The Dumbest Marketing Mistake I Ever Made

The worst blunder I ever made as an information marketing entrepreneur involved paying to run an advertisement. The decision to pay for a new source of highly-targeted traffic was a sound one — and the ad definitely worked. But I still blew it.

I made a simple error in judgment and foresight — I sent everyone to the wrong page on my site.

I’m not talking about a typo or an error page or an incorrect URL — I promoted the link to a product sales page, instead of focusing my efforts on my squeeze page.

Several months ago, right after launching my first information product, I found myself — finally — in possession of a life-altering, financially life-transforming unique, original passive income stream. THE goal of online marketing.

I’d spent years learning and developing a system I could teach other people as a professional service, and months crunching it into a D.I.Y. tutorial format that absolutely anyone can use… I had IT. One sale, from one reader, could generate in seconds more income than I could potentially make from months worth of Google Adsense…

Once that first download-able product was in place, the sales page written and edited and formatted and rewritten again, the only thing I needed was to lead as many of the right kinds of readers to that sales page as possible.

My PageCoach subscriber list was very small back then — made up mostly of the clients I had worked with over the past few years — and I had not made the decision to re-invent and re-focus my problogging specifically for other writers in the Spirituality | Personal Development niche. I thought what I needed was a guaranteed surge of traffic, much more than I would get from months or perhaps years of blogging and growing my readership slowly.

All I needed was a big fat dose of traffic — and I was willing to pay for it. I had identified the perfect list to promote to — I have a mentor who had been doing phenomenally well with her email newsletter for years — she had over 20,000 subscribers on her list — and a large portion of that audience overlapped with the one I wanted to get in front of.

So, even though I had to scrape together the money to purchase a promotion to her list — $150 for one email — and I did NOT have $150 to blow — I still projected that, out of potentially 20,000 people, if only 2 or 3 people purchased my tutorial, it would pay for the cost of the ad. A totally worthy and wise investment, easily justified.

How did I manage to blow it?
I sent everyone to the sales page.

Isn’t that the point? Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?
No. I was totally naïve. Wait, worse than that — I failed to follow my own advice. I didn’t do what I would’ve told ANY client to do…

Let me try to explain — how about a metaphor?
Picture this scenario as a first-date, a blind-date, or a “fix-up” — my mentor was going to introduce me to thousands of people on her list. Any one of those people would be the “date.”

Linking straight to my sales page was like asking the reader to marry me, right after the hand-shake.

When you’re dating someone, or courting her, you’re getting to know her over a course of events, a little bit at a time, for months or years before you pop the question.

When you have a successful first date, the next step is simply to get another one. (In marketing terms, this is the opt-in subscription process — you ask if you can call her again and take her out another time, and she says “Okay.”)

So, I got the huge surge in traffic I’d hoped for — my promotional email was carefully written — hundreds of people clicked through to check me out. NO ONE bought the tutorial. No one said “Okay, I’ll marry you” on the first date — totally makes sense.

Subscribers versus Visitors versus Customers
Now, about 30 people DID hang around and explore my site enough to subscribe and agree to come back. But hundreds of them visited, listed to my proposal, and quickly moved on, most of them never to come back… Over the course of the next 6 to 8 weeks, many of those new subscribers ended up purchasing my tutorial. Since I was publishing about once a week back then, that is just under — better than — the average 8 to 10 exposures required for a reader to trust you enough to become a customer or client.

If I had focused on simply getting everyone who saw that ad to sign up for a free gift and subscribe to my list, I could’ve had hundreds more regular readers. Many of whom would have eventually become paying clients…

A subscriber can always become a customer or client later — she has on-going opportunities. A first-time visitor who leaves without giving you permission to bring her back… She’s not likely to return and become a customer… well, EVER.

What should I have done?
If someone gives you the opportunity to share ONE URL:

• it should not be a sales page
• it should not be the front page of your blog
• it should not even be your best post

Give ‘em a little squeeze
That precious link should be your name squeeze page — where you sell your reader on an irresistible incentive in exchange for subscribing to your blog.

I discuss “squeeze pages” and “landing pages” in my latest tutorial Build Your Blog Subscriber List.

If you want something from someone, attach a handle to it — make it simple — make it a “who could say no to this?” — make it so that all they have to do is say “Yes.”

Promoting one page of your blog is not any harder or more expensive than promoting any other page on your blog — the right choice is not any more difficult in terms of technology — making the right choice is not easy — but it is incredibly simple.

Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.

August 15, 2007 | by Slade Roberson | Filed Under Email, Marketing, Tutorials

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