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What I learned from my membership with Teaching Sells

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Brian Clark is an internet “legend”. When he speaks, the tech savvy sit up straight and listen… so back in November, when he and Tony Clark launched their membership Site Teaching Sells, I signed up immediately.

Those of us who jumped on the bandwagon quickly were called the “founders”….. and we got 3 months of membership for what we were told was the price of a single month’s membership. Within the first few weeks, the site underwent a MASSIVE overhaul.

My first impression was not a good one.  Most of the content was merely “selling copy” to sell members on the benefits of launching a membership site.  The problem?  We were already sold and we’d already bought our ticket.  We sat down, ready for the show and instead were treated to a sales pitch on why we should be there.

For me, it was worth the price of admission to see how Moodle/Amember worked together.  (Very well and I was impressed.)  I had been previously disappointed with Amember and its ability to integrate with php nuke. (In a word… it doesn’t… but you don’t find that out until you purchase and read the install directions for the plug in!)

Then, the “meat” of the site began appearing as the tutorials began showing up.   Teaching Sells started with a robust offering of Camtasia tutorials.  The problem?  Camtasia is a commercial product and they’ve done a really nice job of providing training materials for their product.

What would have been another “worth the price of admission” would have been a series of Moodle tutorials.  Moodle is an open source online course management system.  During my 3 months of membership, I never got a tutorial on the basics of Moodle.    Because of it’s open source origins… learning Moodle is a “trial by fire” experience.  Video tutorials would have been welcomed.

In all fairness, I noticed that content development seemed to get a “burst” with approximately 2 weeks left in my membership so it’s possible that it’s a very robust program now.  I saw on the web site that they now have 9 content modules available and they’re offering a $1 preview.

Despite my disappointment, I consider the money well spent for several reasons.

  1. Addressing Different Learning Styles:
    As I perused the video clips, I realized that I really wanted a written version that I could quickly scan and assimilate. It pointed out to me that as I develop content for my support site, that I take heed of a lesson I’ve already learned: different learning styles require different methods of content delivery.

    When I began plans for my support site, it was my plan to populate the site with how-to videos. However, feedback from my beta-testers let me know that many of my clients prefer their tutorials to be written. However, videos are SOOOO much easier to create….. I was tempted to “ignore” my beta tester feedback.

    The Teaching Sells experience clearly illustrated for me the importance of providing instructional content in as many formats as possible. The old “Tell them what you’re GOING to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them” holds true in training as well as public speaking.

  2. First Impressions are Lasting Impressions
    Teaching Sells once again taught me that first impressions were lasting ones.  My experience with the site clearly illustrated to me the importance of creating the BULK of your content BEFORE you issue invitations. Towards the end of my membership run, the rush to fill the site was on and it may be well worth the price of admission now. Considering that they’re offering $1 preview, I would assume that the content has been “filled out”.
  3. There’s no such thing as a set it and forget it web site.
    In one of the lessons, the student is told that they have two options for their membership site.  They can either continually add fresh content or they can continually add new members.

    I’ve had many, many clients speak wistfully of a membership site because for some reason there’s the crazy notion out there that membership sites are a “set it and forget it” business.   If you’re not adding content… then you won’t be adding new members…. and both require a lot of effort.

    I’ve spent the last 6 months creating content for my future membership web site.  I have a client who completed her membership site in less time, however it was not her first stab at launching a membership site either.

    It’s both of our opinion that you “pay up front” when you put together a membership site.  There’s a LOT of time invested up front pulling together quality content.  Then, you get to start promoting the heck out of the site.  The primary goal of both of our “membership” sites is to take the support pressure off of us in our businesses instead of hoping to “get rich without working hard”.  Because trust me, pulling together a membership site is HARD WORK!

For me…  the investment in Teaching Sells was worthwhile…. but this is a conclusion I’ve come to after considerable introspection after a rather knee jerk reaction (or two) leading to a few hasty and harsh comment on a couple of blogs.

In the end… isn’t that what the internet is for… so individuals can irrationally lash out with impunity at nameless, faceless strangers in a public forum?

In other words…think before you comment.  I wish I had.

Dot Com domain names still rule….

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When it comes to domain names… dot com is still king, as the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers – AMPTP recently discovered.

Ed Lee gives the heads up in his blog post The Importance of buying the right domain names | Don’t let your brand get hijacked online

In essence, the AMPTP owned the rights to amptp.org but not amptp.com. With time on their hands, a couple of striking writers put the dot com version of the domain name to good use and launched a parody site.

The important lesson here for any business owner is the importance of picking up ALL the versions of your domain name, especially if you’re building your business on a dot net or dot org domain name.  Leave the dot com version of your site “out there” and you could find yourself in a similar situation.

Brian Gardner’s one smart cookie….

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I met Brian just before the Colts went to the Superbowl.  Brian’s not only a talented Word Press blog theme developer, he’s also a Colts fan who happens to live in the heart of Chicago Bear (the Colt’s Super Bowl XLI opponent) country.    Are all great minds Colts fans, or is it just an amazing coincidence?

Anyhow, Brian has since quit his day job and struck out on his own and he’s hit the ground running!!!  Last week, he launched an affiliate program where he pays commissions on sales of his premium Word Press themes.  Yesterday, Brian has announced his own version of March Madness…. offering fabulous prizes to his top affiliates in the month of March.

The promotion works on two levels:

a) It’s a great way to promote affiliate sign ups.

Sales is a numbers game.  In affiliate programs, 20% of your affiliate will generate 80% of your sales.  The more affiliates you have, the more sales they will generate.  It’s just that simple.

b) It’s link bait.

Not only must you sign up as an affiliate to join the contest, but you must also link back as well!

GREAT JOB Brian on crafting a compelling contest to promote your new affiliate program.

Questions about Web Site Traffic: Hits vs Visitors

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I’m having these conversations more and more often… so I probably need to address it here… again. It’s about web site log files and the analysis of them.

web site solutionsHere’s how it goes: Web site owner contacts me… says his web site is getting 3,000 unique visitors each and every month. Then says despite the huge traffic, the web site in question is not working.

Is there anything I can do to help?

When these come in via email, I begin with detective work. Since I don’t have access to this person’s log files, I go and look at said website with the Alexa and Google PR tool installed in Firefox. Alexa tells me said web site is 11,080,071.

WOW! I didn’t know Alexa WENT that high. I know it’s not reliable for sites out of the top 100,00 and according to Aaron Wall in his post “Wow! My Alexa Ranking is Great!“says that

Just a few people from each browsing my site with an Alexa toolbar caused the rankings to nearly double, which is a huge change on a logarithmic scale for a site in the top 10,000.

So yeah… the Alexa toolbar is not a reliable measure of traffic. It only measures how many people who have the Alexa tool bar installed have visited the site. Those visitors tend to be web master types who are nosy about other people’s traffic. But for 3,000 visitors to come to a site in a relatively short period of time (one month) to a relatively NEW site (less than 6 months old), WITHOUT any other form of promotion is highly unlikely.

Next, I head over to Compete.com. No data for the site there either. Hmm…. the site IS a WordPress blog but it isn’t linking out and according to it’s PR ranking (which is zero) it’s not getting a lot of link love from reliable sources. It’s also not registered with any of the social networking tools for blogs like Blog Catalog or Technorati.

At this point, I have to question whether we’re seeing VISITOR or HITS.

To clarify, a hit is defined as a “call” made to the web server. Every time a visitor enters a web site, depending upon the structure of the page, they will cause MULTIPLE “hits” to the server. If a web site or blog has 49 small graphics on the page, every time a visitor loads the page, the site will register not one hit, but perhaps 50 or more hits on the server (49 graphic files plus the html file. PLUS any java applets, etc which are also “hitting” the server).

With this in mind, 3,000 “hits” may actually translate into 60 unique visitors.

A good traffic analysis program will actually TRACK the visitor’s movement throughout the site. I ADORE the program Click Tracks for this, but it can be a bit pricey for the “non-professional” webmaster. If you’re serious about using your web site to market your business, it’s a GREAT investment. (I need to upgrade my version as I see there are lots of shiny new toys in their latest version!)

So as you look at your log files, whether it be AW Stats and Webalizer (both are better at providing amusement rather than hard data, but they are free and readily available) remember that a VISITOR is not the same as a “hit”. It’s also important to note that I’ve had a couple of cases of client blogs with fewer than 100 visitors per month who are actually seeing client referrals from their blogs. I’ve also heard complaints from people with blogs with incredibly high visitor counts who aren’t seeing ANY referrals of clients from their blogs… which is the opposite side of the same coin.

The moral to that story: A handful of interested potential clients reading your blog is much, much better than a throng of visitors who want something for nothing.

Why blogging in the dark can be a good thing….

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The email was short and sweet….

” Kathy!  It’s me again.  I am wondering if you can tell how much activity my blog gets.  I looked at the stats sheet, but couldn’t tell.  Am I writing about the right kind of stuff?”

My reply:

This is a COMMON problem.

It’s been my experience that you can’t judge which posts are the most “powerful” by the comments because often, the only people who leave comments are other bloggers who want to leave a breadcrumb trail from your blog to their blog.

With that said, I peeked at your stats …[snip] I also saw that you’re getting lots of love from the Google bot.   That’s good.

However, aside from the dry information readily available in your log files, ….for right now, you’re blogging in the dark so to speak.   It’s true that your stats can tell you what page people entered on and how many left after reading that page.  I can also see how many pages each “visitor” consumed “on average”.    Log file analysis doesn’t always tell the story.  We know your average page view is 2.32 pages…. was that the result of each and every visitor visiting 2.32 pages or was it hundreds of single page views combined with three or four visitors consuming 10-20 blog posts on their visit?  Because of the high traffic, analysis is difficult at best!  It’s easier in this case to see 10 visitors with an average page view of 8 pages per viewer.   Then we know SOMEONE is very interested in what you have to say!   It’s very common for high traffic blogs to have a low number page views because an interested reader who consumes 10-20 blog posts won’t drive up the average number of page views over thousands of visitors.

Then the question is…. did those visitors who consumed a single page on their visit… were they “regular” readers (who subscribed via RSS feed).  An RSS feed subscriber may visit every time you post an entry… or they may only visit when you have an interesting headline that catches their eye.  The blogs I subscribe to via RSS will only see me visiting a single page if I was just there the day before, reading the previous day’s entry.

In a word, you could drive yourself NUTSO worrying about this.  Or, you can continue to blog from your heart.  Write as if you were speaking directly to a potential client.  What would she need to know about you before signing up for your services?  How can you build TRUST with this stranger?  The goal is to build up trust to the point where the reader will take a chance and contact you.

The more you post, the more trust opportunities you’ll have.   As you post, you’ll be revealing MUCH more than you should even focus on.  For example, today’s post is EXCELLENT!  It tells me a lot… I read this one and the one before it and if I didn’t know before, I do now that you’re a Christian.

Now, that may be a HUGE turn off to some people.  That might be enough to “cross” your name off their list.  But those people weren’t really even in the running to be your client.  On the contrary.  Once they had a conversation with you, they would have seen that and never contacted you again.  This way, they learned it from your blog BEFORE they wasted your time by calling.

Again, you’ll drive yourself CRAZY trying to define the single post that was the “tipping point” and caused the potential client to fill in the contact form or pick up the phone.  You can ask, but they probably weren’t aware of the process.  Was it the last post they read or the first?  Which straw broke the camel’s back?

I am aware when I reach that tipping point… but only because I’m ACUTELY aware of the process.  I don’t ask “regular, normal, functional” people the question of “when did you decide to pick up the phone” because it’s not that they WON’T answer it, it’s that they can’t answer it.

On the one hand, you don’t want to “ruin” the intake process by grilling them on what made them decide to call.  On the other hand, if you WERE to grill them, you need to be aware that psychologists estimate that 85% of the buying decision is made at an unconscious level.  All your potential client could answer would be what the last post was that they read before they called or contacted you.  The probably can’t tell you when they made the decision.

The moral to the story…. many of us are “blogging in the dark”.  I remember one potential client contact a few months back.  A woman called late on a Friday afternoon and she opened the conversation with me with an unforgettable phrase,

“I don’t know why, but for some reason… I think you might be able to help me.”

She’s normal… she’s functional… and she’s not obsessed with this stuff…. of course she can’t pin point WHY she called.   However, her comments and questions clearly referenced a few blog posts I had made a few months earlier.  Looking back, she hadn’t posted a question or a comment on the post…. no one did!  It wasn’t a “powerful” post by anyone’s definition except hers!!!

On the other hand, my serious introspection of my bellybutton lint when it comes to making major sale decisions is BOUND to affect my decision making process as well.  By trying to see past the veil… the one the hides the 85% of the buying decision making process from view… am I skewing the results?

As I try to measure, I find myself entering aCatch 22 world similar to that in Quantum Mechanics… “when a quantum system interacts with a measuring apparatus, their respective wavefunctions become entangled, so that the original quantum system ceases to exist as an independent entity.”  In other words, by trying to MEASURE  the quantum state one will actually ALTER the quantum state rendering the measurement useless.

In other words… tis far better to blog naked, in the dark.  That way, when you think no one is reading… you can really speak your mind and blog from the heart.

Spend too much time “blogging” from your head makes blogging scary… difficult…. and not fun.  When you’re blogging “from your head” you end up viewing posting to your blog in a similar vein to working up the courage to go streaking across the field of the Super Bowl during the first quarter.  Turn off the television cameras and all the lights and it’s a MUCH easier proposition!

Instead… just post to your blog.  The more you blog, the sooner you’ll find your “blog’s voice“.