Are you making the kind of money with your digital marketing endeavors and strategies that you thought you would be making?
Are you putting in time and effort, but nothing seems to work?
Are you following your online marketing success blueprint faithfully and still not getting any meaningful results?
Have you tried all sorts of gimmicks and software in the past?
If any of the above applies to you, you are hardly alone. Most digital marketers face these issues at one time or other. The sad reality of online marketing is the vast majority of marketers make very little money. In fact, 20% of marketers make up 80% of the total income of all online marketers. That means if you’re in the 80% you have to settle for leftovers and fight for your tiny slice of the online income pie.
The bad news is you can tweak almost all of your operations and still end up broke. This is exactly what many marketers do. They buy all sorts of products and even hire consultants and “coaches”. Some even spend thousands of dollars on so-called gurus. What do they get for all those hard-earned dollars? Well; most only manage to improve their operations marginally.
The good news is you don’t have to resign yourself to barely scraping by. You only need to apply one technique that will take your online business operations and results to a whole new level.
Of course, as with all things in life, there’s a catch. And the catch in this situation is the same catch as you’ll find with any worthwhile endeavor… you have to put in the work and take action.
Don't Let Your Mindset Hold You Back From Success
Keep your mind open to the discussion outlined below. If you let your imagination and creativity, take over, you can let this technique work wonders for you. However, if you are closed-minded, or you think you already have things figured out; well, nothing is going to work for you.
You must change your mindset. If you think that you have everything figured out, that’s going to hold you back. Seriously. Why? Obviously, you don’t have it all figured out because if you did, you wouldn’t be reading this book and needing help with making more money online.
Traffic for Traffic's Sake is a Waste of Time... and Money
Another mindset you need to ditch is the ‘magic traffic’ mindset. Too many marketers suffer from this.
They think they only need to use a tool or use a special traffic generation technique to pump a huge amount of traffic to a landing page or an affiliate link and the job is done.
I’m sorry to break this to you, but if this is how you view online marketing; you are wasting your time. That is nothing but brute force conversion.
The best that brute force techniques will give you is a few cents on the dollar. In fact, you are leaving a lot of money on the table or simply wasting time and money by attacking your conversion problems exclusively through traffic.
Traffic is Not the Problem; Your Conversion Rate Is
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t get it to drink. You can dump all the traffic in the world to a landing page or a series of content pages, but if you don’t know what you’re doing, you’re not going to convert those people.
Simply attracting traffic is not enough. This is a crucial insight you should wrap your mind around to finally make headway in your conversion goals. Otherwise, you would be put in a ridiculous situation of pumping a huge amount of time and money into traffic generation and having very little to show for it.
Conversion is Not a Last Minute Issue
Now that I’ve opened your mind to the concept of conversion; you must understand that conversion is not this last minute concept you scramble to adopt after you’ve put up your website, generated your traffic, and otherwise did everything else.
If you are serious about making money online, conversion should be your top priority. It is not a last minute detail. In fact, you should build your whole online presence around the concept of conversion. This may seem like you’re putting the cart before the horse, but if you don’t do this, you’re not going to make as much money as you deserve to be making.
Conversion is all about turning traffic into sales, email leads, zip code entries, or software downloads. In short, conversion is all about turning website traffic into activities that put dollars in your pocket. Conversion is not going to happen if you view it as the last stage in your online promotion process. Instead, it should be the guiding force of your online activities.
Don't Focus on Conversion as the Last Stage of Web Development
If the need for conversion only dawns on you after you have finished your site, you’re headed in the wrong direction. This is precisely how most marketers do it. They pick a niche, create content, drive traffic, and then when they realize they’re not making money; they focus on conversion. At that stage, it’s too little, too late. You must focus first on engineering conversion into your content and traffic funnel.
Too many marketers simply assume that if they get their content right and their traffic flowing properly, conversion will automatically happen. In many cases, they think that conversion will happen at the last minute. Not surprising, most of these marketers end up completely blindsided when they’re unable to turn their dreams of financial freedom into a reality.
Engineer Conversion into Your Content and Sales Funnel
The first truly fundamental lesson you need to learn as you try to make money online is the importance of conversion. You must build your online business from the ground up, with conversion as your first priority.
The best way to do this is to implement the discussion outlined below.
Understand the Know-Like-Trust Process
This is the heart and soul of online conversion. If you don’t know how the know-like-trust process works, you are simply taking shots in the dark. Your strategy for making money online is simply throwing the dice and hoping to get lucky. Some months you may make a few bucks. Most of the time, you may be struggling to pay your bills. That is not a recipe for success. Unfortunately, this is precisely the kind of conversion “strategy” too many online marketers use.
You Have to be Systematic and Methodical Regarding Conversion
Knowing the know-like-trust process code is your secret to skyrocketing your conversion rates.
How does the know-like-trust process work? For somebody to buy something from you online, they must first trust you. Pretty straightforward, right? I mean, this is how it works in the offline world. Who would you rather buy from? A friend who recommends a product to you, or some random stranger that hits you up off the street. It’s a no-brainer.
The same process applies online. People buy and take recommendations from people they trust. However, getting people to trust you online follows a specific process.
For people to trust you, they must first like you. In turn, for people to like you, they must first feel they know you. In other words, you can’t just go straight from know all the way to trust. It doesn’t work that way. You must go through a step-by-step process: know-like-trust.
The good news is that conversion speed depends on the prospect. Some people only need to look at a particularly engaging and informative piece of content for them to feel they know you enough to like your brand. They consume the content some more, and then they develop enough trust for them to pull the trigger and buy things from you or click on an ad or enter their email address. For other people, the process takes longer. In some cases, they must go back to your website or read more of your emails for them to finally commit.
Regardless of the speed of conversion, it can only happen on a predictable, systematic, and methodical level if you engineer the know-like-trust process into your content and sales funnel.
This is extremely important to understand. Many marketers think that they only need to produce tons of content and people will eventually ‘warm up’ to their brand or value proposition.
Wrong!
Great content and great marketing materials are like sharks: either they are pushing your brand forward or your brand is dying. There is no middle ground. Your content must always work to build up your brand’s overall credibility and trustworthiness.
The more your content does this, the more potent your conversion process will be. Each piece of content shouldn’t just be drifting out there independent of each other. They should support each other.
At the very least, your content should filter the visitor into the proper stage. Great content filters visitors into know, like, or trust stage. Effective content would then link to the specific stage the person is in so that the visitor gets a guidance to go to the proper content that would convert that person.
You have to remember that when people enter a keyword into a search engine, they have different intents. Some people are just looking for information. They’re not out to buy. They’re just trying to understand a particular piece of information. Other people already have a preference, but they’re looking to find a brand they can trust. Other people already trust a brand and just need that push for them to pull the trigger and make a purchase or enter their email or zip code.
As powerful as the Know-Like-Trust Process Seems, It's Not Enough
Make no mistake about it, adopting this technique will help you make more money. However, to turbocharge your ability to generate dollars online on a predictable basis, you have to include one secret ingredient. This secret ingredient is what separates professional marketers’ materials from amateurs.
The secret ingredient also separates truly successful online marketers from those who sometimes get lucky with conversions, and especially those who are completely broke.
What is this secret ingredient? Keep reading.
The Secret Ingredient? Stories!
Effective conversion processes tell stories. Stories are what make us humans. We make sense of the world based on stories. We approach new ideas based on whether they fit the story that we already have in our minds.
Knowing this, you can include story elements in your content and marketing strategy that will make your brand less suspicious and more likeable. You must understand that there’s so much content being produced every single day. People are trained to constantly filter out information. Either that information fits the story they have in their head or phrased in such a way that they can incorporate it as a story, or they simply resist it or ignore it. This is the reality that your content and marketing messages must work with. By incorporating stories into your content, they are less threatening and easier to like.
Once you get enough of your stories into the minds of your prospects, you become more trustworthy by comparison. Why? Your competitors aren’t making it that far. Since people trust based primarily on comparison, your content and brand stand out. By incorporating stories into your content and marketing strategies, stories can help you become more trustworthy.
The Problem with Marketing Storytelling
At this point, you’re probably excited about using stories with your marketing and content strategies. Congratulations! You have made serious progress. Seriously. You are aware of a secret that eludes over 90% of other marketers. They simply don’t understand the power of storytelling when it comes to online marketing.
With that said, you still have a big problem. Simply understanding that storytelling is important is not enough to solve all your problems. While your conversion is going to improve, it’s not going to take you where you need to go. You need to achieve a predictable level of conversion and a truly efficient conversion rate.
Simply Throwing Random Stories Into Your Marketing and Content Materials Do Nothing
How do you know you’re using the right stories? How do you know you’re sending off the right signals? How do you know that your stories are directing people where you need them to go? You might be doing more harm to your conversion process by telling the right story at the wrong time. Similarly, you might be dropping the ball and be completely clueless about it because you’re telling the wrong story at the right time.
Simply adopting a story-telling approach is not going to cut it. A random and chaotic approach rarely works. This is like taking shots in the dark. You know you’re in the right area, but simply making random shots is not going to get you where you need to go. You’re too dependent on luck at this point.
You Need The Right Strategy To Explode Your Marketing Storytelling Power
The good news is that we have been researching and implementing marketing story-telling techniques for years. We’ve seen what works and exactly what fails. We understand the proper context and proper messaging signals that successful marketers send and unsuccessful marketers completely ignore. If you want to achieve high conversion rates and increase the predictability of your online income, you need to tell stories the right way at the right time.
To help you get started the right way, we’ve written a massive (it’s over 10,000 words) mega article on storytelling as a marketing powerhouse. We go into how you can use it to grow your email list, how to assemble the story correctly, and how to position it strategically in your funnels.
There are many different story-telling options out there as well as different implementation strategies, and we tried to cover the ones you should care about.
One thing is for sure, simply taking shots in the dark, is not going to cut it. You need to have a systematic and methodical way of weaving storytelling into your content and marketing initiatives – to maximize your success.
Did I forget to mention the most important thing about this storytelling content that we spent weeks creating for you? It’s free! No opt-in. No download. Just click on this link and read it all right now.
