How to Use “Spammy” Website Tricks Efficiently

Let’s start right off the bat and make it very clear that we are not encouraging you to spam your customers or trap people with clickbait. Those tactics don’t work out well for anyone.

That being said, there are a few “spammy” website tricks that can help boost conversions. With some subtle but effective methods traditional employed by spam sites, you can actually help boost your website traffic, leads, and sales without annoying your customers.

Here’s how to make three traditional spammy tactics work for you and your customers.

Countdown timers

Countdown timers are a great way to push a sense of urgency. If you are running a big sale or have a special offer and put a countdown timer on it, people feel like they have to act or risk losing out. No one wants to lose out.

When a person goes to your website and sees that little timer ticking down, their primitive brain goes into panic mode. Seeing time tick away makes them worry that they are going to lose out on something or that they are going to miss out on something everyone else is getting.

This panic isn’t a conscious response and it can be used to your advantage. Consider putting a countdown timer at the top of your website page when you are having a sale or in the checkout cart to help avoid cart abandoners.

Countdown timers can also be good for autoplay webinars. Delivering a little “webinar starting in 5 minutes” with a countdown timer as a pop-up in the bottom corner of a screen can draw people in. They will see the pop-up and think “Oh! What luck! I came to this page just as they were starting a webinar. Now I have to watch it.”

While countdown timers are great, make sure that you use them sparingly and only where appropriate. If your timers become predictable and expected, they lose their effectiveness. Keep your customers guessing and your countdown timers will work towards your advantage.

Autopilot webinars

Have you ever poked around on a company’s website, landed on a conversion page, and see a little “webinar starting soon” banner with a countdown clock? While it would be nice to believe that you landed on that page at the exact right time for a webinar, this is not usually the case.

Webinars are a great way to drive conversions and get leads; however, they usually don’t convert well when you are doing them live. People may express interest in them and even register for them, but it is more than likely that they will forget about your webinar and never watch it. This is there autopilot webinars came into play.

Autopilot webinars are designed to drive people down the purchase funnel. Someone’s interest in your services or product is highest when they are navigating through your website and registering to get more information.

The idea with autopilot webinars is that you capture those people when their interest is the highest, at the registering for more information stage. Adding an autopilot webinar to the registration confirmation page can make people more likely to actually purchase your product.

Choose a webinar that works well for these first time, exploratory customers. A webinar about the importance of what you do and how it helps others be successful is a great example. Make sure to add a countdown timer here and change the webinar once a quarter. That way you can keep people guessing and capture more customers.

Utilize overlays

Overlays or “Welcome Mats” are a great way to get leads and push people to take action. Essentially, they are a total screen takeover that pops up when people get to a certain page on your website. Usually, they include some kind of messaging like “Want to become an expert? Sign up for our newsletter now!”

Overlays can be a little annoying to customers, but they work. They work really well, especially when it comes to lead generation.

But when it really comes down to it, putting all of these tactics together gets the best results. Create a pop-up overlay with a lead generation box, an autoplay webinar, and a countdown to the webinar and you are in business. Using “spammy” techniques intelligently can give your digital marketing the boost it needs.

Want to learn more about how to make these tools work for you? Check out my done-for-you system today.

Tips for Managing Blog Comments on Marketing Content

When you create a landing page or release a blog article as part of your internet marketing approach, it’s sometimes a good idea to allow comments. This can help increase engagement and could lead to more subscribers for your mailing list. At the same time, you could end up with lots of spam comments.

How do you manage your blog comments to increase the effectiveness of your marketing content? There’re a few simple steps that you can take to prevent a free-for-all.

Use a Trusted System for Your Comments

You shouldn’t allow just anyone to comment on your blog. This can quickly lead to spam comments, random messages, and internet trolls. Before long, your comment section could be packed with comments that’re completely unrelated to your content.

Use a trusted system for your comments. This means a system that requires a login. There are two main options – social media plug-ins and third-party plug-ins.

Google Plus, Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter have plug-ins that you can place on your site for your comment sections. This helps to cut down on the random noise-makers that plague open comment sections.

Another option is to use Discus or another third-party comment plug-in. These plug-ins also require a login. By ensuring a user has some type of profile, there is less of a chance of anonymous comments.

Community Only Comments

If you find that you still get anonymous, irrelevant comments, you could restrict comments to community members. Before someone could leave a comment, they’d need to sign up to your community and join your mailing list.

Restricting comments to community members can help increase the quality of your comments. Though, it can also decrease the number of comments your content gets.

Don’t Allow Comments

You don’t have to allow comments. While comments help create an engaged community, provide feedback, and allow you to answer relevant questions, they can also be distracting. If you feel that your comment section is more trouble than its worth, you could remove it completely.

There’s a downside to removing the comment section. A recognisable brand won’t see a major impact by removing the comment section, but, a smaller business may find it more difficult to build trust with their customer base.

Choosing the Option That Works for You

How do you choose the right option? You basically have four options — you can use a social media plugin, use a third-party plugin, restrict your comments to community members, or not allow comments at all. Each of these options has their own advantages and disadvantages.

Social media and third-party plugins can help you build a community. They’re more open and allow a greater number of users to comment on your content. This can be beneficial for businesses that are still establishing themselves. They can also lead to irrelevant comments and discussion unrelated to your content.

Community only comments can restrict unrelated comments. Though, they also limit the number of comments you get. This could be a suitable option — if you already have a large community established.

The final option is to not allow comments at all. This is mostly reserved for major brands that don’t need to engage with their customers.

Weigh the benefits and drawbacks of each option. The decision should be made before you begin releasing content. You may even use different options for different types of content.

For example, on landing pages connected to a PPC advertisement, you might choose to include social media or third-party plugins. For blog posts, you might want to restrict comments to community members.

These tips will help you make better use of your comment section, depending on your marketing strategies. This only covers a portion of the considerations you should make. For extra help and tips for internet marketing, learn more about my done-for-you system.

Caveat Emptor – Watch Out for Internet Scammers When Buying Leads for Your Business

When you buy email lists, many of the less reputable sellers are getting the addresses they sell you buy scraping them off old lists, picking them off web sites, and collecting contact lists from conferences.

And some list sellers create their own squeeze pages and collect opt-ins, then turn around and sell them to other marketers.

The problem is that the people who opted-in did so for that company, not for yours. So when you contact them, they don’t know who you are and are more likely to mark you as a spammer.

Another problem is the way these lists are put together … hodge-podge, if you will … many of the addresses you receive are going to be misspelled, abandoned or even phony.

This is actually really common, so the legitimate companies that sell lists will usually give you a refund for these types of addresses up front. That’s another indicator that you are buying from somebody legit.

So when your autoresponder sends out your emails to these addresses, they are going to be kicked back. This is also a red flag to email providers like Gmail and Hotmail and it could cause them to block all future emails from you.

So once again you could find yourself having to start over again.

Know Your Intended Audience

Then there’s the ultimate objective of your email campaigns. Sometimes that gets lost in the shuffle.

Remember: The whole reason you are sending emails to prospective customers is to sell them your affiliate products.

When you send emails to people who don’t know who you are, haven’t asked you to contact them, and aren’t expecting to hear from you, how open do you think they are going to be to your sales message?

It’s like taking a shot in the dark. That’s why the conversion rate is so low with purchased lists. And the risks are high.

So you are almost always better off simply building your list the organic way. While buying a list may seem like a shortcut, it’s generally too costly and too high risk.

And it can actually set your sales program back because if you get banned you have to start over anyway.

Put Yourself in Your Customer’s Shoes

How you respond when you get an email from somebody you don’t know?

Odds are, you didn’t even open it, but instead either deleted it right away or sent it to a spam folder. You don’t know what’s in that email. It could be a computer virus that is going to damage your computer.

At the very least, it’s an unsolicited offer that you are probably going to dismiss out of hand anyway.

So if even YOU aren’t going to open emails from people you don’t know, how do you expect other people to react when they get an unsolicited email from you?

A better plan is to get your sales message in front of people by organically growing your list through squeeze pages, sales letters, SEO, social media marketing, blogging and all the other free methods we have discussed so far. Or to use the paid methods, such as PPC and other ads.

Being careful when dealing with people you don’t know is as important in business as it is in the rest of your life. Keep in mind that your customers aren’t familiar with you the first time you meet them, either. So you have to take steps to build their trust.

If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-for-you system.

Should You Pay for Leads to Expand Your Customer List?

The common thinking among many Internet marketers is that you are never supposed to buy email lists because the people on that list don’t know you. After all, you don’t know for sure they are open to what you are selling. They may mark you as spam and get you banned from email services.

All those things are true, in general, but there are certain lists that absolutely are worthwhile to buy. So you shouldn’t dismiss buying leads altogether because there is a right way and wrong way to go about it. You just have to be very careful about how you proceed because there are risks.

Most Lists Contain High-Target Customers

You should only buy leads if there is a high probability that they are going to convert. What you don’t want is a list of people that you essentially are going to be cold-calling — via email — because that’s going to be low-converting.

Obviously, the best leads — and the optimal way to reach people — focus primarily on customers who have interacted with you at some point or another, either through your squeeze page or your sales page or your YouTube videos or on social media or what have you.

Those people have already opted-in, so they have in effect given you an implicit permission to contact them. As a result, they are going to be far more likely to open your email and, more importantly, to act on your call to action.

This is a very important point because if people haven’t opted-in to receive your emails, it can be very dangerous for you.

How Much Should You Pay?

Now, you see a lot of companies out there that will sell you thousands of email addresses for $99 and the like. You may be wondering if these are a good option.

It’s a good idea to proceed with caution. If you have done business with the company in the past or the company has been recommended to you by somebody that you trust, then it may be a good idea to consider buying a list from them and trying them out.

Beware of making large scale purchases from companies that you aren’t familiar with because there are a lot of scammers out there on the Web who would be happy to take your money and sell you a list that is filled with either dead addresses or emails they have scraped from other places that aren’t going to do you a lot of good.

Risk vs Reward

Buying lists can be a big expense, so what you have to consider is the value that you are getting for your money. It can be a financial burden and there also are other risks involved.

For example, you can seriously harm your reputation if you buy the wrong list because when you buy a list and contact people who never heard of you before, they can send it to their spam folder.

Whenever they do this, it sends a notification to the email service. If it happens often enough, it can lower your sender score, which can affect your domain’s ability to send emails through that email service in the future — even if they are legitimate emails to people who have asked you to contact them.

Also, if you are marked as spam often enough, every time you send out an email from your website, it may be automatically diverted to the recipient’s spam folder, so they are never going to see it. And that’s a total waste of time and money.

Don’t Get Banned

If enough people mark your unsolicited emails as spam, you will eventually get banned on some of the biggest email providers, such as Yahoo and Gmail.

If that happens, you are going to have to shut down your website and start over with a new one.

That’s not going to put you out of business, but it will delay your efforts to get your business up and running. Plus there will be the additional expense of buying new domains, setting up new pages, re-establishing your autoresponder, not to mention the opportunity costs associated with being offline.

Monitoring the social media marketing landscape is vital to your success. If you’d like to have access to even more powerful marketing tips, as well as a way to generate conversion-ready Internet marketing prospects each month, click here to learn about my done-for-you system.