In a rapidly changing environment spotting and capitalizing on trends can become more and more difficult. Especially if you are a bootstrapping entrepreneur, the idea of “trends” or “forecasting” becomes laughable.

Yet, regardless of the shifting “trends” something that will never go out of style (if you’re building a real business) is relationship marketing, and in a way that still makes you money!

So despite your current level in your business, let us capitalize on the atmosphere of reflection, and take a step back to see the life-blood of your business: your consumers. More specifically we will focus on the relationship between you.

The aim: higher conversion rates and cultivating better clients.

Clients that actually help you build your business with repeat sales, referrals, and glowing social media reviews rather than burying you with support issues, refunds, and scathing complaints in the social sphere for all to see! It can be much easier than you think when you have a good framework. So today I am going to reveal to you the “Three Critical Phases of The Consumer Lifecycle”.

If you have any one reason to give your Consumers Lifecycle serious attention, it is this:

“If you don’t have a process for what you are doing, you don’t know what you are doing.” – W. Edwards Deming

A path that ensures you make the most of every opportunity, while giving you accurate information with which you can refine a water-tight funnel; building your business with efficiency and scalability!

Each one of these stages has a number of stages within them that I have identified in the complete cycle, but it is important for YOU to build out according to your unique business model.

1. Generation to Conversion

Do you sometimes feel as though you have the best product in the world? If only more people could find out about it, then you’d be set! I think everyone goes through this “phase”, until they start generating serious traffic that is!

It doesn’t matter if you’re in a strip mall, a business complex, or online; you will always need traffic in one form or another. The more the better, however, it is not just the amount that matters, but also the quality of the visitors (how closely what they want is aligned with what you have). Bottom line: traffic is great, but leads are better!

When put into a choreographed process, leads can “move along” a pipeline toward becoming actual customers!

During this phase it’s important to educate your leads and, while educating them you can watch their behavior and find out towards which they gravitate. By focusing on relationships, their behavior, in addition to surveys and market testing, you will find that getting sales conversions become natural and easy! You will get more than just buyers; you will get the Right buyers! Buyers who actually use your product or service enough to get value!

2. Adoption to Causation

Basically, it doesn’t matter how great your product is, unless people actually DO something with it, they will most likely not be coming back to you for more products, let alone give you a referral, a testimonial, or positive review online. And why should they?

It is through better adoption of your product that your consumers naturally become a causative force for you in the marketplace. This leads to more natural repeat sales, upsells, referrals and testimonials.

As more and more business are struggling with diminishing e-mail open rates, lower quality leads, and diminishing sales, you will find more and more businesses realize the value of each and every lead and customer. So DO NOT make the mistake of thinking that just because the deal is ‘closed’ that the relationship has ended!

3. Affiliation to Ascension

Entire empires have been made from affiliates and affiliate marketing, but despite the vast opportunity many business owners still struggle with how to 1) Get affiliates on board and 2) get them to actually DO something! But while there is nothing wrong from going straight to affiliate networks, it would be reckless to ignore the greatest affiliate goldmine you may have: your happy customers!

As you can see, the third stage relies heavily on the efficiency of the second stage, much like the second relies on the first. Thus, if you get the right traffic (which generally comes from good affiliates, which you can grow inside your own organization) you will easily get higher-quality leads.

Higher quality leads makes getting sales much easier. With the right clients on board, they will naturally use more of what you sold making it easier on your support team. When people see actual realized value, it makes it MUCH easier to get authentic testimonials. Likewise, it is now much easier to get a referral from someone who gave you a testimonial. At this point it is surprisingly easy to turn your referral sources into full-blown affiliates!

Finally, with the right kind of motivated affiliates on board, they will see their traffic turned into a goldmine. It soon becomes easy for them to become super-affiliates who flood your sites with the perfect visitors for your products! It is actually quite easy and takes relatively very little effort to take someone to this level of ascension when you plan and act deliberately with a holistic process in mind!

It may seem complicated, but it also seems complicated to have to date a person before asking them to marry you. Thus you build a relationship, which is exactly what you need!

Tips for a Strong Consumer Lifestyle

• Have a process for what you are doing
• Remember Relationships
• Generate traffic and convert them into buyers
• Get buyers to adopt your products (this is part of your relationship)

Extracted from StomperNet SEO Intelligence Report, November 4, 2011.

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How do you ensure that the information products you sell give fair value to your customers?

One way is to follow Internet marketing guru Fred Gleeck’s “ten times” rule.

Fred says that the information products you sell should be worth at least 10 times the price you charge for them.

Alex Mandossian and I discussed this in an ETR tele-seminar, looking for a way to determine whether your product and pricing meet Gleeck’s criterion.

The solution we came up with is something I call the “loose-leaf test”.

Here’s how it works…

Traditional non-fiction paperback books (around 200 pages) typically sell for around $10 to $20 or so.

To determine whether your book is worth ten times that amount—Gleeck’s “ten times” rule—imagine printing out the book manuscript on 8½ by 11-inch sheets of paper.

Now, three-hole-punch those pages and put them in a three-ring binder and maybe even add tabbed dividers to separate the sections or chapters.

Information products in three-ring binders are typically dense in content and consequently command much higher prices than bookstore books.

It’s not unusual for these “loose-leaf services” to cost $100 to $200 or more per copy.

(One loose-leaf service for executives on how to write and give speeches, American Speaker, sold for $297.)

Does your $20 paperback book contain enough valuable, in-depth content that you could reprint the thing in a three-ring loose-leaf binder—and sell it for $200—to customers who would feel they got fair value for their investment and not ask for a refund?

If it does, then you can rest assured that the content you deliver in your book is indeed worth at least ten times more than the $20 you charged on it.

However, if you think customers who paid $200 for a loose-leaf version of your book (remember: same content, just different packaging) would feel gypped and ask for their money back, then your book doesn’t pass Gleeck’s “ten times” test.

I increasingly see today non-fiction business books that are thin and light. They present just one or two new ideas, often in a short book of 150 pages or less.

If a reader buys such a book in a bookstore, they probably won’t complain: expectations for trade books are modest. If it’s a good read, they’ll be satisfied enough.

But your customers perceive information products published and sold online as containing more specific and highly specialized content than a “bookstore book”.

So if you are an Internet information marketer, you have to deliver far more value to your customers for their money than a bookstore book.

Gleeck’s “ten times” rule—and the Bly/Mandossian “loose leaf test”—help you ensure that you do just that.

I have discovered that, if the customer thinks your information product was worth the $20 you charged but no more than that, they may be dissatisfied and want a refund.

One customer, JB, recently asked for a refund on one of my e-books. He wrote: “Your e-book was certainly worth the $19 you charged me, but no more than that. So please send my money back.”

At first, I thought: how odd! JB says the product is worth what he paid for it. So his desire for a refund made no sense to me.

But in Internet information marketing, we make big promises in our copy to grab the reader’s attention—and make a sale.

(In a bookstore, by comparison, the only “selling” is usually done by the book’s cover and its jacket copy.)

JB apparently felt that the book did not live up to the copy on my landing page, and was disappointed on that basis.

The solution, of course, is either to charge less (not very desirable), write weak copy (also not a good idea), or,
preferably, to make the product stronger.

Add content until the product meets the Gleeck/Bly/Mandossian test and delivers content not just worth what you charged for it but worth ten times what you charged for it.

When you sell an item worth $200 for $20, customer satisfaction will soar, and refunds will be minimal to non-existent.

I can’t remember who said it or where, but a famous marketer once stated: “It is our goal not to give the customer her money’s worth, but to give her more than her money’s worth!”

Or more specifically, at least ten times her money’s worth—or even more.

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.

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You need to write an article for your website, so you sit down at your desk and open your word processor. You stare at the blank white page, hoping to get some inspiration or idea of what to write about.

Nothing.

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The power of Twitter is often not as obvious to people than the value of Facebook or MySpace. Most people initially respond with “I do not understand. How can 140 characters answering ‘What are you doing now?’ assist my business?” To Internet marketers used to 300 to 500-word blog posts, Twitter sounds constricting. To others, Twitter’s quite confusing.

Surely you cannot promote your goods and services, develop branding, develop real relationships, create interest in your opportunity, and develop a following with these small amounts of content? Well, the answer is “Yes, you can!” Twitter has, in fact, proven to be very important to numerous marketers. And it’s fun!

Here are 10 ways Twitter can help your business:

1) Powerful and easy way to find new product users and customers.

2) Powerful networking tool.

3) Excellent way to learn various kinds of important information.

4) Help you build deeper relationships with your downline, your list, your buyers, other entrepreneurs, and possible customers.

5) Grow the reach of your brand, types of gurus and their advice and suggestions.

7) Causes a strong influx of additional website visitors. Twitter is a great entry-point to your business site.

8) Provides a feed for you to alert people who came to your sites at any time that you uploaded new content.

9) Assist you in building a lot of new relationships and friendships.

10) Further develop the profile of your business.

I’ve spent hours and hours trawling the Internet for some great personal development information.

Although there’s a huge amount of information out there, it’s quite hard to sort the wheat from the chaff…

Well, I’ve found a source which has quality written all over it.

It’s from a guy called Steven Aitchison. He has the biggest Personal Development blog in the UK and one of the biggest in the world with over 25,000 subscribers.

He’s just released 84 Personal Development Products.

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The great thing is the price. You need to see how much he’s giving these away for!

I’ve know Steven for a while now and know his work to be quality, and some of his tips and techniques really are life-changing. Developing your self and life is always a priceless affair no matter how high the investment. If Steven’s offer is still not value for money to you, I don’t know what else is!

A few months ago AWAI co-founder Don Mahoney e-mailed me an article about the National Enquirer.

In that article, Editor-in-Chief David Perel revealed the secret of the tabloid’s outrageous success:

“The big news organizations tell people what they think they should be interested in, whereas we try to give them stories that they are interested in.”

I think Perel has hit upon a key principle that applies to all writing, not just newspaper publishing.

And it is especially relevant to information marketing.

Namely, that your sales will be many times greater when you offer your customers information they want to read and learn instead of information you think they should read.

The late Gary Halbert went even further, advising marketers to sell exclusively to what he called a “starving crowd”.

A starving crowd not only wants what you are selling but has an insatiable appetite for it.

Therefore, even if there are a lot of players in that market, they can all do well, because the market’s demand is a bottomless pit.

In particular, there are 3 “starving crowd” markets that have an especially consistent and unending demand for information:

>> Hobbyists—hobbyists read about antique collecting or quilting not because they have to, but because they want to.

Those who are heavily “into” the hobby, whether that hobby is calligraphy or macramé, can’t get enough of it.

In these niches, a lot of competition is a good sign, not a negative sign, for two reasons.

First, it proves the niche is viable. If others are making money selling information online to this market, you can too.

Second, you can make joint venture deals with these other marketers to sell your products to their lists and vice versa.

>> Business opportunity seekers—there is an insatiable appetite for information on how to make money in your spare time, start a home-based business, change careers, or earn a living without a job.

I believe these business opportunity seekers can be divided into two groups.

The first group is doers. These doers are serious about changing their lives, and they actually pursue the course of action you recommend.

The second group is dreamers. The dreamers enjoy learning about small business, yet take no action beyond buying and reading how-to information products.

You can’t usually distinguish between these segments when marketing. But you really don’t have to, because both consume an unending stream of info products purchased online.

>> Money making and investing—it is a nearly universal desire to make more money and increase one’s wealth.

If you sell information that helps people get greater returns from their investments with less risk or accumulate a 7-figure net worth or become financially independent, you will never run out of eager buyers.

Of course, there are other starving-crowd niches for information marketers, including: self-help, relationships, sex, health, beauty, fashion and fitness.

But the 3 above—hobbies, business opportunities, investing—are by far the largest and most active.

One of the biggest mistakes beginning information marketers make is choosing, as their primary niche, a market that is not a starving crowd.

Reason: without a starving crowd of buyers, you will always be fighting an uphill battle to peddle your info products.

And you will be forever frustrated that your prospects aren’t buying your valuable information when you know it’s stuff they absolutely should have.

But people don’t readily do what they should do—or what you think is good for them.

They are much more easily convinced to buy what they already want rather than what you think they need.

And when you select as your primary niche in information marketing a starving crowd…like hobbyists, business opportunity seekers, or wealth seekers, you can sell your prospects the stuff they want over and over again.

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.

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Crazy-busy people read their e-mail with their finger on the ‘delete’ key. Follow these guidelines to increase your e-mail prospecting success.

1. Eliminate Delete-Inducing Words

Get rid of all verbiage that activates the delete response. Here are some serious offenders: exciting, state-of-the-art, solution, partner, leading edge, passion, unique and one-stop shopping.

2. Keep Your Message Simple

Your e-mail needs to be less than 90 words. Use 2-sentence paragraphs so it can be scanned. Stick with common black fonts (no colors) and never include more than one link or attachment.

3. Align With Their Objectives

Research your prospect’s specific company, industry or position. Make sure your e-mail mentions an important business objective, strategic imperative, issue or challenge. Relevance is essential.

4. Focus on Immediate Priorities

Identify key business events that may be impact your prospect’s priorities and tie your message into that. Examples might be: relocations, mergers, management changes or new legislation.

5. Be an Invaluable Resource

Your product or service may be a commodity, but you’re not. In your e-mails, focus on the ideas, insights and information you can share that will be of value to your prospect in reaching their goals.

6. Craft Enticing Subject Lines

Your subject line determines if your message gets read. Avoid sales hype and focus on business issues such as: “Quick question re: outsourcing initiative” or “Reducing product launch time”.

7. Launch a Campaign

Do 8-12 touches (via e-mail and phone) over a 4-6 week time period, with each contact building off the previous one. Provide links to resources. Spotlight the value of changing from the status quo.

Your challenge? To quickly capture your prospect’s attention, pique their curiosity and prove your competence.

Visit Jill Konrath’s website, Snap Selling, for more free sales resources.

Mobile text advertising is quickly turning into one of the most effective ways for small business owners to stay in contact with their customers and to create new relationships with existing leads.

While the concept of mobile advertising is becoming more understood, most people still have trouble understanding how SMS text advertising works. Here is a quick explanation:

1. The small business advertiser conducts other forms of marketing and promotion in which he encourages customers and potential customers to text with a special keyword. By doing this, the customer has opted into the advertiser’s mobile distribution list and, similar to an e-mail list, receive text messages from the vendor. The advertiser can market different keywords for different campaign purposes.

2. When a consumer opts in with a keyword, they receive an automatic response which has been set up by the vendor to correlate with the purpose that the keyword was set up. The vendor can even set up recurring automatic responses or different responses if someone texted a keyword in more than once.

3. At that point, the advertiser will periodically send out bulk SMS text messages to the entire distribution list, or even to just a small portion of the list.

Creativity is the only roadblock in how SMS text advertising can be used by an advertiser. Some uses might be for a realtor to send information about selected properties, service vendors sending appointment reminders, and restaurants sending coupons or special selection offers.

Popular TV shows use SMS text messaging for voting and contests. An advertising campaign could be as simple as notifying your distribution list that new post has been made to your blog. It can be very effective to set up advertising campaigns to coordinate between e-mail messaging, IM and text messaging.

Image having the ability to click the mouse a few times and out pops a 15-page sales funnel with upsells, downsells, and OTOs…everything needed to start building a list and making money online.

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Recently JN, one of my readers, sent me an e-mail very similar in sentiment to dozens of other e-mails I have received over the years.

“Why do marketers like ETR and AWAI send me 16-page DM packages when the copywriter could have said the same thing in 1 to 2 pages?” JN writes.

“The prospect might even buy out of gratitude for not having to wade through those 16 pages and breathe a sigh of relief instead of snarl a nasty expletive.”

But JN is not through lambasting long-copy direct marketing yet. Her e-mail continues:

“My brother-in-law makes a hobby of going through those 16-page packages just for fun, red-penciling errors before he tosses them. He would never, under pain of death, buy from a DM package.”

And it’s not just JN’s brother-in-law who thinks direct marketing copywriters are fools.

“My sister just drops those 16-page mailings in the recycling without even bothering to open them,” JN reports.

“Many of the people I know feel the same way. So why do copywriters persist in creating these massive multi-page mailings? Because they are paid by the page? Or because the client wants his pound of flesh from his writers?”

Finally, JN turns to the Internet as the harbinger of doom for long copy, asking, “Isn’t the Internet killing off traditional direct response copywriting?”

The answer to JN’s question is fairly simple…

The marketers she complains about use long copy not because they love writing it…or paying their copywriters a fortune to write it for them…or because they enjoy spending more money on printing and postage.

They use long copy for only one reason: it works.

Now, does long copy always out-pull short copy?

Of course not.

But long copy often out-pulls short copy when:

>> You are marketing information products or other products that are sold by telling stories or conveying ideas.

>> You are generating a direct sale…via mail order…rather than just generating a lead or inquiry.

>> The reader is unfamiliar with your product and its benefits.

>> You are demanding payment with order. The prospect has to pay up front with a check or credit card. He cannot order the product on credit and get an invoice he can choose to pay—or not pay—later.

>> The product is complex and therefore requires a lot of explanation.

>> The product is something people want rather than something they need—it is a discretionary purchase.

>> The product is expensive, representing an expenditure the prospect is likely to consider carefully before ordering.

As for JN’s theory that the Internet is making traditional long-copy direct marketing obsolete, it’s quite the opposite: a product that requires long copy to sell offline usually requires long copy to sell online as well.

For instance, take a look at my website www.myveryfirstebook.com.

So…what does this long copy vs. short copy debate have to do with “the worst way to make marketing decisions”?

Simply that it illustrates that the worst way to make marketing decisions—which is what JN and her family are doing—is through subjective judgment.

Copywriter Peter Beutchel advises marketers: “Don’t let personal preferences get in the way.”

What’s important is not what you think, like, believe, or prefer…it’s what your prospects think, like, believe, and prefer.

The poor general advertisers! They are largely stuck having to make subjective judgments about marketing campaigns.

Reason: most general advertisers cannot precisely measure the ROMD (return on marketing dollars) for their ads and commercials.

But direct marketers don’t have to rely solely on subjective judgment. We don’t have to let our personal likes and dislikes cloud our judgment, like JN’s brother-in-law.

That’s because direct marketers can put almost any proposition e.g. headline “A” vs. headline “B,” or long copy vs. short copy, to a direct test with an A/B split.

So, JN, it doesn’t matter what your sister or brother-in-law do…or that they don’t like long copy.

What matters is that in a statistically valid split test, the long copy generated more orders than the short copy.

I close with this quote from advertising legend Claude Hopkins: “Advertising arguments should only be settled by testing, not arguments around a conference table.”

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.

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We all have goals. Yet sometimes it seems no matter how many times we write them down, no matter how many times we visualize the goal, we still never seem to make any progress.

Why?

It could be as simple as changing your habits. The reason is simple but we all know that changing habits can be very difficult. Here are some tips to help change bad habits and create new ones.

Let’s talk about your brain.

In the last 20 years many studies have been done on the brain, and the results have been incredible.

Many studies talk about the conscious and the unconscious brain. According to the book, The Answer, “The conscious brain is the part of the brain that thinks and reasons, the part through which you exercise your free will” and the unconscious brain “is where the great bulk of perception happens: it is where your habits reside, where your accomplishments and achievements take root.”

What I glean from that is that habits happen unconsciously, you just do them because that is what you have been doing for a long time. Have you ever completed a task and then thought how did that get done? It just happens because your brain is used to doing that task or habit daily.

What does this mean for you and for you wanting to get rid of some old habits or create new ones? It means you have to beware of your brain. Your brain remembers the way you have done things for a very long time. To change the habit, you must be consciously aware of the old way of doing things, and the new way you want to do things.

Be Consciously Aware

Let’s take an example. If you decide you need to make sure you get 7 hours of sleep each night, you consciously need to make the effort to go to bed at 11:00 PM if you have to be up at 6:00 AM. If you do not think about this habit you want to achieve, your brain will let the old sleep patterns take over. It takes your brain anywhere from 27 to 31 days to adapt to a new habit.

At the very least for the next 4 weeks you will need to tell yourself to go to bed at 11 pm. After awhile this will become an unconscious and natural habit that your brain will adapt and just tell your body at 11 pm, “We are tired and need to go to bed.”

Changing habits is no easy task. It takes thought, effort and perseverance. For instance, when I worked for a computer retailer, I was expected to check my e-mail every hour, on the hour, for the latest communications from corporate. I worked there for 5 years, so when I left there it was the hardest habit to break. Checking my Yahoo! e-mail account once an hour was taking me away from what I needed to be focused on.

The very strange part is that I felt like something was missing if I did not check the e-mail; I felt like I was going to get in trouble for missing a very important email. I had to retrain my brain that it was no longer required and that it was a very bad habit. No one needs to look at e-mail once an hour, but it took a good 30 days for my brain to get it. So you see, consciously I got it, but it took my unconscious brain a lot longer to completely understand.

Write It Down

We may have the best intentions, we know we can achieve these goals; we write them down on paper or a “to do” list. We write it down and then continue to live this day like we did yesterday. To make this goal more real, you need to see it all day long. You need to physically be able to look at the goal throughout the day. Then you need to begin to take action on that goal everyday. This is where you need to retrain your brain.

When you are looking at the goal every day and taking steps toward the goal, your brain begins to see the pattern. The unconscious brain finally gets it, this is the direction you are now moving in.

Here’s the simple thing you should do right now. Write down the goal you want to achieve in the next year. Then begin taking action. You will be amazed at your brain and its power in helping you to achieve your goals and dreams.

In summary, changing your habits for more productivity is easier than you realize. All you need to do is:

• Retrain your brain
• Be aware of what you are doing
• Write down your goals

Extracted from StomperNet SEO Intelligence Report, October 21, 2011.