand.

LESSON: Your homepage is about you, not just your business

https://entrepreneurshq.com

Homepage Example 8: Liam Austin

CTA: Sign Up

HEADLINE: The #1 marketing tactics of proven entrepreneurs – delivered daily

Normally I find ‘Sign Up’ to be a weak CTA in this day and age, but on this homepage it works. There isn’t a hero shot confusing you with the personality of the author – contradicting the previous lesson with Derek Halpern – instead, there is just a clear and simple value statement, and everything is framed around the daily email.

Putting so much effort into content marketing means that Liam does not want to dilute his main message (‘Sign Up’) with competing calls-to-action. He may have plenty of programs to sell, and media to review – videos, and podcasts, and ebooks, oh my! – but he will pitch you all those things in good time, AFTER you have subscribed. This homepage is a lot like a landing page – its goal is to convert you into taking ONE action, and other subsequent CTAs don’t distract you from taking this entry into the larger funnel.

LESSON: Optimise for the one action you want people to take

https://leopoldblake.com

Homepage Example 9: Nick Stephenson

CTA: Get the Book

Headline: Your Free Book is Waiting

Nick knows his audience, and they are heavy readers. The prospect of a free thriller is going to be exciting to his target market, but not to people outside of it. If he can hook a heavy reader with one thriller, the likelihood that they will purchase the rest of his books is very high.

Offering a free book is a big giveaway, and I especially like that he does not answer a relevant question here – is this a free digital copy, or a free hard copy? Just wanting to get that question answered is enough incentive to get someone to click.

LESSON: Be a little unclear, so users have to click to figure it out 

https://lewishowes.com

Homepage Example 10: Lewis Howes

CTA: Sign up to learn these 3 simple steps

Headline: Make a full-time living doing what you love

At first glance, the headline seems to be ‘Become The Hero Of Your Own Story,’ but I don’t think it is. I think that’s the tagline. The real headline for this homepage, and the message that frames someone’s decision to enter Lews Howes’ sales funnel, is ‘Make A Full Time Living Doing What You Love.’ That is the outcome-based value statement that tells the reader what they are going to get.

The hero shot is excellent quality, and the tagline does more to draw someone in to Lewis’ brand than the headline would. In this instance, I think it’s a smart move to have the tagline overshadow the headline. Without superior design, this wouldn’t work, but this is a good examples of breaking the rules the right way.

LESSON: Inspire users to level up, through you

https://www.nerdfitness.com

BONUS Homepage Example: Steve Kamb

Headline: We help Nerds, Misfits, and Mutants Lose Weight, Get Strong, & get Healthy PERMANENTLY!

There isn’t really a clear CTA on this homepage above the fold, but the messaging is so clear, it deserves an honorable mention. Nerd Fitness, run by Steve Kamb, has a very clear message – so clear, that if you’re a nerd who wants to get in shape, you won’t need a big flashy button for your call-to-action – you’re willing to hunt it down, like the Easter Egg in the bonus level of your favorite video game.

The hero shot is great, the headline is visually compelling, and the before-and-after photos peeking up from below the fold demonstrate the results. Some of the top-level navigation links could technically be CTAs, but without a clear button, or fillable fields, I don’t think this page properly has a CTA – but as I said, it’s so well-targeted, I don’t think it needs one.

So, what do you need on YOUR homepage above the fold?

Quicksprout has a simple formula, and they go into much more detail in their post about what to put above the fold on your website:

  • A well-written USP
  • Some brief explainer copy
  • Your branded logo
  • Simple, intuitive navigation
  • Contact info – especially important if you’re running an e-commerce store

This is their formula for what to include above the fold on your homepage, and it’s pretty straightforward. However, don’t just follow the rules.

A Contrarian View

Don’t Put Your CTA Above the Fold

It must be noted, putting a call-to-action above the fold is not strictly necessary. As we see above with Nerd Fitness, it’s not essential. There are even some A/B tests that have seen a 20% increase in putting the CTA below the fold.

“If you just rotely put the call-to-action above the fold,” Marketing Experiments says on their blog, “you may be making ‘the ask’ before your potential customer sees the value in why they should act. Or, sometimes, before they even know what you’re asking.”

If you have a solid reason for taking a contrarian position with your homepage CTA – like some of the examples above expertly demonstrates – then do it. Just make sure, as Picasso supposedly said, that you “learn the rules like a professional, so you can break them like an artist.”

That’s why I like website design and sales funnel strategy – there is an art to it, and it’s an art that generates revenue – especially when you know which rules to break.

About The Author

Caelan Huntress is the father of 3 kids, and in his spare time serves as creative director of Stellar Platforms. He is also a writer, digital marketer, multimedia producer, and a retired superhero. He blogs about his adventures on https://caelanhuntress.com.

Why does a customer buy from you? If you can discover this golden reason, the journey from Stranger to Customer will be much easier to follow. In this article, I’ll share with you 4 ways you can research your ideal customer, to improve your ability to sell to them. First, let me ask you a question:

What do you know about your customer?

  • What’s bothering them?
  • How do they make decisions?
  • Where do they go for help?
  • What makes them decide to buy?

If you know the answers to these questions, you can guide people into doing business with you. If you don’t know…you’re guessing.

Here’s how you can cut the guesswork:

  1. Competition research
  2. Go to their forums
  3. Make Facebook Audiences to build your list
  4. Survey your customers

Are you selling, or are you marketing?

There is a difference between sales and marketing. Sales is when you convince one person in front of you to buy something from you, right now. Marketing is when you convince groups of people to buy from you, anytime.

The lines can blur between sales and marketing, which causes confusion about what you actually…do. Marketing often adds urgency, with a limited time offer, and makes it more of a sale. Making a sale, research tells us, can take 7 or more touches before the close, so it can seem to take the same amount of time as marketing. But they work in two distinctly different ways:

Sales is one-to-one, and Marketing is one-to-many.

The best marketers are good salespeople, and good salespeople are also good marketers. Find the best marketers and salespeople in your field, and you can discover what’s working, by doing what they do.

Next time, I’ll help you do some research one-to-one. Today, we’re going to research one-to-many.

Competition Research

Henry Ford had a tremendously difficult job to do. He introduced the first mass-produced automobile to the American market. “If I had asked people what they wanted,” he said, “they would have said faster horses.”

Creating a brand-new market is daring, perilous, and complicated. Don’t build a new market from scratch, unless you have successfully entered a saturated market a few times. For most entrepreneurs, you want competition in your field.

Competitors help you to identify trends, generate ideas, and harvest customer research. In most cases, you should be able to find someone who is already doing what you do, and doing it well.

If you are not pioneering a new market, and you can find 3-5 rock stars in your industry, pay attention to what they are doing. Follow them on social media. Subscribe to their newsletters. Read their content.

Take notes.

The most effective strategies I’ve implemented in my digital marketing agency are adapted from other experts. I pay close attention to people who are better than me (like her and like her and like him and like her), because they are investing time and money and resources into researching what works.

If these people do something clever, the result of six months of customer research, I adapt their tactics for my own business. The best part is, I don’t have to spend six months figuring it out.

Big Caveat: Don’t just cut and paste from your competition. It’s dishonorable, illegal, and lazy.

If you learn the difference between repurposing work and copying work, you gain a big advantage. You can model the successful systems of your predecessors – but be careful not to cut too many corners. Do the work.

As Kaleigh Moore says on the Shopify blog, “Keeping an eye on your competitors helps you anticipate shifts in the market, spot new trends and successful tactics, and stay on the cutting edge of what’s working within your niche.” They even have a competitive analysis template here

Once you know what your competition is doing, go to your customers.

Go to their forums

Reddit and Quora are treasure troves of newbie information. These forums don’t have a lot of spammy sales pitches, because the forum architecture naturally discourages them (thanks to upvotes and downvotes). This raises authentic content to the top of the feed, making it more likely that people will read posts relating to the topic at hand.

What does this means for you, doing your customer research? You can go into one of these forums, and search around on keywords related to your topic. What you will find are a bunch of newbies, all asking basic questions that you are uniquely qualified to answer.

This is valuable for two reasons:

  • First, you can answer these questions and make some connections.
  • Second (and more importantly), you learn how your prospects phrase their problems.

You can amplify the effectiveness of your marketing copy by using the phrases your customer uses to talk about their problems.

As James Mulvey says on the Hootsuite blog, “Reddit can help you observe what people really think about your industry and products, reveal what frustrates customers, and help you create marketing campaigns and content that kill those pains.” 

The comment threads on forum posts can be a goldmine of information for you. You can eavesdrop on people who are trying to solve the problems that you can solve, all laid out in a threaded conversation, on a free website.

When you read through these conversations you will see how they interact with their problem. They will talk about the types of solutions they try, and where they encounter obstacles. You can read the solutions that other people offer, and see how they react. You can make note of what works for them, and what makes them lose interest.

Forum research opens your customers’ minds up like a book. This gives you a deep understanding of how they are currently searching for answers.

Make Facebook Audiences to Build Your List

Facebook allows anyone with a minor amount of technical aptitude to create a ‘Lookalike Audience.’ Use their sophisticated demographic and behavioural data algorithms. You don’t have to be a social engineer, all you need is a list of your current customers.

Do you have a spreadsheet of customers? Does it have enough contact information (name, email address, zip code, and so on) that Facebook can identify their user profiles? If so, then you can enter one of the most sophisticated marketing research games in the world.

All you need to do is create a Facebook ad campaign. Upload your .csv of customer data, and Facebook can create a Lookalike Audience. This is a group of people who have similar interests, similar activity, and similar data collected about themselves.

Using this Lookalike Audience is limited to the Facebook platform – you can’t export these lookalikes and start cold calling them. But you can advertise to them.

As AJ Agrawal says on the Forbes blog, “I highly suggest running a series of low-budget campaigns to see which ads and messages work best. Only increase the budget once you find one with a low acquisition cost.” 

What messages make these kinds of people respond? Learning from your Lookalike Audience helps you hone your Ideal customer avatar template.

If you already have a working Sales Funnel, then you can advertise a Lead Magnet to these folks, and start filling your pipeline. If not, you can still use a Lookalike Audience for customer research, through surveys.

By asking similar people a series of survey questions, you gain valuable marketing intelligence. You can use this to sell to them in the future.

Survey Your Customers

Ryan Levesque is a master of customer research. He has worked with a Deep Dive Survey for years, and his book “Ask” is a wealth of information. He describes how (and why) asking good questions on surveys will lead you to copy that makes high-converting headlines.

Whenever he is entering a new market, Ryan will offer an incentive for people to take a detailed survey. The first question, all by itself – before he asks for their name, or email address, or any contact info – he asks, “What’s the #1 challenge you’re dealing with in relation to _____?”

He puts this question first because – it’s the most important question. If the user leaves the survey before completing all the questions, at the very least, he gets the answer here.

The responses to these questions are framed in the customers’ language, using the terms they use, and the way they think about their problem.

These specific phrases can become marketing copy, so when similar Customer Avatars see a headline with that specific phrase, they think, “This was made for me! I’ve got to get this.”

Remember, the ultimate goal of any piece of marketing is to make someone say: “Shut up and take my money!” If you can create that reaction, your marketing is a success.

Ryan uses many sophisticated techniques to gather customer intelligence. If you are planning to do a survey campaign, I highly recommend reading his book, Ask.

Setting up complicated surveys does take a lot of work. While it can reward you with qualitative data, the technical complexity to gather it might not be worth it.

That’s why many businesses prefer the old-fashioned, tried-and-true method. Gather customer research by interviewing customers one-on-one. I’ll talk about that in an upcoming article – subscribe to my newsletter to get notified when it’s ready.

About The Author

Caelan Huntress is the father of 3 kids, and in his spare time serves as creative director of Stellar Platforms. He is also a writer, digital marketer, multimedia producer, and a retired superhero. He blogs about his adventures on https://caelanhuntress.com.

The awards for this contest, the Best Email Subject Lines of 2018, is totally biased and skewed. To even be considered for this award, you have to:

  1. Publish a newsletter regularly, to which
  2. I happen to be subscribed, and
  3. One or more of your subject lines has to make me go, ‘Wow!’

Last year I did a round-up of the 170 best email subject lines from 2017. Now that we’ve faced another New Year, I clicked the same Gmail label in my inbox to pull up a list of all the best emails that got my attention in 2018.

Email Subject Line Contest Judging Criteria

  • 3rd place – You show up in this list. Sometime, in 2018, you sent me an email with a subject line that made me say, ‘Wow, that’s good.’
  • 2nd place – You show up in this list more than once.
  • 1st place – You show up in this list more than anyone else.

Again, this is a highly subjective list, and it’s skewed towards digital marketers and salespeople (since they are the content creators I like to follow the most, and they are usually the best at writing subject lines that make you want to open the email) and the joy of having your own award show is that you get to award them however you please, so without further ado, here is…

3RD PLACE – Best Email Subject Lines of 2018

I kept this secret way too long – Mira Kelly

I never wanted to be an entrepreneur – Stu McLaren

DAMMIT DAMMIT DAMMIT – Kartra

Can we talk about getting you leads? – Dan Faber

Announcing major new services for your site. – Jetpack

How I Generated 800 Booked Calls With A Four Page Website – James Kemp

So, stop me if you’ve heard this one – Joseph Michael

How to get 10 paying Clients Now – Ted McGrath

New for you. The Mozart Pack is now ready. – Divi Den

The bad advice I followed at the start of my business – Melyssa Griffin

Full-time author within 12 months (how she did it) – Nick Stephenson

Question – Holden Qigong

did you miss it? – Jill Knouse

You are guest speaking on TED in 3 days (you’re ready, right?) – Dominika

Write me back if you want one of 7 test drives – Amber McCue

I know Keto is hot. Here’s a simple way to do it. – Pedram Shojai

Surprise! Unlock a Free Membership Upgrade When You Join Today – Trusted Housesitters

[pdf download] Get paid to share your message – Ben Kniffen

Why I love it when my clients are afraid – Laura Simms

Steal this sales email – Shenee Howard

You won’t believe who just joined the Naturopathic CE Faculty! – Naturopathic CE

I recorded a video for you – Fab Mancini

“That’s the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard” – Vishen Lakhiani

You’ve acquired FIFTY PERCENT OFF 😉 It’s confirmed, CAELAN – Expedia

Can we put your name in the raffle? – Danny Iny

Day Six – “ABANDON SHIP!” (and other launch lies your brain tells you) – Kyla Roma

[Explosion noises] – Digg

Don’t buy this course! Guerilla Publishing is NOT for you if… – Derek Murphy

Your “Start Here ” Page – Pat Flynn

REGISTRATION IS NOW OPEN – Susan Peirce Thompson

Now I’m obsessed. – Nick Stephenson

Changes – SARK

do you believe me yet?- Cory Huff

Announcement : Introducing Unstoppable with Kerwin Rae – Kerwin Rae

You have a $603 credit – Michelle Shaeffer

The Productivity Hack That’s Made Me Millions – Bob Allen

Can I give you $1000? Two people are going to win…might as well be you. – Kelly Poelker

You’ve always wondered ….Now you can find out for yourself – Team Tony Robbins

The ultimate list building short-cut (PDF DOWNLOAD Inside) – Navid Moazzez

BOOM! This is how you make money from a tiny list – Meera Kothand

Something BIG is coming – Steph Crowder

Write better emails TODAY-Here’s how – Derek Halpern

You’re not in yet 🙂 last chance today! – Aaron Morin

Can you come as my guest? (VIP invite) – John Assaraf

did you hear the news? – Dustin W. Stout

Why do customers really buy? – Donald Miller

Did you see this? – Andrea Leda

10x your book revenue without selling another book – Ty Ward

Get my best speaker training tips! Here’s how… – Sage Lavine

do you need a raise? – Lisa Sasevich

The hardest decision I’ve made in my business this year. – Caleb Wojcik

Make Your Website a Well-Oiled Machine – Pia Larson


While some of these subject lines look like they were addressed to me personally, or seem to be a personal request, I can assure you, they are not. Some of these were so good because they insinuated a personal connection so well, but these were really all mass emails.

The email subject lines in this list – these are examples of really good mass emails.

2ND PLACE – Best Email Subject Lines of 2018

These authors showed up multiple times in my inbox this year, and more than once I said, ‘Hey, that’s a really good subject line.’


Wendy Weiss

Wendy Weiss, the Queen of Cold Calling

Wendy Weiss runs a sales training and coaching consultancy, with an expertise in new business development.

Wendy’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2018

  • Your message = your money
  • This will be your last chance

Eben Pagan headshot

Eben Pagan, Entrepreneur & Teacher

Eben Pagan teaches advanced strategies to grow your business to the 6 and 7 figure per year level.

Eben’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2018

  • Email me back
  • Did you still want this?

Jon Morrow, 7-Figure Blogger

Jon Morrow gives cutting edge advice about blogging to smart bloggers.

Jon’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2018

  • [Blog Launch Tookit] Please don’t pay full price for this
  • [FLASH SALE] The Ultimate Training Library for Beginning Bloggers

Benji Bruce headshot

Benji Bruce, Motivational Keynote Speaker

Benji Bruce shows an audience how to create a psychological advantage so they stay sharp and stay ahead.

Benji’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2018

  • Send me your pitch
  • Cancel my membership

John Lee Dumas headshot

John Lee Dumas, Podcaster

John Lee Dumas hosts the daily business podcast EOFire for the Fire Nation.

John’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2018

  • Secrets to selling from pages, stages, and webinars
  • Get ready to learn Facebook Ads!

Alan McKenna, Business Strategist

Alan McKenna is a sales & marketing strategist with over 20 years experience in turning companies around and exploding their growth

Alan’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2018

  • Can I send you $3000?
  • Wednesday March 21st-Add to your calendar
  • I changed the date of the meeting

David Siteman Garland headshot

David Siteman Garland, Online Course Creator

David Siteman Garland helps experts create and sell online courses.

David’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2018

  • (super time sensitive) Create Awesome Online Course is open
  • The biggest mistake I made in my business (plus deadline)

1st Place – Best Email Subject Lines of 2018

Marisa Murgatroyd headshot

Marisa Murgatroyd, Brand Builder and Marketing Strategist

Marisa Murgatroyd provides done-for-you branding, website design, and training on becoming the most bold, colorful, vibrant expression of who you are online.

Marisa also has one of the best platforms on the internet, IMHO. She’s got crystal-clear messaging, top-notch website design, excellent sales funnels and creates a TON of content. So it’s no big surprise that she showed up in this (highly subjective) list a total of NINE times.

Marisa’s Best Email Subject Lines of 2018

  1. Can we work together on your business?
  2. I hit 7-figures because I did this…
  3. what Luke Skywalker can do for your business
  4. this common product creation mistake can lead to zero sales
  5. this is not a trick question
  6. I’ve got an idea for you!
  7. {true story} How I hit zero….
  8. 2 inconvenient fact that should disqualify me as a coach
  9. {urgent} change of plans….

About The Author

Caelan Huntress is the father of 3 kids, and in his spare time serves as creative director of Stellar Platforms. He is also a writer, digital marketer, multimedia producer, and a retired superhero. He blogs about his adventures on https://caelanhuntress.com.

Follow Caelan on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Youtube.

The best autoresponder sequences have a lot of shared characteristics. After subscribing to hundreds (maybe thousands) of email newsletters over the past decade, I’ve become adept at noticing what works, what the best people are using, and what steps are used by everyone. Here’s a standard email template you can use for a follow-up autoresponder sequence, one that you can use with just about any email newsletter signup autoresponder: 

  1. You Are Confirmed
  2. Let’s Connect
  3. Here’s My Services
  4. Survey To Segment You Into A Group
  5. Here’s Some Good Education
  6. Book a Call
  7. Referrals

If I’m working with a new client who doesn’t yet have any content on their blog, this is the outline that I use to set up their email autoresponder. I make a copy of my Stellar Email Template, spend an hour or two writing some good copy, and then migrate the content into their ESP. In an afternoon, you can have a completely custom email newsletter autoresponder sequence all set up and ready to go, using this template.

Get the Stellar Email Template

Note: this template can be used for an entire sales funnel, and it also includes copy templates for thank you pages, confirmation emails, and more. Some of the pre-written email autoresponder templates in this doc may not apply to you or your business. But if you want to flesh out your email autoresponder sequence with CTAs to follow you on social media, book a call, or buy your services, there are templates for those emails in this document as well. Delete the ones that are not relevant, and add sections if you want to promote more blog posts.

This easy, step-by-step process outlined above can give you a brand new email autoresponder sequence with just a couple hours of attention. Passively nurturing your sales funnel is definitely worth this investment of your time; successful bloggers and entrepreneurs are always tweaking and optimizing their onboarding autoresponder sequence.

Can I send autoresponders and newsletters at the same time?

Personally, I have no problem with this overlap, in the emails that I send or that I receive. I like to leave a long interval between email autoresponder messages (unless it is a 5-day or a 30-day course, which often needs to be every day) so any email newsletters sent will likely be in between the delivery of the autoresponder.

Besides, many times, your new subscriber cannot tell the difference between an immediate newsletter and a pre-scheduled autoresponder.

There are ways that you can exclude someone from your newsletter sends until the autoresponder sequence has completed – the specific method of doing so depends on your email service provider – but generally, I don’t bother with that unless the newsletter would really interrupt the flow of the autoresponder sequence.

If you ever wonder, “How are others doing this well?” You can just collect some examples to find out.

How To Collect Autoresponder Email Examples

The best autoresponder email examples are only a subscription away. I’m sure you follow some people who are good at email. (If you don’t, there are a number of them quoted in this article.) Go subscribe to a bunch of their email newsletters, and if you like, use a filter to automatically tag their emails as they arrive. In a few weeks, you can search your inbox for this tag, and you will have dozens of the best autoresponder email examples to review.

Pat Flynn’s autoresponder sequence examples

Autoresponder Series #1: The Bait and Hook
Autoresponder Series #2: The Ground and Pound
Autoresponder Series #3: The Pat Flynn

“The real magic of my approach is two-fold,” says the mastermind behind Smart Passive Income. “I’m establishing credibility and building relationships in a non-evasive manner, which keeps people on my list and opening emails. This obviously helps increase the open rate and responsiveness of my broadcast emails; and some of the content emails get people back onto another platform where opportunities for affiliate sales and product sales exist.”

Pat Flynn is one of the best in the business. If you want to make money online, I recommend you subscribe to his newsletter, just to watch what he does, and how he does it. Read his article explaining these 3 Autoresponder Series here.

Best welcome autoresponder email examples

stellar-email-template-pin

Dan Wang collected 13 of the best Welcome emails on the web, and laid them out in a nice visual progression. Give this article a scan so you can see how some other successful email autoresponders are doing their thing.

Other talented email marketers that I follow include:

Subscribe to their newsletters and take notes. And download the Stellar Email Template to work on your own.

About The Author

Caelan Huntress helps people sell their stuff online. As a website designer, sales strategist, copywriter, and digital marketer, he works with entrepreneurs, coaches, authors and public speakers to bring them more calls, more clients, and more customers.

The first Make It Happen Mastermind was a success!

After 15+ years of leading and facilitating my own mastermind groups, I decided to formally offer a group coaching mastermind as a service for entrepreneurs, online businesses, service providers, and thought leaders. As an experiment, I launched the first cohort of the Make It Happen Mastermind in Q4 2018, from September 15 – December 15, and decided I would do it again in 2019 if it was a success.

Based on the testimonials below, I think it was successful.

Mastermind Testimonials

My business has blossomed over the last three months. I’ve gotten a lot of help with strategy and organization, and everything that seemed to be impossible on my own now feels possible because of this network. It’s not an expensive investment of time or money, given what you get at the end of 3 months working with other business owners helping you work on your challenges.” – Kathleen Celmins, MIHM 2018 Alumni

Because of joining the Make It Happen Mastermind, I’ve had some really great changes. I’m a lot more focused, and that’s been super important for me, because I tend to work on too many things at one time. Making me focus and drive to one thing has been very helpful and successful.” – Jonathan Logan, 2018 MIHM Alumni

I was a little reluctant to join when I first started, because I have a coach, and I wasn’t quite sure I needed any more support, but I’m glad I did. One of my biggest challenges is feeling like I can accomplish everything by myself. I’m a one-man-show, it’s me, myself, and I, and a bunch of freelancers, trying to make things happen. Having a cool group of people to kick ideas off of has been profound for me. My business was already doing really good, but I really look forward to this meeting every week and checking in and having regular accountability. It’s been a really positive experience for me and my business. I’m so glad I joined, and it’s been a lot of fun.” – Michael Riscica, MIHM 2018 Alumni  

Mastermind FAQ 

Q: ) How often does the Mastermind meet?
A: ) Once a week for 60 minutes a group of 4-5 people (including us) will meet in a group call, and you and I will meet again for 30-minutes, just the two of us. We do this for 12 weeks.

Q: ) What time are the group masterminds?
A: ) The time depends on the preference of the group, and can be selected from one of the following three recommended slots:

  • Monday at 4 pm Pacific time (Tuesday at 1pm NZ time)
  • Wednesday at 1 pm Pacific time (Thursday at 10am NZ time)
  • Friday at 12 pm Pacific time (Saturday at 9 am NZ time)

Alternative times are available, depending on the group preferences.

We start meeting the week of January 15th, and finish the week of April 15th.

Q: ) How many people are in each Mastermind group?
A: ) Every Mastermind group will be capped at 4 participants, plus myself as the host. I have space for up to 3 weekly cohorts, and only enough time for 6 hours of 1-on-1 coaching throughout the week, so there are only 12 spots available for this quarter. After 12 people enroll, it’s full until later this year.

Q: ) What happens during the 1-on-1 coaching calls?
A: ) I will be your own personal webmaster and digital strategy consultant, for 30 minutes per week. We can review your goals for the quarter, and I can keep you accountable for your progress. More importantly, I can troubleshoot issues on your website, I can help you revise your copywriting or CSS, I can help you review and compare different platforms you are considering, I can train you on how to use your website, or I can make specific changes for you, while you watch me on a screenshare.

Q: ) What happens during the mastermind calls?
A: ) Each mastermind call follows a very structured agenda. After reading the opening (the same one Andrew Carnegie used to open his mastermind sessions) a group of 4 people will share:

  • Wins
  • Challenges
  • Commitments

Andrew Carnegie’s Mastermind Opening

Every session begins with the same opening read by Andrew Carnegie at the start of his own Mastermind meetings, as chronicled by Napoleon Hill in his book “Think And Grow Rich.” Listen to the opening of Andrew Carnegie’s mastermind below:

“Mastermind Groups are the single most effective way to regularly surround yourself with remarkable people.”

“Mastermind Groups are the single most effective way to regularly surround yourself with remarkable people.”

Barrett Brooks

"Working from home does not mean that you have to be alone."

"Working from home does not mean that you have to be alone."

Charles Bordet

Ready to join the Make It Happen Mastermind?

Applications close January 5, 2019

About The Author

Caelan Huntress is the father of 3 kids, and in his spare time serves as creative director of Stellar Platforms. He is also a writer, digital marketer, multimedia producer, and a retired superhero. He blogs about his adventures on https://caelanhuntress.com.

If you have been blogging, then you already have an easy email autoresponder sequence that is 85% done. Writing email newsletter autoresponders doesn’t have to take a long time; you can repurpose your best blog posts, using the 10-step system in this article. Before I describe the step-by-step process for converting your best blog posts into email autoresponders, let’s take a second and remind ourselves why email autoresponders are so effective.

Email autoresponders convert strangers into customers, automatically.

You’re facing a problem, and you’ve met someone who is solving that problem. They offer you a solution: it’s an intriguing lead magnet, giving a step-by-step solution to your problem, and you only have to subscribe to their newsletter to get access. Shyly, you hand over your first name and email address, and your relationship begins.

Over the next few weeks, this person courts you. They send you interesting and useful emails, that seem like they were written just for you. Over time, you begin to know this person. Then you like them, because they are funny, and engaging, and real. Finally, you trust them, and when they ask you to buy something, you agree.

This is what an email autoresponder sequence is supposed to do.

“Autoresponders allow you to build ‘know, like and trust’ before you ask for the sale. That way, you can convert more customers, and you can do it without being overly ‘salesy’ or pushy.”
– Mary Fernandez

Research tells us that it can take up to 7 touches to close a sale. So don’t try to sell your services right away in your confirmation message – treat this new relationship like a courtship.

Butter them up. Demonstrate your expertise. Tell some stories. Share some photos of you and your life. Give them time to get to know you for a few weeks, and then, when they are interested, ask them to buy something.

What is an email autoresponder, and how does it work?

“Autoresponders are the hardest-working, unsung heroes of content marketing. They’re a series of emails you write once and set up to send out at pre-set intervals to anyone who asks for them.”

Beth Hayden

Simply put, an email autoresponder is a series of pre-written email messages. They are sent at specific intervals after someone subscribes.

You can think of email autoresponders as evergreen newsletters – rather than sending them out once a month, or every Friday, email autoresponders are sent in a predetermined sequence after subscription.

 

The Secrets of Great Autoresponder Messages

  • The best autoresponder emails are repurposed from your best content.
  • They can be short, or long, but they typically only ask the reader to take 1 action.
  • Use a testimonial or a PS at the end.

“The very first email you send to a new subscriber sets the tone for how they see you for the rest of their time with you – so you want to get this one right. It’s also the single best email for getting them to look at specific pages of your site, like popular posts or product pages.”
Naomi Dunford

How do you write the best email autoresponder, without creating tons of new content? Simple. Don’t start from scratch. Use your blog.

Your blog is a pre-written autoresponder series waiting to happen

Every time you write a blog post, you have a free email autoresponder message.

This is a piece of content that your future email subscribers would be happy to read, if it’s on-topic and relevant. Chances are, they are not going to subscribe to your newsletter, and THEN go read every blog post you’ve ever written. The likelihood of doubling up here is very low, and the likelihood of presenting useful and interesting information is very high.

“An email autoresponder easily makes use of the blog content you’ve already created. Most readers haven’t read everything you’ve written, nor have they read it in sequential order. Your email autoresponder groups related topics together and packages it neatly for the convenience of your readers, delivering it right to them.

You don’t have to create new content in order to make this happen. You can use what you’ve already written for your blog.”

Julie Neidlinger

You can pick your own favorite blog posts, and decide manually; or, you can follow the data. The blog posts that are most successful on your blog are typically the ones that will make the best autoresponder emails.

10-Step Blog-To-Autoresponder Email Series Writing System

  1. Go to Google Analytics, and find your most popular posts.
  2. Create a card for the title of each post in Trello, and link to the article on the card.
  3. Drag and drop the subjects until they make a sensible progression.
  4. Scrape a couple paragraphs from each post, and paste the content onto the card.
  5. Create a copy of the Stellar Email Template in Google Docs (linked below)
  6. Paste the content from the Trello cards into the template.
  7. Edit the copy in Google Docs. Add connectors, like ‘I’ll tell you all about X next week,’ and ‘Remember last week, when I talked about X?”
  8. Add a CTA (Call-to-Action) to each message. Sometimes, this is just a link to read the full blog post, but it may be ‘book a call with me’ or ‘reply’ or ‘buy this product.’ Make sure there is only 1 CTA.
  9. Migrate the content from Google Docs to the email autoresponder delivery platform.
  10. Subscribe with a testing email, to review the results.

This final step is critical. There are so many moving pieces in any autoresponder email series, it is inevitable you will find things to tweak and edit only by being on the receiving end.

Setup an email address [email protected]. Subscribe to your own newsletter. Make note of what you find, what needs to change, and what can be better.

About The Author

Caelan Huntress helps people sell their stuff online. As a website designer, sales strategist, copywriter, and digital marketer, he works with entrepreneurs, coaches, authors and public speakers to bring them more calls, more clients, and more customers.

Get the Stellar Email Template

(Fill-in-the-blank email autoresponder series)

If you are looking to learn about Gutenberg in advance of the WordPress 5.0 release date, the best thing you can do is install the Gutenberg Ramp Plugin and give it a try for yourself. There are plenty of WordPress Gutenberg tutorials out there, but until WP 5.0 drops, we don’t really know what the effects will be. But so far, it seems to be mostly positive.

“For most casual users, it will, after some growing pains, bring a more flexible content creation experience.

Non-developers will be able to intuitively craft more complex layouts with extra elements like buttons, content embeds, and lots more. And that will, hopefully, help WordPress to continue to grow.”

Colin Newcomer on CodeinWP

WordPress Gutenberg Introduction

The new editor is clean, sleek, and simple. As I said in my first-ever Gutenberg post on my personal blog, “If Medium and the WordPress WYSIWYG had a baby, it would be named Gutenberg.” It’s a much more intuitive user interface that will enable newer bloggers to create content easily and fluidly.

“Gutenberg is an obvious reaction to competitors of WordPress; the writing experience of Medium, the quick and easy site builds using Wix and Squarespace.”

Iain Poulson on Delicious Brains

Gutenberg was revealed in mid-2017 by Matt Mullenweg during an interview with Om Malik, and ever since then, there has been a lot of anticipation for this new editor. Because WordPress is open source, none of this has been secret, and friendly geeks have been investigating the ins and outs of the software as it develops. Some of the links below have detailed tutorials on how to use Gutenberg for your WordPress website, with some tutorials in text, some in video, and a few in gifs.

How do I install Gutenberg on my website?

First off, let’s determine whether or not you have WordPress 5.0 or not.

How to install Gutenberg on your WordPress 5.0 Website

Step 1: Install WordPress.

That’s it. The WordPress core will have Gutenberg standard on every WordPress installation.

How to install Gutenberg on your WordPress 4.X site

  • Go to Plugins → Add New
  • Search for “Gutenberg” (I used Gutenberg Ramp plugin, it worked fine)
  • Click Install Now
  • Wait – Install Now button will change to Activate
  • Click Activate

Installing Gutenberg early will give you the chance to see what it does with your website; if things will break, if things will go smoothly, or if it’s way above your head.

Gutenberg FAQ

What will Gutenberg change in my WordPress site?

After WordPress 5.0, Gutenberg will change the Post Editor (and Page Editor) that you use to create new posts and pages. All the remaining WordPress functionality will be unchanged.

Can I use my page builder with Gutenberg?

Yes and no. Yes, on the website, but no, not on the page.

Yes, you can use a page builder on a WordPress 5.0 website that uses Gutenberg as the core editor. No, you cannot use the Gutenberg editor and your Page Builder editor on the same page.

This website is built in the Divi theme, and uses the Visual Builder as the page builder for many pages (and even some posts). If I compose a post in Gutenberg, and then try to transition that post to the Visual Builder, it used to remove all coding in the easiest way possible: it will delete all the content in the post.

I tried a Gutenberg-to-Visual Builder conversion, and it refused to convert, I couldn’t even access the Visual Builder. But it did preserve the Visual Builder shortcodes.

wordpress gutenberg tutorials screenshot

I tried a Visual Builder-to-Gutenberg conversion, and this is what the screen looks like when you try to go to the Classic Editor:

wordpress gutenberg tutorials classic editor

If you try to return to Default Editor, or get to Gutenberg, you’ll lose it all:

gutenberg tutorials divi builder visual builder

Will Gutenberg change my eCommerce Store?

Since Products are a Custom Post Type, they will not (currently) be able to use Gutenberg without extra enhancement.

However, since I use WooCommerce on as the shopping cart on this website, I did see a neat little notice on here after I installed Gutenberg:

gutenberg tutorials woocommerce integratione

I did this to get one of my basic page-builder functions in Gutenberg, and it is something I can already do with WooCommerce shortcodes, but this is what a Product Block looks like in Gutenberg:

Can I keep the old version of WordPress instead of using Gutenberg?

I am quite sure there will be a plugin to attempt doing that, as there is always a plugin to handle any feature the user base wants; but since the old Tiny MCE editor is embedded in the core, it would take quite a hefty piece of code to transition it back.

If you really need to keep the old editor and refuse to use Gutenberg, your best bet is to stick with WordPress 4.9 and manually install any security updates, keeping your website increasingly obsolete. I’m sure this will be an appealing option for many to begin with, but I suspect that most people will upgrade in due course. 

How hard is it to learn Gutenberg?

Try one of the Gutenberg tutorials linked in this post, you’ll see how easy it is. Like any learning curve, though, it depends on your aptitude and your interest.

Writing a blog post in Gutenberg won’t be much different than writing a blog post in Medium, but it will have a lot of the core WordPress functionality and integration. Getting all of the new features to sync up will take a little study, but it’s not very difficult. I’ve found it to be very user-friendly – read the first post I wrote in Gutenberg, with glitches, here: https://caelanhuntress.com/2018/08/12/gutenberg-is-coming-to-wordpress/

How long does it take to learn Gutenberg?

It’s not long. After 3-4 posts, a novice blogger should have the hang of it; experienced bloggers will only need 1-2 blog posts to pick up all the differences.

Are there Gutenberg tutorials?

One of the best Gutenberg tutorials I’ve found is the WP Engine Gutenberg for Beginners tutorial.  – This comprehensive tutorial is full of gifs and is very useful.

If you like video, the Yoast team put out a great video series of Gutenberg tutorials for free on YouTube:

Will my old WordPress posts be affected by Gutenberg blocks?
Will Gutenberg affect the SEO of my WordPress website?

What’s New: Gutenberg Blocks

The Blocks are the most fundamental change to the editor. The Gutenberg tutorials linked above go into them in some detail.

Users of Medium will recognize the interface intuitively; but because it’s WordPress, you have much more flexibility and control than with a typical Medium post.

When you pop the hood and look at the the code, the Blocks code is pretty simple. It looks like this:

<!– wp:core/text –> <!– /wp:core/text –> makes a text block. Everything within those bracket pairs can be moved around, drag-and-drop, within the Gutenberg editor.

“Previously, your content lived inside one big HTML file and for every enhancement there had to be something new: shortcodes, custom post types, embeds, widgets and the like. All with their quirky interfaces and weird behavior. Now, you can build your content precisely like you make a LEGO set: all from one box, following a standardized and straightforward set of instructions.”

–  Edwin Toonen on Yoast

This sounds great, on the surface, if you’re starting from scratch. But what if you have an older website?

If you use a lot of shortcodes in your theme, this could present some problems.

“Currently, shortcodes cannot be executed in text columns or paragraph blocks. They must be placed in the shortcode block in order to work. This can cause some problems if your shortcodes produce inline content like the year or an inline call to action.”

– Nathan Ingram on iThemes

Gutenberg Glitches

These are the glitches I noticed while composing my first post in Gutenberg:

  • Making links doesn’t always work. The Link editor doesn’t always take my text, and I often can’t add a link easily.
  • Sometimes when I mean to backspace a word, it deletes the entire text block.
  • There is no undo when this happens; the text block I am working on is just gone.
  • The Fixed Background option to make images parallax often masks the image entirely in the editor
  • Sometimes deleting blocks is problematic, and I have to convert to HTML and manually kill it in the code
  • The images don’t display in the Editor the way they do in preview

An easy caveat: I created this post using the Gutenberg Ramp plugin, on a WordPress core that is still made to support previous versions of WordPress. This is also the early stages of rollout, and I made this post without reading any Gutenberg tutorials, so I am quite sure these glitches will improve over time.

Others have noticed some glitches and hazards too:

“Doesn’t support responsive columns yet. We really hope this is coming. A lot of times this is a reason people install visual builder plugins or shortcode plugins, is to get the column feature alone. It is definitely time for columns to be in core!”

– Brian Jackson on Kinsta

“Backward compatibility is going to be a primary concern for most developers. It will destroy current plugins and themes, especially ones that require integration with TinyMCE.”

– Manish Dudharejia

Gutenberg Plugin Compatibility

“Since announcing the database on March 1st, 70 people have been granted testing status. However, of 5000 total plugins, we’re still at 4139 untested plugins. No companies have stepped up to contribute a significant amount of person-hours.”

– Daniel Bachhuber on his blog

Of the 861 tested plugins that Daniel tested in April of 2018:

  • 219 (25.44%) are compatible.
  • 518 (60.16%) are likely compatible.
  • 25 (2.9%) are likely not compatible.
  • 39 (4.53%) are not compatible.
  • 60 (6.97%) are in “testing”, which means someone started test and abandoned the process.

That’s a decent spread, and the numbers may have improved. But as Igor notes below, this could cause big difficulties for Custom Post Types:

“If your plugin has a custom post type, then you may want to disable Gutenberg for that particular post type. To disable Gutenberg for your custom post type, you can just change your post type configuration.”

– Igor Benić on Tuts Plus

When will Gutenberg be a part of my WordPress website?

The answer to that question is very personal.

When WordPress 5.0 is released, every WordPress website that upgrades is going to have Gutenberg installed as its core editor by default. If you want it earlier, you can install a plugin, as described above. If you don’t want to upgrade to 5.0, you can probably coast on WordPress 4.9 for a number of months without facing any serious issues.

So, you will have Gutenberg on your WordPress website when you want it. Get ready, because it’s coming. Read some Gutenberg tutorials, or better yet, give it a spin.

If you want to talk about what Gutenberg could do to your WordPress website, schedule a consultation.

This interview is the first episode of the Stellar Platforms Show! During this hour-long interview, I spoke with Sean Ogle of Location Rebel about the main tools he uses to run his membership website, the project management software he loves the most, and how he advises his members to identify their best target market.

We Talk About Location Rebel

Sean goes over the progression he’s gone through since launching Location Rebel in 2011, when it grew into a Frankenstein-like collection of tools. In 2016 he moved to an all-in-one system, the Rainmaker platform by Copyblogger – and in 2018 he moved back into WordPress, splitting off his tools into ‘best in class’ components.

We Talk About Running A Membership Website

When building a membership website, is it best to cobble all the pieces together, or do an all-in-one platform? Sean has some interesting perspectives on this idea. “It’s best to go with something that is best in class at what they do,” he reasons, because any all-in-one platform that’s trying to do 10 different things is going to do each of them 10% as well as it possibly could, and all these components could be 90% better.

Sean also advises against trying to sell too much right away in the early stages, and instead, focus on building a real connection with your audience. “If you can build up that core audience early on, and they trust you, they will buy your stuff early on when you’ve got it,” he says. 

“Another benefit you get from waiting,” he continues, “is you get to know your audience better.” This can be very helpful for publish-happy content producers, the types of people who often want to start a membership site.

“Figure out the problem you’re solving, and do the bare minimum to solve that problem.” – Sean Ogle

{clicktotweet}

We Talk About His Target Market

I asked Sean about the people who join Location Rebel, if they are looking to find a way to make money as a freelance writer, or trying to find a way that enables them to travel more. His answer was really surprising.

We Talk About His Newest Project

Sean not only helps people improve their business, he also helps them to enjoy their hobby more. Our interview took place just as Hobby Hacking launched, a new component of the Location Rebel community.

Listen in on the biggest lessons learned from an experienced membership site owner. There were lots of questions answered in the whole 55 minute interview – watch it below.

Social media marketing can be done well, or done badly. No matter how good you’re doing, it could be really easy for you, or really hard. The easiest way to make sure your social media marketing is both easy and good is to follow the advice of people who have mastered the mediums.

6 Small Business Social Media Marketing Tips

#1 – Say something valuable.

Seth Godin talks about ‘the trap of social media noise.’ Just because we can say things in so many places, to so many people, it doesn’t mean we should.

“Prune your message and your list and build a reputation that’s worth owning and an audience that cares.”

– Seth Godin

#2 – Don’t spread too thin.

Every account you set up will cost you, in time, energy, and mental overhead. Ask yourself which accounts are really necessary, and if you should skip one, then do it.

Ashley Kemper wrote a comprehensive overview at Marketing Land comparing each social media platform, with specific guidelines on when these different platforms make sense. Her recommendations are very detailed, so read her article if you have any questions about a specific platform. Her guidelines were:

  • Use Facebook if you want to reach a massive audience with a diverse array of content types.
  • Use Twitter if you have frequent updates or content with a “timeliness” factor.
  • Use YouTube if your business could benefit from product demos, testimonials, or putting a human face to your brand.
  • Use Google+ if you have a physical location and want to appear in local search results.
  • Use LinkedIn if you are in a B2B space, or you want to speak to a more professionally-oriented audience.
  • Use Pinterest if you want to target a female audience and have great visual content.
  • Use Instagram if you can create interesting visual content on a regular basis.
  • Use Foursquare if you have a brick-and-mortar location.

Read her article for more depth on each platform, if you’re not sure whether or not one of them is a good match for you.

#3 – Variety is the spice of social media.

Posting the same thing, all the time, isn’t giong to keep your audience engaged or interested. On the 8Days blog, Jimdo recommends a 70-20-10 formula.

“Don’t be overly promotional: Nobody likes someone who just talks about themselves all the time. 70% of your content should add value for your followers (such as sharing blog posts, coupons, etc.), 20% should be sharing other people’s content (posts from other businesses or highlighting customers), and only 10% should be directly promoting your business (such as “come by our store we have a new shipment of handbags!”).”

Social Media Marketing Formula:

  • 70% adding value
  • 20% sharing other people’s content
  • 10% direct promotion

For every promotional tweet you write, prepare to publish 10x that much content that is for connection and relationship-building.

#4 – Show Them The Wizard Behind the Curtain

Social media marketing is your opportunity to be seen by your audience, really seen. They don’t want to see your products; they want to see you, working at your craft. Share the stories of what it’s like to do what you do.

Ramsay at Blog Tyrant recommends being open on social media to create customer loyalty:

“Social media is a fantastic way to break down the barriers of facelessness. By showing your potential customers the people behind the business you are giving yourself a chance to be different from all the other competition. They will become loyal to you.”

– Ramsay

#5 – Get Popular To Get Seen

Popularity snowballs. The more that people like you, the more they like you, and it’s not just momentum; it’s math.

On the Buffer blog, Alfred Lua gives 10 social media tips, and describes the importance of popularity:

“Social media platform algorithms, such as those on Facebook and Instagram, are prioritizing posts with higher engagement on their feeds due to the belief that users will be more interested in seeing highly engaging content.”

– Alfred Lua

Collect likes, retweets, and shares, and you will rank higher ion the algorithm of social media platforms, and get seen more often.

#6 – Stay Authentic

Most people can sniff a sell-out, and it stinks. A genuine, long-term relationship can be completely derailed by staying in sales mode all the time.

Everybody needs to sell. It is, most often, why we get on a soapbox in the first place. But the only way to keep authenticity is by staying authentic, regularly.

As Timothy Skyes says in 8 Tips On How To Grow Your Social Media on Enterepreneur.com:

“You need to find that balance between popularity and business. You need to have a little bit of both and mix the more fun side that wants popularity with the serious and informative side that boosts the reputation of your business.”

– Timothy Sykes

 

Social Media Setup – Done For You, or DIY

If you need to get your new brand up and running on social media, you can hire Stellar Platforms to do it for you, or you can buy our DIY kit for a tenth of the price, and do it yourself.

 

Are you ready to set up all your social media accounts? This social media checklist will give you a step-by-step series of tasks to do, with instructions on how to do each step. Set aside a couple of hours, and when you are done, you will have completely new social media accounts for your brand on all the major platforms.

Social Media Checklist Table of Contents

  1. Decide on your username and password.
  2. Write your Bio
  3. Collect your branding assets.
  4. Create Your Social Media Accounts
  5. Upload your Logo and Cover Photos
  6. Fill out your Bio or Description
  7. Link to all of your social media accounts

Download Workbook

Step 1: Decide on your username and password.

For best results, a universal handle is easiest. When you set up Twitter, you will need to have your handle limited to 15 characters or less. Try and use the same handle for all your accounts. When you set up Twitter, if @yourhandle isn’t available, keep trying until you find a handle that you like, one that you could use anywhere and everywhere.

When I set up social media accounts for Wellness Website Design, the full name of the brand was too long for a Twitter handle. I went with @wellness_web, but on other platforms that allow for longer handles, I selected @wellnesswebsitedesign. This caused some friction later on, and when I have to enter all the social media profiles for this brand, I have to manually look up the link, like some sort of savage.

If there were one universal handle, like @wellwebd, then anytime there was a form to be filled out, or a profile to be completed, filling in the social media account links would be easy and fluid, because they would all end with the exact same handle.

Decide on one secure password in advance, different from all your other passwords, and use that same password for all of your social media accounts. This makes it easy to sign in to any platform; you don’t have to hunt down for the right password, because there is only one password. It also makes going through this social media checklist super easy.

Now, set up a new gmail account with this username and password.You can use a different unified email login for all your accounts (like [email protected]), but you will need this gmail account later for Youtube and Google Plus.

Step 2: Write your Bio

You can write your bio once, and copy and paste it into all of the other profiles. A short, concise paragraph describing who you serve, and what you do, is all you need.

“I help [these people] who [face this problem] by [your awesome solution].”

It can be tempting to skip this step, and write whatever comes to mind, but trust me: don’t.

As Evan LePage says on the HootSuite blog, “Why is your bio so important? In addition to sharing basic information about yourself, adding your website and email address turns any social network bio into a potential source of referral traffic. Especially on company pages, the opportunity to describe your products and link out to an external website makes bios a powerful marketing and sales tool.”

Step 3: Collect your branding assets.

Create a folder on your desktop, and call it ‘Branding Assets.’ This is where you’re going to collect the image files you will need for the rest of this process.

Open up a folder on your computer that has your logo files. If you have a square logo image file that is at least 300px wide, make a copy of it and put it in your Branding Assets folder. If you don’t have a 300px wide version of your logo, make one.

How to Make a Square Image Of Your Logo In 5 Easy Steps

  1. Go to Canva. This is the easiest, most intuitive graphic design tool on the internet. You don’t need to be a graphic designer to use it, and it makes it really easy to make everything look good.
  2. You will need a square version of your logo for most social media profile pictures, and a 300px wide version will work for all of them. Make one by signing into Canva, clicking ‘Use Custom Dimensions’ in the upper right, and put in 300 width x 300 height.
  3. Upload your logo.
  4. Drop it on the square canvas.
  5. Click ‘Download,’ and you’ve got a universal social media profile picture.

Put this 300px wide image of your logo (either .jpg or .png is fine) into your computer’s folder, along with any other visual assets you have that you would like to use.

Pro tip: make sure your logo works with a circle around it. If you have important colors or shapes in the corners, they may get cut off in some platform’s profile pictures.

What is a cover photo?

A cover photo is the second photo you will need for your social media profile. Many profiles allow you to upload a profile photo and a cover photo. The cover photo is the big background, and the profile photo is the smaller one.

To keep you on your toes, every cover photo size is different for every social media platform. Thankfully, Canva makes this easy; with a free account, you can use all their pre-sized templates, and export all the photos you need, at the perfect size.

Do I have to make different cover photos for every platform?

You don’t need to – you could use one high-resolution background photo that you like, and upload it as the cover photo on every platform, as you edit your profile there. But your photo may be cropped at an inconvenient place, and it may be pixellated, because it has to be resized, so it will look fuzzy.

You can select one high-quality stock photo that expresses the visual feeling of your brand, upload it to Canva, and then create cover photos for all your platforms at once. Then, you can export all these photos into your Branding Assets folder on your desktop, along with your 300px wide logo, and you’ll be all ready to get started.

Step 4: Create Your Social Media Accounts

Open this post in an incognito browser, so you can keep your social media checklist handy, and then Ctrl + Click on all these links to open them in new tabs:

Next, one at a time, sign up for accounts. If you are using a new email address, you can have that inbox open for review, or (even better) set that email address to automatically forward to your main email address.

You will need to confirm your accounts with this email address, for every new account you open.

**please note – the exception to this setup is Facebook. (As usual.)

Facebook often has its own rules and requirements, and as the most dominant social media network on the planet, it has earned that right.

For Facebook, you will need a personal account, which will be an admin of your brand’s Facebook Page. So you can sign in to your personal account, and create a Facebook Page with your brand assets. You won’t be able to customize the slug (the part of the URL after facebook.com/ that is) until after your page has 25 likes.

Social Media Setup Pro Tips:

  • Use the same handle, login email, and password for all accounts
  • Use Gmail for this email address, and it will set up your Google and YouTube accounts for you
  • Have the Branding Assets folder open on your desktop while you work
  • Click on all email address confirmations in one sitting

Step 5: Upload your Logo and Cover Photos

This is self-explanatory, but time consuming. You may run into difficulties. One of the platforms may have changed their sizing requirements, or need their file in a different format, or frustrate you for some other reason.

Stay calm. Take deep breaths. Persevere.

When you are done with the social media setup process, you will have branded visual assets on every social profile. It’s worth the challenge here; stick with it.

Pro tip: Canva gives you pre-sized templates for most cover photos.

Step 6: Fill out your Bio or Description

Be sure and include a link to your website on every profile. This is the true SEO benefit of this work; you will receive backlinks from high Page-Rank sites, which legitimizes your website in the eyes of search engines, so don’t skip this step.

Step 7: Link to all of your new accounts

There’s an easy way to do this: set up your personal page on about.me.

When you set up this personal profile page, you can copy and paste the links to all of your profiles here.

Now, whenever you need to access your profile links, just go to your about.me page, control+click on each icon, and you can copy and paste the links.

Other places you can put links to all of your profiles:

  • Your website footer
  • Your website sidebar
  • Your YouTube channel
  • Your personal Facebook profile page

There are so many social media platforms out there, it can be a challenge to launch your brand-new-brand everywhere across the internet at once. Social Media Setup can be difficult without an easy map. What’s the difference between all these social media platforms? Mark Chandler was good enough to describe the difference – using donuts.

Getting a donut onto all of these platforms can seem like a real chore. But don’t worry – you can set up social media accounts for your business in an afternoon, if you have a good social media checklist, your logo files, a pre-written bio, and a good tutorial.

How To Set Up Social Media Accounts for a Business

Social Media Setup Tip 1:

Use the same login credentials for all of your social media accounts.

Using the same email address and password for all of your new accounts will make it easy to set up (and manage) your social media accounts.

If you create a new email address just for this purpose, like [email protected], then you can even hand off logins for these accounts to someone else securely in the future.

Social Media Setup Tip 2:

Set up all social media accounts in one sitting.

Set aside an hour or two with this tutorial, and give yourself the time and space to do it right, and do it once.

Having multiple browser tabs will make this easy. To use multiple tabs, Ctrl + Click on a link and it will open in a new tab. If you press Cmd + T on a Mac, or Ctrl + T on a PC, you will open a new tab where you can manually type your URL.

Social Media Setup Tip 3:

Use an Incognito browser for setting up your business social media accounts.

If you already have other social media accounts, or a gmail address, then do yourself a favor and use an incognito browser to start fresh. This way, you won’t accidentally login to the wrong account, and connect them in a confusing way.

Using an incognito browser doesn’t make your activity invisible, however. As Heather Parry writes, “Chrome’s ‘Incognito’ might stop Chrome itself from logging your browsing data, but it doesn’t stop your operating system, your router, or the websites themselves from logging that you’re there. When streaming content, whether you’re in ‘Incognito’ mode or not, you open yourself up to data storing, and this mode does not hide your IP address, meaning that information such as your location, your browser, your operating system and even your physical address might still be seen.”

This means that going Incognito does not completely shield your activity, but it does give you the same browsing experience as if you were signed out of all your accounts.

How To Go Into Incognito Mode In Your Browser:

Press Cmd + Shift + N on a Mac, or Ctrl + Shift + N on a PC.

Use our Social Media Checklist to set up your new social media accounts

If you’d like Stellar Platforms to set up your social media accounts for you, we can do that. If you want to do it yourself, we can give you a video tutorial and a step-by-step guide to handle it yourself in an afternoon.

Read the Social Media Setup Checklist

 

 

What is your best strategy for 2018?

You’ve got a whole new year to plan. Setting a plan for 2018 is more than writing New Year’s Resolutions – a solid 2018 strategy combines your habits and your goals. Spending the time to figure out what your 2018 goals are, and deciding how you are going to achieve them, will give you a roadmap to follow to your own predefined vision for success.

Over the past seven years, I’ve worked with lots of entrepreneurs. Many of them have successful, thriving businesses, but some of them just limp along, from year to year, never getting that far ahead.

The biggest difference I have seen is -> successful entrepreneurs make a plan.

Having a new plan for the New Yearallows you to do 2 things:

  1. Decide where you want to go
  2. Figure out the best way to get there

Without a plan, you might continue fumbling in the same direction, and it may improve your situation – or it may not. Like the Cheshire Cat says in Lews Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass,

“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

 

The entrepreneurs that are going to succeed in 2018 will have a plan, and that plan will help them achieve their goals. Are you one of them?

Questions to ask yourself about 2018:

  • What old projects do you want to complete in 2018?
  • What new projects do you want to get started?
  • What accomplishment would give you the most dramatic results?
  • What can you stop doing?
  • What regular tasks do you do, that can be done by somebody else?
  • What parts of your business have you been neglecting?

Planning for a new year is an exciting time. With the right focus and direction, you can amplify your effectiveness and results.

Some of the best tools I have found to use around New Year’s for planning the new year include:

Since I love brainstorming with people about their businesses, I am offering a dicsounted rate on a few 90-minute strategy sessions. Normally my time for client work is billed at $150 an hour, but for these New Year Strategy Sessions you can reserve 90 minutes with me for 90 dollars. 

“Marketing my personal business has a new direction and focus thanks to Caelan.  His talent for listening and understanding combined with his skills for painting the big picture really helps me to spend my advertising budget most effectively for getting the best results.  Not only does he see the big picture from a unique perspective, he is able to map the steps to take my business in the direction that will be most beneficial for me and my clients.”

Sara Mustonen

In 90 minutes, I commit to helping you identify your strongest outcomes for 2018, and make a plan for achieving them.

During our call, you may also have specific questions about your website, content marketing, multimedia assets, or a recent product launch. I’m happy to discuss anything you’re working on, but especially in the context of what you’re planning for 2018.

Are you ready to plan an exceptional year?

For $90, I’ll spend 90 minutes with you to help you do it.

About The Author

Caelan Huntress is the father of 3 kids, and in his spare time serves as creative director of Stellar Platforms. He is also a writer, digital marketer, multimedia producer, and a retired superhero. He blogs about his adventures on https://caelanhuntress.com.

I subscribe to a lot of email newsletters. (As of this writing, I have 256,918 unread emails in my inbox.) While I don’t read all of these emails, I do scan them all, so I can find the best email subject lines. As a digital marketer, it is really useful to listen to what the masters of content marketing are doing, en masse. Every day as I sift through my email, I notice what grabs my attention. When an email subject line stands out in my inbox, I know there is something that it can teach me.

All year, I have been tagging the best email subject lines that catch my attention, and below is a list of the 170 best email subject lines that I saved. The author of the subject line is linked next to each one, so if you like, you can subscribe to their email newsletters, and follow the masters that I follow.

Table of Contents

22 Webinar Invitation Subject Lines

These subject lines ask your email subscriber to register for an upcoming webinar. Webinars are fantastic for creating rapport and delivering mini-campaigns that increase engagement.

8 Best Customer Survey Email Subject Line Examples

Getting feedback from your customers gives you invaluable marketing intelligence. (If you’ve got a website, btw, I’d love to know your thoughts in this 2-minute survey.) Getting your list to open the survey request is step 1, and a few different techniques are shown below. Coupons work well.

12 Good Email Subject Lines for Lead Magnets

These are the best email subject lines for getting opt-ins for a new list. If you want to develop a segment of your existing list, or clean your list so you can identify the people who are willing to re-subscribe, these subject lines will get your existing subscribers to opt-in again.

9 Re-Engagement Email Subject Lines

Sometimes, your open rate lies to you. Open rates are notoriously inaccurate, but they are still used to determine the level of engagement of your list – which can be factored into the likelihood you will land in Gmail’s Propmotions tab, or in the Spam folder. To keep your list engaged, you need to both produce compelling content, and check in with your subscribers regularly to see if they still want to be on your list.

21 Best Email Subject Lines for Sales

Email is for selling. Out of every method of selling things on the Internet, email is still the #1 driver of sales. Improving your open rate on your sales emails through a good subject line is probably the most granular thing you could improve to increase your revenue. Pay special attention to how people are selling with the best email subject lines, and you can increase your own sales as a result.

16 Post-Product Launch Email Subject Lines

These emails are sent after a product launch. If your product launch has a sales funnel, with a lead magnet at the top of it, or if you had a waitlist, then you have an additional group of people to market your product to during launch.  After launching your product, it’s good to keep communicating to this hot list with all the benefits of your product – the extra bonuses, the expiring offer, and the testimonials of people whose lives have been changed because of what you’re launching. The best email subject lines will help get those emails opened.

10 Subject Lines For Affiliate Offers

These emails were sent to promote another person’s product (or lead magnet) and they do a good job of creating interest, offering solutions to a pressing problem, and standing out in the inbox.

9 Great Blog Post Announcements

Announcing a blog post can get very pedestrian – or it could be an opportunity to showcase your great headline writing skills.

  • New post: 47 Resources for People Who Love to Write but Can Never Find the Time – Jon Morrow
  • What my vacation face-plant can teach you about success  – Marie Forleo
  • Are successful people crazy? Benji Bruce – Speaking Lifestyle
  • ✪ The Cardinal Sin of Self-publishing ✪ – Derek Murphy
  • 7 Questions You Have About RE-Launching a Product – Answered! – Bailey Richert
  • Did you miss this episode? Tim Ferriss
  • 5 Unusual Ways to Get Paid Doing What You Love (Even If You’re Not an Expert Yet!) – Live Your Legend Team
  • New Episode: Do you want to hear a joke? – Dr. Fab Mancini
  • My podcast launches today! – Noah Kagan

38 Email Subject Lines That Intrigue

The best emails in a crowded inbox can create a ‘pattern interrupt’ – something that makes you curious enough to stop what you are doing and actually pay attention. The best pattern interrupts are usually shocking in some way, making them stand out from the noise. These are the ones that caught my attention this year.

16 Email Marketing Subject Lines for Email Marketers

Many of the lists I subscribe to are about email marketing, since I spend a lot of my time marketing through email. These are the best email subject lines that don’t fit in the other categories on this page, but are of particular interest to people who work with email as their craft.

9 Welcome Email Subject Lines For New Customers

When engaging new clients on your list, getting them involved immediately is a great way to increase retention. A good onboarding sequence starts with an introductory email that gets opened.

Bonus Tip: Subscribe to Email Newsletters in ALL CAPS

You may have noticed that some of the best email subject lines listed above address the name CAELAN in all caps.

This is because I make it a practice to always subscribe for newsletters with CAELAN as my first name. I can easily pick out who is using a first-name parameter in their email, and who is actually addressing me personally, by the capitalization of my first name in the email.

Some people have a specific email address they use for email subscriptions, so they can corral them all into one inbox, and only check it when they want to. Personally, I like having everyone’s email newsletters crowding my personal inbox. I even disabled the ‘Promotions’ tab in Gmail so I can get an unfiltered firehose of communication anytime I check my inbox.

Whenever something stands out from that noise, I know that it matters.

About The Author

Caelan Huntress is the father of 3 kids, and in his spare time serves as creative director of Stellar Platforms. He is also a writer, digital marketer, multimedia producer, and a retired superhero. He blogs about his adventures on https://caelanhuntress.com.

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Well-designed lead magnets are great for building your email list, and they also serve as tangible examples of how you can solve the problems of your customer avatars. When I took Fizzle’s 7-day Build Your List Challenge recently, I knew that designing a good lead magnet was going to be a core component of the course. I thought it would give me a new lead magnet for list building, but I was wrong. What I did not expect was how easy this process would make inviting new clients into working with me.

Even if you don’t know precisely what a lead magnet is, you’ve probably seen them before. ‘Subscribe to get my free PDF workbook!’ is a standard call-to-action, to encourage people to sign up for your email newsletter list. The PDF workbook is the lead magnet – it is the free incentive that you offer your new subscribers.

My previous lead magnet was way off base. I was using the Sales Funnel Workbook, which is an awesome piece of content, but it’s way too advanced for the type of person who usually hires me. I love geeking out on sales funnels, but my clients, they hire me because they do NOT love doing this. They want me to do it, and deliver them the results.

I’m really glad I signed up for Fizzle’s 7-Day Challenge, because I knew my lead magnet needed an overhaul, and even though I’ve got really well targeted customer avatars (you can see them here) I wasn’t offering them something that they wanted.

By doing the foundational work, thinking and strategizing about what my customer avatar really wanted, I became flooded with new potential clients, and I was also able to show off some of the digital skills that I rarely get to showcase.

Here’s how it happened:

Step 1: Sign up for Fizzle’s 7-Day Grow your List Challenge

This is an excellent email course – and I say that as somebody who produces autoresponder courses for a living. There was plenty of content delivered to my inbox every day, but it was scannable, and focused on simple outcomes and tangible wins.

Step 2: Do the work for list building

I must confess, I started this course three times before I actually got all the way through. The final time, I doubled back when I had a better idea. All in all, it took me 10 days for this final run (and a combined total of 5.75 hours), but the extra time spent was worth it. When you’re digging, you never know how far it is until you strike riches; sometimes you just have to keep at it.

Step 3: Make the right thing for clients, not for list building

To give myself accountability, I liveblogged my homework for this course every day on YouTube. You can see it here:

When I was finished, I was surprised to find myself with a Homepage Audit. This was a 48-question self-assessment that anyone with a website could use to improve their website design, functionality, and loading time.

I started making this into a Homepage Grader instead, assigning a score to every question, but then I realised, once again, I had made the wrong thing for my audience.

Step 4: Iterate, again – just not for list building

The kinds of people who hire me are not going to sit through a 16-step fillable form, learning all about their website flaws along the way. The types of people that hire me, they don’t want to do all that stuff – they want to pay somebody like me to give them customised, specific recommendations, and then to implement those recommendations.

So I offered the first part for free.

Step 5: Gateway Product instead of list building

I’ve been trying to pin down a gateway product for years, and I didn’t figure it out until I went through this experience.

All I did was offer free homepage reviews to my personal network. Anyone who has a website (those are my kinds of customers) and filled out a simple form would get a free 5-10 minute video screencast review of their homepage, where I would discuss the 4 things I liked about their homepage, and listed 4 things I would improve.

Here’s what I made:

These quickly became very popular. Nearly half the people that I did this for asked me, “How much would you charge for doing those 4 fixes?”

It worked like a charm.

By providing my services for free to people who matched my customer avatars, I was able to do a lot of things at once:

  • Demonstrate my expertise
  • Provide some actionable advice that they can use right away
  • Open a conversation about improving their website
  • Build credibility, trust, and rapport

As a client generation tool, this has worked really well. I became so swamped with new work that I had to set up a paywall; instead of offering my homepage reviews for free, now they cost a few bucks. It’s still a great value, but having a paywall filters out the people who wouldn’t want to pay for my services, and preserves my time and energy for people who are already willing to pay for the work that I do.

My email list? It’s growing, but not very fast. Everybody who got a homepage review became a subscriber. But I can’t use this as a lead magnet; it’s too time intensive for me to offer a 10-minute customised video for every new email subscriber.

Besides, what’s better for me right now: a subscriber that might buy from me one day, or a new client that will buy one of my services, right now?

Moral of the story: New clients are more valuable than email subscribers.

I’ll keep working on the lead magnet, because I do want a good passive way to build my list.

The big lesson I learned here is to follow your creative impulses, even if you’re going off track. If you know what you’re aiming for, sometimes going off track can give you a much better shot at reaching your goal.

About The Author

Caelan Huntress is the father of 3 kids, and in his spare time serves as creative director of Stellar Platforms. He is also a writer, digital marketer, multimedia producer, and a retired superhero. He blogs about his adventures on https://caelanhuntress.com.

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Like many website designers, I have a negative opinion about website sliders. At least half of my web design clients come to me with detailed ideas about all the slides they want on their homepage, and most of the time, I can talk them out of it. It’s not that sliders are hard to create; any web designer knows how to add a slider in a WordPress homepage.

The problem is that on your website homepage, sliders are just a bad idea.

Here are 9 reasons homepage sliders suck:

1. Website sliders slow down your website.

A website slider is a hefty piece of code. Unlike a text box with an image, a slider is a fancy section that can replace its own content with an animated transition. That transition takes some time to load, and your browser has to do it.

Each slide is a big image, and that takes some time to load, too. In a typical slider, the browser has to load multiple images, animated transitions, and the controls for navigating the slider – all above the fold.

2. A slider above the fold is not a lazy load.

‘Above the fold’ is a newspaper term, defining the content that is above the fold bisecting the first page of the newspaper. This is where you put your most important content, because it is the first thing that someone sees when they are deciding if they want to read further.

On a website, ‘above the fold’ content is what is in the browser window, without scrolling, when the page first loads. Ideally, this should be your fastest content, because you want to give your user something to see right away.

Many websites use ‘lazy load,’ or asynchronous loading, so they do not download (or display) images from further down the page until the user scrolls to that section. This is good for website usability, because if you have to wait for the entire long web page to download before you read what is on the top, you are sitting and twiddling your thumbs, waiting for the entire page to be delivered to your browser, instead of reading the top and waiting for the bottom at the same time. Sliders that are at the top of the homepage (above the fold) have to load first, and your user has to wait as soon as they arrive.

Pro tip: Put your website URL in GTmetrix.com to measure how fast your website loads, and see how big it is. You should aim for under 1MB and 5 seconds.

3. Your first page load looks bad.

At this point (maybe now is good) you may be heading over to your website in a new tab to take a look at your own website slider, to see if it’s doing some of the things I’ve mentioned. Keep in mind, you have seen your website slider before. This means that that your slider images are cached.

Your browser has already downloaded the big images in your slider before, and your browser, helpful servant that it is, has stored those images in the browser cache. This is great for you, as the user, because it means you don’t have to re-download the images every time you visit your website.

But that’s just you.

New visitors to your website will have to load your slider images from scratch, because they have never downloaded these images before. What they see may be different than what you see.

Pro tip: Clear your browser’s cache, and visit your website homepage. How long does it take the slider to load?

“Every second it takes to load a page past two seconds hurts the user experience, and has an impact on search performance.” Harrison Jones

4. Slider images are big and take time to load.

Your slider images should be big, anyway. If you’re using a 300px wide image in a full-width slider, it’s going to be pixellated and look really fuzzy.

While I do love the look of full-width images in web browsers, they need to be optimised for the web. If your image is 1.4MB, you are already way beyond the recommended 1MB threshold for total page size that you want to aim for, with just one image.

Using a tool like optimizilla.com, you can easily and quickly optimize your images, reducing their filesize dramatically. As a practice, I always run my images through optimizilla before uploading them to the WordPress media library. Watch me do it here:

Pro tip: Replace some of your biggest homepage images by running them through optimizilla. This free tool reduces the filesize of your image without sacrificing quality. Re-run GTMetrix after this, and you can measure precisely how much your images have been slowing your sitespeed down.

5. Website sliders are vulnerable to hackers.

The popular Revolution Slider, which has some amazing animation features, is often a target for hackers, precisely because it is so popular. Unlike the WordPress core, this slider plugin is not nearly as secure, and not updated as frequently.

This makes it a tempting target for hackers, because if they can exploit a vulnerability in a popular slider plugin, they can gain access to many websites quickly, before a repair patch is issued and installed.

Pro tip: Install the free WordFence plugin to check your site for malware and clean up after attacks.

6. Website visitors scroll down for more information, they do not wait for a slideshow.

How often do you land on a new homepage, and wait for the pretty slideshow to finish its carousel?

Do you find yourself hovering over the navigation dropdowns, obscuring the slideshow?

Or do you scroll down to search for information, ignoring the slides entirely?

“The primary purpose of your home page should be to create a high-level map of the world for your visitors so they can understand the range of available products that you carry. The giant banner will take up all of the prime real estate on the home page and push this navigation off the visible top of the page – sabotaging the page’s primary purpose.”   Tim Ash

7. Multiple Slider CTAs split the user’s attention

One of the golden rules of landing pages is: give the user one option.

If you are sending a user to a landing page, through paid traffic (like a Facebook ad), you want this new user to do one thing, and only one thing. That is your Call-to-Action. Distracting them with other options (like your navigation bar or footer menu) will decrease conversions. In most cases, your homepage is not a landing page, but the same principle still holds true:

If you give your user too many options, they will select none of them.

[clicktotweet]

On your homepage, you’ve already got your entire navigation menu, maybe a sidebar, and (hopefully) a Call-to-Action to subscribe to your newsletter.

If you distribute some of these CTAs through your slider buttons, you are diluting the effectiveness of ALL of your Calls-to-Action. According to KissMetrics, “of users’ first three eye-fixations on a page, only about 22% are on graphics; 78% are on text (headlines, article summaries, captions). In fact, people often ignore images entirely until the second or third visit to a page. So taking up the majority of your page’s real estate with images is ass-backwards.”

8. Information in sliders looks better in columns.

Most times, if you are expressing separate ideas in separate slides, they would be easier for the user to view all at once, in columns. Take a look at these two options below, and ask yourself which is more effective for you, as a user:

Here is a Slider:

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is making your website easy to read by search engines. I wouldn’t go so far as calling Google stupid (it is, quite likely, the largest artificial brain on the planet) but it thinks in very different ways than we do. Part of the...

eCommerce Shopping Carts

At its core, the purpose of your website is to help strangers become customers. The transaction where this formally happens on the Internet is usually in eCommerce shopping carts. The moment a new customer pays you for the first time, that is when they are putting...

Third Party Integrations

Third party integrations can be confusing, but any website that is more than brochure-ware needs to manage multiple platforms by using them. What is 3rd party integration? Third party integrations with WordPress websites are when you sync another platform or account...

Here is the same information, in columns:

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is making your website easy to read by search engines. I wouldn’t go so far as calling Google stupid (it is, quite likely, the largest artificial brain on the planet) but it thinks in very different ways than we do. Part of the...

read more
eCommerce Shopping Carts

eCommerce Shopping Carts

At its core, the purpose of your website is to help strangers become customers. The transaction where this formally happens on the Internet is usually in eCommerce shopping carts. The moment a new customer pays you for the first time, that is when they are putting...

read more
Third Party Integrations

Third Party Integrations

Third party integrations can be confusing, but any website that is more than brochure-ware needs to manage multiple platforms by using them. What is 3rd party integration? Third party integrations with WordPress websites are when you sync another platform or account...

read more

Which do you like better, when you are scrolling down a webpage? I’m guessing the columns were easier for you to scan and digest.

 

If you don’t have a website theme that makes columns super easy, then consider a simple Hero Image. As the Altos Agency suggests, “A well-executed hero image serves as the very first glimpse of your site most visitors encounter, and should combine everything from your unique personality to a laser-focused look at just what you offer and why users might want to learn more. Pair that with a powerful CTA and you’ve got a static header image that actually attracts more clicks than any slider.”

 

9. Sliders are not that important.

 

If there was really something you wanted your user to see, as soon as they land on your homepage, you would show them that one thing. (Identifying that one thing is extremely difficult – that’s why it’s so important to work on your Customer Avatars.)

As Michiel Hiejman says on Yoast, “What you’re saying with a slider is basically: ‘I really don’t know which product or picture I should put on display on my homepage, so I’ll just grab 10 of them!’ In that case, you really need to add focus. If you don’t know what to choose, how would your visitors or clients?”

With every lukewarm offering you have sprayed across your slider, your website visitor gets more distracted.

“Unless the image slider is the only thing on your website (bad idea!), it’s not a good thing. It means it takes away attention from everything else – the stuff that actually matters. Like your value proposition. Products. Content.”

homepage sliders peep laja

– Peep Laja 

 

Do we need to talk about your homepage?

If you have a website slider that is dragging down your sitespeed, I can design a multi-column section that conveys all the same visual and text information as your slider, but loads your website much faster.

We can have a complimentary 30-minute consultation, and I can answer any questions you have about your website or digital marketing. Schedule a time here.

Or, you can purchase a video homepage review here -> 

About The Author

Caelan Huntress is the father of 3 kids, and in his spare time serves as creative director of Stellar Platforms. He is also a writer, digital marketer, multimedia producer, and a retired superhero. He blogs about his adventures on https://caelanhuntress.com.

Would you like to fix a few things on your website before the summer ends? We can do that in an August Afternoon.

As you may know, I’m going to New Zealand. While this transition takes place, I’m on a mission to clean up loose ends in my life and business. I want to help you do the same. If you’ve been embarrassed to send people to your website, or you’ve been avoiding getting needed help with technological issues, let’s get through these unfinished tasks together.

Our afternoon-long strategy and production session could include:

  • Strategic coaching about your business, brand, or website
  • Website troubleshooting and research
  • Specific copywriting work on a piece of content
  • Revision of your homepage or website copy
  • Review of your website and media properties
  • Suggestions for how to increase your sales
  • Competitive research and analysis
  • Project scoping for other contractors to carry out
  • Brainstorming ideas for a new email autoresponder sequence, followed by an hour of copywriting, followed by review and revision

Normally my rate for working on digital strategy, website design, and content marketing is $150 an hour.

However, for the month of August, I’m offering a 33% discount off my normal rates for these strategy sessions.

For $300, you can have me all to yourself on an August afternoon.

  • Is your website running slow?
  • Does your about page need to be rewritten?
  • Is a WordPress plugin giving you trouble?
  • Do you have an idea for a new product to launch?
  • Is there a lead magnet that’s 75% done, and you’re ready to finally make it happen?

Book your 3-hour strategy session today. Once all these spots are gone, getting my time at this rate won’t be available again.

(Unless I decide to move again to another hemisphere – we’ll see.)

I’d love to work with you during an August Afternoon.

Book your time here.

August Afternoons FAQ

If you’re in New Zealand, Caelan, will it really be a summery August Afternoon for you?

No, it won’t, not at all. If you are in the Pacific time zone (like 65% of the subscribers on this list) then New Zealand is 19 hours ahead. Wait, don’t do the math – trust me, it breaks your brain – because New Zealand is functionally five hours behind Pacific Time, but a day ahead. Still, don’t do the math – save your brain. Or use this converter.

I’ll be staying on Pacific time for my first few months in New Zealand, waking at 3am local time. The earliest starting time for August Afternoons(1pm Pacific) will be 8am my time.

So no, it may not be an afternoon for me, depending on where you are in the world. It also won’t be summer, it’s been snowing in Wellington.

My website has a lot of issues, can we fix all of them in three hours?

Maybe not all of them – but I can make a big dent. Many website issues can be solved quickly, and if you bring a list of improvements you would like to make, I will go through as many as I can in three hours.

For any issues I cannot fix during our August Afternoon, I will provide resources, tutorials, recommendations, and next steps – so even if it’s not fixed, you have a plan of action.

I want to improve my organic search rankings. Can you help me with that?

In 3 hours I can run a comprehensive set of reports on your website, detailing how you rank for relevant keywords. I can also perform competitive analysis, to discover what your competitors are ranking for, and offer specific suggestions on how to improve your own ranking for those keywords, as well.

I can also dramatically improve your sitespeed, which has become one of the largest factors Google uses in determining search rankings. By analyzing your site I can find the largest bandwidth hogs, and create a plan of steps for improving these specific issues. Some of those issues, I can fix right on our call.

I want to redesign my entire website. Can you do that in three hours?

Unless you have a very small website, then no, I cannot redesign it all in 3 hours. But I can rewrite a few of the important pages (like your homepage or your About page), rewrite your calls-to-action, or design a new version of your website in a sandbox.

Website redesigns need multiple revisions anyways, and you can get at least one out of an August Afternoon.

Can you plan my upcoming project, so that I can delegate it to my team?

Absolutely. Project planning is one of my specialties. Collecting all the different pieces of a project together, and identifying all the next steps (with lots of checklists!) will jumpstart that project that’s been languishing at the back of your mind.

How much time and money do I need to invest?

In addition to being present during our 3-hour strategy session, I will need you to describe your project to me in advance via email. I will review your materials before our call so I can come prepared with questions and ideas; your advance briefing will help me to be more effective for you during this project.

$300 will reserve 3 consecutive hours of my time. See availability here.

Can I purchase one of these sessions from you and use it after August?

The 3-hour strategy session is a discount off of my normal hourly rate of $150, and it is only available for the limited period of this promotion. Hiring me after August will only be in accordance with my standard terms, with a minimum purchase of a 5-hour block of time for $750. If your schedule does not open up until September, I’d be happy to work with you at that time under my normal terms.

What is the format of our meeting?

Ten minutes before our call, I will send you a short, funny, inspirational video to get your juices flowing. Then, we will each have an optional 1-minute solo dance party.

At the precise time of our appointment, I will call you via Skype, Slack, or phone, and we will bring up the agenda that I have sent you in advance.

Together, we will edit the agenda for our call for a couple of minutes, and then dive right in.

The format of our session is dictated by the needs of your project. We might talk for twenty minutes, and then break while I get into your servers and making improvements to your website. Or, we could be collaborating on a Google doc together, fixing your website copy and editing ideas together. We could keep the call going the whole time, call each other back and forth every thirty minutes, or talk once at the beginning and once at the end.

You’ll have your very own in-house outsourced marketing consultant for three hours; we can format this session whatever way we think is best.

I know my website needs work, but I don’t know exactly what it needs. How can we work together if I don’t know what I need?

I can help you figure it out. We’ll start by looking over your website together, and I’ll ask you a bunch of questions. Based on your answers, and what I see on your website, I will make recommendations for how to best meet your goals in the time we have. I will also provide you with a detailed plan for improving your website and platform after our meeting, which you can execute with any digital marketer.


“Caelan has a great way of taking your vision and making it a reality. He works really well with visionaries – I speak it, and he makes it happen! His website design for The Aware Show really captured my personality, and his project management skills kept my entire team on track. The beautiful summits he put together helped us to grow our list and expand our audience. Caelan is always positive and keeps a positive outlook on life!”

 – Lisa Garr


I don’t have a website, just an idea. Can we work on my idea?

Brainstorming an idea is one of my all-time favorite things to do. As a coach and strategist, I can help you hone your idea and turn it into an actionable project.

I need a sales funnel for one of my products, can you make that in three hours?

While sales funnels are one of my specialties, they typically take me more than three hours to make. However, we can work through the Sales Funnel Workbook together. This way, we could identify what assets you already have that we could use in your Sales Funnel, and build (or outline) a few of the other pieces.

My email newsletter subscription isn’t working, can you fix it?

This is a perfect project for an August Afternoon. If you need to get one platform to pass data to another, and customize what users see at different steps, all I need are some logins and an idea of what you want, and I can fix it quickly.

Ready to go?

Book your 3-hour strategy session today.

I built the wrong platform for myself, and that’s how this all started.

After years of working with successful authors and coaches, improving or creating their digital infrastructure, it gave me the opportunity to examine how a thought leader builds a successful business on their teachings.

There were a number of similarities. (I call them Cornerstones.) Once I identified what these similarities were, and how the most successful platforms worked, I resolved to make a platform for myself.

I made the wrong platform.

My intentions were noble, at least. I did some really deep soul searching, and I asked myself: how could I have the most positive impact on the world? Not just today, or in ten years, but in a hundred years – how could my work provide the most positive benefit to humanity, one century from now?

I settled on fatherhood.

If I could help men become better fathers, then they would raise better children. Better kids grow up to become better people, and better people make a better world. This was the area I identified as having the maximum impact for my life’s work, so I built a platform around it.

I made a logo, and a brand, and a website for BeTheBetterDad.com. I started blogging about the habits that make me a better father, and I made a free online course, the 5-Day Father Fitness Program. That gave me some customers, which meant I could ask them about the problems they face, and structure my offerings around solving those problems. I made Customer Avatars, and discovered, to my surprise, that I was in no way qualified to help this audience.

The problems that modern dads are facing – divorce, depression, having kids living in separate households – I wasn’t equipped to help them with that. I’ve got no experience with divorce, and I’m not a therapist or a relationship coach – I’m a guy who has a good handle on his habits, and I tried to share some of those.

But what this audience actually needed was not something I could provide.

So I went back to the drawing board. I asked myself, “What am I uniquely good at doing?”

I looked over the entire infrastructure that I created for Father Fitness, and I thought, “I can do that. I can make a platform.”

Stellar Platforms was created so that I can help people with what I do best: create the branding and automation infrastructure that financially supports a thought leader as they grow their audience.

The Four Cornerstones

Like many polymaths, I’m not an expert in any one thing, but I have a modest level of mastery in some very different things. It turns out this variety of skills is especially useful for the 4 Cornerstones of a Stellar Platform.

  • My theatrical training gave me an artistic flair in creating characters, which I use when making Customer Avatars.
  • My sales training has given me the psychological understanding of why people buy, which I use to make Sales Funnels.
  • My time as a writer gave me the ability to produce and disseminate ideas clearly, which is a core component of Content Marketing.
  • My freelance web design business taught me how to integrate complicated platforms together, which is essential for eCommerce.

I never thought these separate areas of my interests would combine anywhere. I only pursued the interests that appealed to me most at the time. Now I have the opportunity to use each of these areas of mastery as a Cornerstone to my own Stellar Platform. That’s why I started this business.

Stellar Platforms are for Rising Stars.

The kinds of people who need these four Cornerstones are the thought leaders and authors who have a message, and have an audience, but they don’t yet have a platform to enable them to make a living by simply spreading their message.

If you are one of the Illuminators of Tomorrow, let’s work together.

To sell more of your product, reach a bigger audience, and grow your list, the single most effective thing you can learn is how to make a Customer Avatar. Having a good Customer Avatar will give you a near-superhuman ability to communicate powerfully with the people who are most likely to become your customers.

Note: A Customer Avatar is also often called an Ideal Client Profile, or a Buyer Persona. In this article I will use the term ‘Customer Avatar’ because it sounds much cooler.

Let’s face it: not every customer is right for your business. Your message can resonate really well with some types of people, but not with all of them.

Having a Customer Avatar allows you to identify the specific characteristics of people who like to buy what you’re selling. You can make your own Customer Avatars by following these 5 simple steps:

Customer Avatar Step 1

Find a template

A Customer Avatar Template is a document with blank spaces for you to fill in the defining characteristics of your ideal client. These templates are very useful, and I recommend you try a few different ones. You might end up liking one, but then find that another has better questions, or a better layout.

Here are three places to find Customer Avatar Templates:

If you use iWork’s Pages, you can use our own template for making Customer Avatars here:

Customer Avatar Step 2

Prepare your questions

There are lots (and lots) of questions you can ask while building your Customer Avatar. Read through the links above, and you’ll find dozens to choose from. (Be sure and use the “But no one else would” trick in the Digital Marketer post.)

We recommend you read through the templates and articles above, and collect a list of questions that you will ask about each one of Customer Avatars.

Some of them will be redundant, and that’s okay. Asking the same questions over and over forces your brain to dig deeper, to look past superficial answers, and discover something new. Something clear. Something definitive. That’s what you’re looking for with these questions, is tiny little characteristics that define this type of person.

Developing that list of questions will make you think how to get into your customers’ minds, and that’s a useful exercise. Don’t skip it. There is a full list of questions that you can use in the DIY Customer Avatar Creation Kit at the end of this article.

Customer Avatar Step 3

Set the space to work

What you are planning to do is some of the most fundamental, introspective work you will undertake this year. This work could have dramatic positive results for your business. So, don’t throw it together on your lunch hour. Set the space. Decide for yourself:

  • Where will you physically do this work? At your normal desk, or somewhere else?
  • What time of day is best for you to do it?
  • What kind of music, beverages, and/or snacks do you want to have available?
  • Would it be better to do this alone, or with a partner?
  • Will you print the templates, and fill them out by hand? Or type your answers into a computer?
  • What day will you do this work?

Answer these questions thoughtfully. That’s what this exercise is, after all – it’s a series of questions answered thoughtfully. Start off right by asking yourself how to best set yourself up for success.

Customer Avatar Step 4

Answer the questions

You’re at the appointed time and place. You have all of your materials. The rest of the world is put on pause for an hour or more. Do the work.

While you are here, think of your best customers. Think of who they are, why they came to you, and in a hazy, non-distinct way, think about the type of person that person is like. Think about someone famous that you would love to work with. Don’t define these people in your work, define the group to which these people belong.

Customer Avatar Step 5

Edit and review with friends

Your first draft of your Customer Avatars are just that – your first draft. Show them to colleagues, friends, and even competitors, and ask them for feedback. You will likely have a few surprising responses that make you say, “I can’t believe I didn’t think of that!” This feedback is just as important as the work you put into it, and you can see dramatically positive results in your business if you are open to receiving feedback from others.

Revise your Customer Avatars regularly. As you grow with your business, you will learn more about the people you serve. Incorporate that knowledge into these foundational documents, and your business will continue to improve.

Schedule a Customer Avatar Workshop

If you’d like to follow a step-by-step guided process to make your own Customer Avatars, schedule a Customer Avatar Workshop with Stellar Platforms.

A professional WordPress website design provides three major advantages to your digital platform:  

WordPress Website Design Advantage #1:

Updating your WordPress Website is easy.

Getting an update to your website doesn’t have to involve lengthy (and expensive) back-and-forth discussions with the one designer who knows how to change the website without breaking it. If you need to change a photo or some text, you can log in to the back end of your website yourself, point and click, and it’s done.  

WordPress Website Design Advantage #2: 

People know WordPress websites.

Web designers the world over understand WordPress – at last count, this open-source platform powers 25% of websites worldwide, and no competent web developer nowadays can look at a WordPress site and get lost. Whoever handles updates to your site in the future, it will be in a common language that anyone with IT skills can understand.  

WordPress Website Design Advantage #3:

Your software license will never expire for a WordPress website.

The building blocks of your website will never be recalled, and customer support will never disappear. Too many people speak this language.   When we build a website in WordPress, we are standing on the shoulders of the immense programming community that uses and loves this platform. We can start out with a quick, easy method of creating a cutting edge website, because the plugins and themes developed by other programmers are available for our use.  

Your website is your digital storefront.

The virtual territory that you have claimed and made your own, crafted according to your aesthetics and tastes, a place where you can receive your friends, your audience, and your customers.  

Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works. – Steve Jobs

New website visitors make instant decisions about the character of your business and your brand, based on the first few seconds on your homepage.  

Returning customers will sift through your pages, and their experience will leave them feeling one of two ways – better or worse.   A good web design can sway that decision.  

Working with a professional web designer can make a lasting impression on the people who visit your website.   Your website is your soapbox, where you can showcase your expertise and establish your authority in your industry.  

A professional website design improves the image of your company, engages your audience with your message, and can help to increase customer inquiries and boost revenue. 

3 Questions To Ask Yourself About Your Website

Website design is more than just the “look and feel” of the site. Like Steve Jobs said, design is ‘how it works.’ So, how does your website work?  

  1. How does your website encourage the flow of visitors from one step to the next?
  2. What is the ultimate conversion goal for each website viewer?
  3. What action do you want your new website visitors to do?

Your website is the foundation of your online marketing strategy, which is why it is essential to work with someone who understands the psychology of web design.  

Are you thinking about making or redesigning a website?

Click here, and let's talk about it.

Let’s talk a bit about what a new website design can do for your future.

Answer these questions thoughtfully, and it will assist me in translating your vision into a happy website visit.

I want to know more than just what your new site will look like; I also want to understand what the new website will do for your business.

“I’ve had many sites built over the past 10 years. This was, hands down, the best experience in regards to efficiency, design, and back-end mechanics. Caelan is easy to talk to, patient, knows what he’s doing and can execute in a timely manner. It was a pleasure.”
Robin Jay

President, Las Vegas Convention Speakers Bureau

A Responsive Website Design changes the layout and sizing of your website elements, based on the size of the screen upon which it is viewed.

In the old days, websites had a defined width, and sometimes a defined height. If your screen resolution did not match those exact numbers, you would have to scroll left-to-right to see the entire website.

Users are used to scrolling up and down, to see the parts of web pages that are ‘below the fold,’ but scrolling left-to-right provides some real usability problems. Now that devices are built with resolutions as wide as 2560 pixels, and as small as 300 pixels, having a defined website width creates a bad browsing experience for most people – unless the website is responsive.

Responsive websites are often 100% width, meaning that they take the full width of the browser, wide or narrow.

To see Responsive Website Design in action:

Responsive Website Design Example On a Desktop:

  1. Bring the cursor of your mouse over to the right hand side of your browser window.
  2. Click and drag the side of the browser window to the left
  3. Notice how the columns below shift their size and appearance

You can even set some elements to only show at certain browser widths, meaning: you can have elements that show only for tablets, only for desktop, or only on mobile.

Responsive Website Design Example On a Tablet or Mobile Device:

  1. Turn your device 90˚ to one side.
  2. Notice how these elements change their position? That is responsiveness.

“If you are willing to do only what’s easy, life will be hard, but if you are willing to do what’s hard, life will be easy.”
– T.Harv Eker

“We cling to our own point of view, as though everything depended on it. Yet our opinions have no permanence; like autumn and winter, they gradually pass away. ” – Chuang Tzu

Responsive website design is essential for SEO

Responsive website design makes it easier for customers to connect with your brand on a device they use all day long: their mobile phone.

Making the effort to build a beautiful website won’t matter, if the website can only be easily viewed on one type of device. Your website needs to look good on desktop, tablet, and mobile.

Many people search the internet on their mobile phone or on a tablet, and older web designs don’t look good on those little screens.

Responsive web design shifts the elements of your website depending on the size of the browser that is viewing it, so it looks good on every device.

Mobile friendly websites are more likely to show up in local search results, and good local search rankings give you the opportunity to connect with more customers in your area.

“Throughout the entire process of updating and re-designing our website, I was thoroughly impressed with Caelan’s work. He was consistently available once weekly for a phone conference to discuss ideas and progress, and was always available to field any questions I had. He also offered a lot of creative suggestions for the website design, and coaching and guidance for future ideas I have for our business growth, as it relates to our website. His willingness to offer further training to myself and my assistant for continued content updates to out site was a very nice bonus. Ultimately we are very pleased with his work and excited about the new website.”

Joshua Phillips, ND

Hawthorn Healing Arts Center

The advantages of a WordPress CMS are huge – you can easily upload new content, categorize it in your page structure, and organize pages and posts via tags. For premium content delivery, you can protect your best content from the general public by creating a membership site with WordPress. Membership websites create a members-only section of your website, where only your customers and registered users can read, watch, and download your best content.

Membership Website WordPress Overview

If you have a WordPress website, you know how to login to /wp-admin – you enter your username and password, and gain access to the back-end of the website.

There are many different permissions levels in WordPress. The 4 standard levels are:

  • Admin
  • Editor
  • Author
  • Subscriber

Each of these permissions levels gains access to different levels of functionality within your website. Admins can do anything and everything, including creating new users, changing core theme files, and more. Editors can publish content to make it live on the website, while Authors can create content, but cannot publish their changes.

You can use the Subscriber level to protect your premium content, or create another level for ‘Customer’ or ‘October Mastermind’ or ‘Community Member,’ and assign access to specific pieces of content in your website based on the user’s permission level.

What this means: You can designate any WordPress post or page as ‘private,’ meaning it is only accessible to logged-in users. You can designate which user levels can access certain pages, meaning that if you have a different user level for every product in your library, you just need to assign a specific user level to an account after a product is purchased in order to unlock access to that content.

How To Build Membership Websites

The easiest way to create membership websites is to download a membership plugin. Here are three good ones:

  1. MemberPress
  2. Paid Membership Pro
  3. WooCommerce Memberships

These out-of-the-box solutions allow users to register and gain access to select areas of your website, but they do not integrate with your shopping cart right away. It takes some work to get a specific membership level to co-ordinate with a specific product purchase, and getting the plugin to automatically generate a username and password, that already has the right login level, is the tricky part of the automation.

Easy Membership Website Trick

Do you have some premium content you would like to protect?

There is an easy way to make membership websites, baked into the WordPress CMS itself. It won’t create logins for users, but it will protect your content with a password.

Publish your premium content on your WordPress website as a standalone page. When you publish it, under Visibility don’t select Public (the default) or Private, select ‘Password Protected.’ Enter the password that users need to enter to access your content.

Now, if you want to deliver some premium content to your email newsletter subscribers, for example, you can send them the link and the password. It won’t be available to everyone on the internet, but only to those with the password.

Here at Stellar Platforms, where we work with the Rising Stars of Tomorrow, we like to make things look beautiful with professional graphic design.

You can tell at a glance when someone has professional graphic design, and when they don’t. It can attract or repel you from a brand, with a glance.

Cohesive graphic design is essential when you have multiple media channels, and many different ways to present your media online. Aligning all of your brand assets with a curated branding styleguide is one of the best practices we recommend.

Professional Graphic Design & Logo design

The most powerful visual representation of your brand is your logo. Your logo is everything you do and everything you are, all distilled down into one symbol.

Getting the logo right can make the difference between a long-term business and a short-lived one.

Multiple logos under the same branding umbrella require special considerations, and placing this logo in the right locations – on your shareable media, in watermarks, and in your premium content – takes finesse.

Our logo design process is a 3-revision cycle. After filling out our intake form, we provide 3 possible directions for the logo to go – 3 distinct logo comps. After describing what you like and dislike with each of these, we will select one direction and go through 2 subsequent rounds of revision.

All logos are delivered in standard filetypes, with a complete branding styleguide.

Social media shareable image design

The most effective way to elevate your brand presence on social media is to create custom designed shareable images.

We can select 30 of your favorite quotes, or quotes relevant to your brand or mission, and make uniquely designed images formatted for the sizes of the platforms they will be shared upon.

With your logo and website discreetly (but visibly) placed on the image, it will be clear to all who share these quotes who is thinking about these thoughts.

Facebook Ad, Google Ad, & Affiliate Ad design

When you have a product launch to promote, or a sales funnel to fill, a standard suite of advertising images can get you started in an Adwords campaign. Our advertising images are customized to create impact, get seen, and get clicked. We use the finest stock photography libraries and professional copywriting to create compelling advertising images that get clicked.

Print collateral – brochures, book layout, postcards

We have access to the best graphic design programs on the market – Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator. We can make your files printer-ready, with all the right bleeds at 300 dpi.

“Caelan is one of a kind. He has an amazingly active mind and is always putting it to good use. I hired him for a project that had a fairly ridiculous deadline, and he came through like a champ! We had one creative meeting where I explained what I was after, and he had mock ups ready to go within a day or so. The end result was better than I had expected, and we came in exactly on budget.”

James Adair

PDX Home Loan

Professional image editing can save you hours of time figuring out new graphic design programs.

If you find yourself in a situation where you need:

  • The background removed from your headshot
  • A compelling graphic for a Facebook Ad campaign
  • An eye-catching header for your homepage banner
  • A cover designed for your ebook or self-published book
  • A suite of images to share over social media for a few months

Contact us for a customized proposal detailing how we can save you time and energy by producing these images for you.

Professional Image Editing Advantages

  • You provide the idea, we create the work
  • You provide feedback over email at your convenience, we revise within 48 hours
  • Brand cohesion across multiple types of media
  • Permanent digital assets that promote your message and your brand
  • Higher clickthrough conversion on advertisement graphics

How to Make a Social Media Image

The best program for professionals to use for image editing are in the Adobe suite of products: depending on the specific details, Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign may be best suited for the project.

For amateur use, the best browser-based program for image editing is Canva. It is easy to use, very high quality, and they have pre-formatted templates for every social media platform. If you want to make a Twitter image, click on the Twitter image and your canvas will be formatted with the right height and width dimensions.

Select a great background image (Canva has plenty to choose from), pick a text layout, and you’re done.

What makes Canva exceptional is the upload process. You can upload your own images (including logos) and drag and drop them anywhere you want on the image. With Google Font integration, you have a lot of flexibility in how you want your image to look.

Drop a URL on the bottom of your image, and it will travel as far and widely as your image is shared.

Social Media Image Examples

“Caelan is very resourceful. Not only does he offer great services but goes beyond the services he offers to help others have success or build connections. Caelan is fun, energetic and knowledgeable. I recommend Caelan as a friend, business partner and the services he provides.”

Adeah Wetzel

Video production creates a quick, digestible overview of an idea. Video marketing allows you to share your message on the platforms where your customer is already connected.

A high-quality branded video will provide a professional image for your company, and establish you as an authority in your industry.

Videography is one of the most powerful mediums to create an engagement with your audience. While it is now amazing, that you can record a live video from your phone and distribute it to the world on YouTube, for professional brands, videos require a bit of polish. A simple video editing workflow can elevate your videos from amateur to professional.

And no matter how good your video production looks, without good storytelling, it won’t connect with your viewers.

Video production is important. Storytelling matters.

Boring videos don’t get watched. Entertaining videos get shared.

Video marketing is more than just uploading your video to Youtube and sitting back to wait. Your video should appeal to people outside of your immediate circle of influence. When a quality video gets shared, your audience will spread the message of your company.

Online video viewing has boomed in recent years, and there are now over 1 billion users on YouTube each month. A quality video will stand out from the rest, and capture the attention of your ideal customer.

Why video marketing is effective

  • Videos inspire, educate and entertain your audience
  • An evergreen video production can be used for many years
  • Videos can be easily optimized in the search engines, bringing more customers to your website
  • You can receive real-time interaction and feedback from your clients with video marketing
  • Studying video analytics can help you to see how successful your marketing campaigns can be
  • Videos are easily shared, so that your customers can effortlessly refer their friends
  • Your competitors are using video marketing, and potentially taking your customers
  • Videos can be easily viewed on any type of device, including mobile phones and tablets

Marketing your video to get results

You want to make sure your video is viewed online. Video marketing strategically places your videos in the sight of your potential customers.

Without proper video marketing, it is easy for a video to get lost among the “noise” online. Working with a professional video marketer will help your video to be seen by the people who matter most: your ideal customers.

Stellar Platforms provides:

  • Conception and Scriptwriting
  • Pre-production
  • Shooting and Lighting
  • Editing and Post-production
  • Special effects
  • Motion graphics
  • Logo manipulation
  • Youtube, Vimeo, and Wistia channel uploads
  • Social networking on video sites
  • Promotion on fan pages and websites

Every one of our videos is a custom solution. We work with all budgets and timelines.

Interested? We would like to hear about you and your project.

Please take a few moments to fill out this form, so that I can come to our conversation prepared with ideas and strategies.

Video Intake Form

  • About Me

  • About My Project

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is making your website easy to read by search engines. I wouldn’t go so far as calling Google stupid (it is, quite likely, the largest artificial brain on the planet) but it thinks in very different ways than we do. Part of the reason Google think so differently is that it has massive amounts of data to sort through, in its unique thinking process. You can’t just ‘tell’ something to Google. You have to spoon feed it.

SEO is how you spoon feed the search engines.

search engine optimization for red tricycleWhen someone is searching for red tricycles, Google will ignore a site that is dedicated to the history and development of the Radio Flyer company, with detailed specs and blueprints about the carry load on different models, if the site has no SEO. Thats why you often see annoying sites at the top of your google search titled “RED TRICYCLE WHEEL RED TRICYCLE PEDALS SEATS NOW.”

That website spoon fed to Google everything that the site was about. Google ate it up.

Here’s how you can do it:

Easy Search Engine Optimization Tips

  • Get bold. When you bold a word, Google assumes there is more importance about it.
  • Find the keys to your words. A ‘keyword‘ is a word that people use to search for your subject. Pepper your content with keywords that people will use to find them, and then – use them on your headings.
  • Make Headings. Keywords in the headings of your content (h2 and h3 tags) are seen by search engines as especially important. You can write your post with keyword research first, headings second, and content third.
  • Alt your images. Put your keywords into the Alt Text of your images – Google can’t read your image, but it can read your alt text. (My tricycle up above – hover over the image with your mouse to see what it says.)
  • Get backlinked. When someone else on another website links to your site, Google thinks you have valuable content, too, and you’re not just screaming your head off in the wilderness. Some search engine optimizations specialists make their living just on backlinks. (Be careful, though…many of them wear black hats.)
  • Get deeplinks. Don’t just link to your homepage. Link to sub-pages, or specific posts. It shows that you have a wealth of information all over your site, not just a good homepage.
  • Trade content. Those other websites that do what you do? Or do something tangentially related to what you do? They like SEO, too. Guest post on each other’s blogs, and link back to each other.
  • Get shared. There are fantastic, automated plugins you can use to allow readers to share your content with the click of a button. Use them, so your content can be used by others.
  • Tag your pages. Not with graffiti, but with meta tags, alt tags, and other techie stuff that should be easy if you’ve got search engine optimization plugins like Yoast or All-In-One SEO pack on your WordPress-powered website.
  • Don’t be dense. For a while, ‘keyword density’ was sooooo important that thousands of websites repeated their keywords every keyword other keyword word in their keyword article. Google is not stupid. (Biggest brain on the planet.) Their algorithm was modified, and now frowns on sites that attempt to spoon-feed it garbage.
  • Do some research. Use Google’s own free keyword planning tool to find out how people are searching for sites like yours, and write new and interesting content about those subjects.
  • Get friendly. Do an unexpected favor for other website owners in your sphere. Comment on their blogs. Participate in their conversations. You will find them returning the favor, because we all like to have friends.

“Caelan has done a phenomenal job on our SEO. We are the number one site that comes up in our area for any alternative health related search. We are also coming up on the first page of results for conventional medical searches! We love Caelan and his thoughtful, conscientious work on the design and the SEO of our site, thanks Caelan!”

Alisun Bonville

Naturopathic Doctor, Spring Integrative Health

At its core, the purpose of your website is to help strangers become customers. The transaction where this formally happens on the Internet is usually in eCommerce shopping carts.

The moment a new customer pays you for the first time, that is when they are putting their money where their mouth is; they know, like, and trust you, and believe in you enough that they are willing to invest their hard-earned dollars and purchase your product, your service, or your mission.

This is a crucial transition point, because if your digital infrastructure fails them here, they may never trust you again.

What are the best eCommerce Shopping Carts for small businesses?

There are many variables that factor into selecting the best ecommerce platform for your small business. You can schedule a consultation with us to get customized recommendations on the best shopping cart for your website; generally we find that the platform you want corresponds to the level of your business.

Amateur – Gumroad
Professional – Freshbooks
Rising Star – Woocommerce
Illuminator – InfusionSoft

If you’re just starting out, don’t bother with the difficulty and challenges of internet security. Gumroad has a really simple set-up process, it looks great, and it lets you sell digital products easily.

If you’ve been doing this for a while, Freshbooks is the best online accounting and invoicing software on the market. You can add clients and send them invoices with ease, which they can pay with PayPal or a credit card.

By the time you are ready to start handling transactions on your own website, it’s time to look at WooCommerce. This extensible plugin has a myriad of integrations, and can support sophisticated shopping cart functions on any WordPress website.

When you are ready to scale, InfusionSoft provides the complicated post-purchase nurture sequences of the best marketing automation platforms. Be warned: it’s not easy to set up or use, which is why it’s nickname is ‘ConfusionSoft.’

Can I set up an eCommerce Shopping Cart myself?

The short answer is: yes, if that’s really how you want to spend your time.

There are so many perils and pitfalls, though, that most people find it best to hire an expert to handle the technical installation, SSL encryption, payment gateways, and merchant accounts.

Each one of these components could take you a week or more to figure out, and you may run into issues that take experienced programmers many hours to overcome.

If you are growing your business, your time is best spent leveraging your greatest genius. If programming shopping carts is not where your brilliance is, build your team with those geniuses – or at the very least, get some good advice.

Schedule a complimentary 30-minute consultation and we will help you figure out your next move.

“Caelan is a talented digital marketer who is always in beast mode – always zoned in, every pixel, every letter, every plugin, every line. He will help you discover the online success you’ve been hunting for.”

Andy Horner

Founder and CEO, Outstand Email Marketing Platform

Third party integrations can be confusing, but any website that is more than brochure-ware needs to manage multiple platforms by using them.

What is 3rd party integration?

Third party integrations with WordPress websites are when you sync another platform or account with your website, allowing a free and open exchange of data between your website and the third-party platform.

Examples:

You have an ESP (Email Service Provider) that sends out your email newsletter. People can sign up for your newsletter on your website. When they do, a 3rd party integration allows the newsletter form on your website to seamlessly pass the data to your ESP.

How does a 3rd Party Integration work?

Usually, a third-party integration passes data along an API, an Application Programming Interface. This is a set of programming commands that define what kinds of data is communicated between applications, and how that data is formatted.

The most common time that website owners interact with an API is with their API key. This is a random string of characters that verifies one program to pass data onto another – for example, your ESP has an API key, that is unique to your account. When you install their plugin onto your sidebar, so people can signup for your newsletter, it is the API key that tells the signup form how the data is to be formatted, which ESP it is going to, and to which account within that ESP the data needs to be delivered.

Many 3rd party integrations, especially in eCommerce websites, require customizations of arcane settings in order to get them to function smoothly for the user. Spending lots of time trying to figure these myriad options can be frustrating to even computer programmers; if you are not a programmer, and you find yourself spending hours fiddling with the settings of one of your WordPress plugins, it is time to work with someone who knows these plugins inside and out, so you can get back to doing what you do best.

Third Party Integrations With WordPress Plugins We Use Frequently

  • iMember 360
  • WooCommerce
  • Toolset
  • Zapier
  • PayPal
  • Mailchimp
  • Aweber
  • Constant Contact
  • Google Analytics
  • Amazon Web Services
  • ZenDesk
  • IFTTT
  • Buffer
  • Gravity Forms
  • Formidable
  • Contact form 7
  • Yoast
  • Wistia
  • YouTube
  • Vimeo
  • GetResponse
  • App.net

Do you have a complicated 3rd party integration with your website that we can help you with? Contact us today to tell us about what you’re working on.

The best landing page design has one (and only one) clear goal for the user to take. The best landing pages have simple goals:

  • Opt-in
  • Buy now
  • Share

A landing page is optimized to make the user take one action – and if you provide distracting alternatives to that one action, you dilute the effectiveness of your landing page.

Landing Page Design Best Practices

  • Only one Call-to-Action
  • No navigation bar or footer menu
  • Solution to a pain point promised in the headline
  • Test the entire sales funnel start-to-finish with a dummy user
  • A/B test the landing page design monthly

Landing Page Design Checklist

If you are designing your own landing page, ask yourself these 12 questions:

  1. Does your opening quickly offer or clearly imply a strong benefit?
  2. Is everything instantly clear? If it’s funny, clever or obscure – beware.
  3. Have you told the whole story? Unless you give every sensible reason to buy, answer obvious questions and overcome all reasonable objections, you’ll lose conversions.
  4. Is what you sell fully and clearly described?
  5. Is the tone right? Don’t be funny about serious things (e.g. charity, business or money).
  6. Do you demonstrate the benefit – give examples, quantify it, compare it to alternatives? People want to know how and why you are better.
  7. Do you prove your claim is true? Testimonials? Independent figures?
  8. Do you ask firmly enough for a reply, telling people precisely what to do? Repeat your arguments at that point.
  9. Is the coupon, order form or request to reply big enough, clear, simple and easy to use?
  10. Does your copy, when read aloud, sound like someone talking? Good!
  11. Have you shown it to someone uninvolved, preferably a likely prospect? Ask if they understand it – and if they would buy.
  12. Do you have a plan in place to regularly test and modify this page? What converts well today may not convert in six months, as technology changes.

Best Landing Page Design Inspiration

These websites are good places to go when you are designing a landing page. Browse through the best of the best, notice what really grabs your attention, and take notes on how they structure their layout or their content flow.

Recent Landing Pages Produced by Stellar Platforms:

“Caelan, I have to say….you are AMAZING!! I LOVE LOVE LOVE what you have done! I am so thrilled, Thank you a million! This is all really coming together – WOW – its like watching my dreams come to LIFE!!”

Lynn Kitchen

The best sales funnel strategy helps a stranger become a customer. That’s the purpose of your website, after all; if your website helps a stranger become a customer, it doesn’t matter how ugly it is, or what fonts you use, or what kind of CMS or fancy plugins you use. If your digital platform helps a stranger become a customer because of a solid online sales funnel strategy, your website is a win.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel is a series of steps that communicate to your customer in the language of the different stages that your customer goes through, from discovery all the way through to purchase.

Your online sales funnel strategy is a map of all the digital infrastructures that guide a stranger through the journey to becoming your customer.

How to Make an Online Sales Funnel Strategy

There are many different ways to map your sales funnel, based on the stages that your prospective customer goes through. Three typical methods we use at Stellar Platforms to map out these stages are:

  • Actions the user takes
  • Website URLs for each stage
  • Emotional reactions that cause them to progress to the next stage

You can use any of these methods individually, but I like to look at my funnel through the lens of each of these three. The action, the page, and the emotion are all relevant pieces of each stage; by looking at the continuum of the sales funnel, from start to finish, through these frameworks, you can identify ways to smooth the transition from one stage to the next.

That’s the ultimate purpose of a sales funnel, in the end – identify and remove any friction that could keep a stranger from becoming a customer.

Stages of an Online Sales Funnel

Many digital sales funnels look like this:

  • Landing page
  • Opt-in incentive
  • Thank-you page
  • Email autoresponders
  • Sales page
  • Purchase page
  • Access page

As I said before, there are infinite variations on this framework, but this is a general the outline to get you started.

If we are building a brand new website, the pages of the online sales funnel would look like this:

Website Pages of Sales Funnel Stages

Blog – Someone clicks on a link on social media, and they end up on your website, reading an article you’ve written. This is not the place to sell to them. This is the place to gain their interest.
About – When they are interested, they go the most highly trafficked page on your website – the About page. This is where people go when they wan to know more about you, and what you do.
Subscribe – Your qualified prospects find your call-to-action intriguing, because they face the major problem that your product or service solves. They agree to let you into their inbox.
Thanks – Whatever free PDF or opt-in incentive you’ve offered is delivered to them. This is the best place for introducing yourself in a deep and meaningful way, setting the stage, letting them know how often you will email them, and how to find and follow you on social media.
Services – after a few educational emails that deliver good value, they have a hunch that they could work with you. They open an email from you about your gateway offer, they decide to research you, and they read the specifics about your rates and terms.
Checkout – This is where they buy. Please note: they do not buy from you at earlier stages in the online sales funnel, so don’t sell to them there. You should reserve your sales messages for people who have advanced far enough in your sales funnel that they know, like, and trust you.

Online Sales Funnel Platforms

While you can make a sales funnel in your own WordPress website, there are online platforms that make page creation, email integration, and lead magnet delivery a breeze.

Here are three of our favorites sales funnel creation tools:

 

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“Marketing my personal business has a new direction and focus thanks to Caelan. His talent for listening and understanding combined with his skills for painting the big picture really helps me to spend my advertising budget most effectively for getting the best results. Not only does he see the big picture from a unique perspective, he is able to map the steps to take my business in the direction that will be most beneficial for me and my clients.”

Sara Mustonen

The top of your sales funnel offers a lead magnet to incentivize people to subscribe to your email newsletter, or to create an account on your membership website. A free ebook, an mp3 download, a whitepaper, or access to the resources section of your website, are all ‘opt-in incentives’ that encourage people to exchange their email address for the valuable information that you can give them. We call them ‘lead magnets’ because they attract the leads you want to put in your funnel – if your lead magnet design process was done correctly.

Let’s face it, you can stuff any kind of lead into your sales funnel, but the leads that you want are the ones that have the highest chance of becoming your customer.

Free lead magnets are opt-in bribes.

You are building your list, and the free ebook you offer above your email subscription form is your bribe to get people to subscribe.

Be sure you are bribing the right people.

Lead magnet design checklist

  • Your lead magnet addresses a problem your customer avatar is facing right now
  • The title is clear and descriptive (and maybe a little clickbait-y)
  • The medium is digestible quickly (a 5-page report is better than a 7-hour video series)
  • Delivery of the lead magnet is automated through your email service provider
  • A professional graphic designer was either involved in the production, or was asked for their opinion about the lead magnet design
  • The lead magnet ends with a call-to-action to move to the next stage of your sales funnel

Typical Lead Magnet Ideas

Being a lead magnet creator does not mean that you have to become a copywriter, graphic designer, and sales funnel strategist all at the same time. All you have to do is offer to solve a problem that would make a stranger thank you for providing them with an easy solution to the challenge they are facing.

Here are some ideas for creating a lead magnet for your website:

  • A guide, report, or handbook converted from one of your longer blog posts
  • A cheat sheet for easy reference
  • A worksheet they can print and fill out, with questions that will give them valuable perspective on the biggest challenges or pain points their audience faces
  • A resource list, with links and descriptions
  • A video training or webinar replay you have given in the past
  • A free trial or discount code to sample your service
  • A survey, assessment, or quiz, to give them an interactive experience that leads to a customized recommendation
  • Your pricing, rates, or service directory

What Makes The Best Lead Magnet?

After studying many digital marketers and sales funnel specialists over the years, I’ve found the most successful lead magnets have these attributes:

  • The design is consistent with the overall brand strategy
  • The material is thorough and in-depth
  • There are many insider’s resources that are collected all into one place
  • They are filled with affiliate links

Affiliate marketing has a questionable reputation in online marketing, because it is so easy to do it badly. The typical smarmy salesperson who everybody wants to avoid – they can get online and get real loud with all of their affiliate links, and drive potential customers away by brazenly pushing their affiliate links on everyone.

But when affiliate marketing is done well, it’s easy and seamless, and provides a solid revenue stream that can support your business.

Your lead magnet is the best cornerstone for your affiliate marketing strategy. This is where you can collect resources that you have spent time vetting, comparing, and studying; and if you use that opportunity to suggest a resource that your target customer would love to know about, an affiliate link isn’t unexpected, it’s the right and proper use of affiliate links.

For an example of lead magnets and list building done well, read Pat Flynn’s email list strategy and get his ebook, Ebooks the Smart Way.

You can also read ‘How To Wake Up Early (And Like It)‘ by Caelan Huntress. Note the CTA at the end – it’s the entire purpose of this ebook.

 

Breanne Dyck has quickly become one of the most highly regarded business and learning strategists in the online marketplace. She’s one of those experts that the “big names” go to when they want to get their business and their online courses to the next level. Her Beyond Satisfaction book launch this week has brought many of those big names out to talk about why her work is so transformative.

Over the past few years, she’s worked with lots of big-name influencers you’d probably recognize (Chris Guillebeau, Natalie Sisson, Tara Gentile to name a few) to help them create courses that aren’t just profitable, but actually change lives. And in this new book, she shows you how to do the same.

The Problem With Online Courses Today

The online course marketplace is getting crowded. Now that publishing is easy, there are many low-quality courses out there, diluting the effectiveness of online education.

Breanne’s Beyond Satisfaction book helps course creators aim higher than average, by designing the course around the transformation that happens to the student.

The Beyond Satisfaction book is not just about crafting a highly profitable online course, program or workshop, but also provides the strategy for how to create an online course withou having to settle for less-than-transformational results. It’s full of case studies, research and case studies about how you can create a course that truly gets results.

Stories of people who have cracked the code on leveraged products that are extraordinarily profitable … and incredibly transformative.

Stories like Tara Gentile. Tara had been offering her flagship group program for years, and it got solid results. But as time went on, Tara found that her customers were less and less willing to buy. They were getting jaded about online courses, and had put themselves on a course buying moratorium. They were afraid that if they did invest, they wouldn’t ever use it.

Despite all of this, Tara was able to adjust and adapt her program so that it’s now selling more easily than ever — and getting better results, too.

If you want to know more about how Tara did it (along with several other great case studies and success stories), you need to read Breanne’s new Beyond Satisfaction book.

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Exclusive Interview with Breanne Dyck, author of the Beyond Satisfaction book

breanne-dyck-beyond-satisfaction-book-author

Who did you write this book for, specifically?

This book is for the online business owner who is tired of courses, workshops and programs that may look good on the outside, but fail to deliver customer results. Whether they’ve offered courses before or are preparing to offer their first one, they recognize that just “having a course” isn’t enough. Their customers — and their business — deserve better. If you are a course creator who wants to have a massive impact on your students’ lives, this book is your guide to doing that.

What is the most surprising thing about people who make online courses?

It never ceases to amaze me just how little most people think about what they’re actually creating. They’ll think about sales, they’ll think about marketing, they’ll think about what tech to use … but they won’t think about how people learn, and how that impacts what they end up creating. In fact, some are downright dismissive of the idea that there could be a better way to deliver training products and get their customers taking action. That blows my mind — if there was a chance that you could create better results for your students, and thereby your business, wouldn’t you want to take it?

What are your predictions for online education over the next 5 years?

The market is going to get more and more crowded, and as such, more and more jaded. We’re already seeing the start of this, and the results are that many course creators are finding it harder than ever to sell out the very same programs that used to “sell themselves.” So they’re looking for new revenue streams, and new ways to deliver their training: membership sites, masterminds, certification programs, intensives, and more. Plus, let’s not forget the impact of changing technology. The first business to capitalize on virtual and augmented reality in a way that is natural and authentic? Will have a gold mine on their hands.

Who do you really look up that is teaching online courses right now, and why?

The easy answer here is for me to say Tara Gentile, but I feel like that’s somewhat of a cop-out given that I’ve had a hand in crafting those learning experiences. But the people that I really am paying attention to, right now, are the ones who are experimenting with new forms of delivery other than the same old “8-week video course” as well as those who are actually looking to break out of the online-only world and do online/in-person hybrids. I can’t really give you names, because those products aren’t public yet, but be on the lookout for them. They’re coming.

When someone is just starting out with teaching online courses, what is the advice you always give them, that they don’t even think about until they hear it from you?

There’s two things, depending on where they’re at with their business. The first is that an online course shouldn’t be your first product. Unless or until you’ve worked with people one-on-one, you really shouldn’t be rushing into creating a leveraged product. After all, if you can’t find one or two people to sell to now, how on earth are you going to find ten, twenty or more that you can sell to as a group? For those who already have a service or product that they sell and are wanting to turn that into a more leveraged product / learning experience, you need to obey the 80/20 Rule of Curriculum. 80% of your participants’ time should be spent DOING the work, and only 20% consuming content. It’s really contrary to “common sense”, but the less content you include … the more likely your participants are to see success. Provided you’re giving them the right 20% content (and activities), that is!

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How To Get The Beyond Satisfaction Book

Go to http://beyondsatisfactionbook.com/.