What I want to cover today for you is something that struck me when I was talking to a client a day or so ago. Now, I love this client dearly, but I think he would be the first person to admit that he’s extremely disorganised.
Our calls are often taken up by me struggling to make sense of his myriad of businesses, his myriad of websites; the fact that he’s constantly using different outsourcers (when he does use them), so none of the work is followed in a consistent way. His desktop’s a nightmare *shudder* but as I said, I really like this client and I thoroughly enjoy working with him, but I could not cope with that degree of disorganisation.
Today, we started our call with him describing his progress and he said, “I’ve been buying traffic but I don’t know if it’s working…”
Getting The Big Picture, The Plan, The Vision
Hold on, let’s just go back a bit. One of the first things I want to say is, he’s a very talented guy and he’s got quite a few products. He’s got a lot of authority. And he should be making more money than he is. The first few sessions we had together were all spent by me trying to understand how his different activities fitted together, trying to make some sort of coherent concrete plan so that I could get my head straight about how it all fitted together and where the quick money was.
Looking At Things As Your Customer Sees Them
It was often the most painful process of trying to go, “Okay, someone arrives on this website and they click on this, what do they see next? Where are they going? What are they opting-in for? What are they sold next, if anything?” He has so much stuff set up. He had autoresponders, he had membership sites, he had different product offerings in different niches, and he had different websites – some linking to each other but some not. He doesn’t use WordPress, or he didn’t until I got my hands on him. He’s starting to use WordPress now. So, all of his sales pages and everything were HTML-orientated. A lot of them were copied from each other, so a new sales page might have old Google Optimiser code on it or Google Analytics code.
So on this call, we were talking about the fact that he was buying traffic, which is a step in the right direction for him because he was struggling to generate organic traffic from just one website because he can’t concentrate on just one. He’s got a day job as well, so it’s not like he’s got a lot of spare time to work on this stuff. He was struggling to concentrate on any one project, and as a consequence, he was struggling to generate traffic because he wasn’t focused enough. We looked at buying traffic. He tried out Adwords, he tried out Facebook advertising. But it wasn’t generating traffic at the level that we could get it to the point where someone might actually buy something.
I showed him a way to get paid targeted traffic and so we moved one step closer to success, because without traffic you can’t test…
Starting To Get Traffic, Then You Can Track Progress
Then what happened once traffic was coming was we decided to focus in more, and we spent more time just trying make sure that each of those elements was working properly, and then I went through it as a customer – with him watching over my shoulder, virtually speaking. He felt that because he had been outsourcing stuff it was getting done right, but I could tell that it wasn’t. So, we went through this painful process of me acting as a customer and showing him what I saw at each stage, and that was a really useful exercise because he saw it from the eyes of a customer.
So if you’re not doing this on your own business, can I strongly recommend you set yourself up an e-mail that you haven’t used before – it can be a Gmail one – and then go and put your e-mail address in on your opt-in. In fact, before you even do that, walk around your site as if you were a stranger. Even I have to do this sometimes because I keep loading things on to my site like pop-up things, slide-up things and slide-in things. You’ve got to go look at your site sometimes as if you were a customer.
Is It Even Possible To Buy Anything From You?
Then put your new name and e-mail into the box and see what happens. See if it’s possible for you to get from being a visitor to your website to actually buying something. What we discovered to my horror and his consternation, shall we say, is that he’s been buying traffic and it’s been opting in, because he went to the same website I told you about, and he’s been getting traffic. He had about 900 clicks from three promotions and he paid about just over $100 for those clicks. They converted at a rather staggering rate of 10% into 90 leads, which he didn’t have before. So that’s about $1 a lead, and it’s really quite good for cold traffic coming to a website to a squeeze page that quite frankly is not very up-to-date looking, but it obviously was hitting the mark because they were opting in at 10%.
I said, “What happens to them when they opt in then?” He said, “Well, I’m not absolutely sure.” I said, “Why don’t we opt in and see?” I thought they’re either going to go to a “thank you” page or they were going to go to the page where they have to register for his membership site to get free the gift, and it turned out you end up on a “thank you” page.
But on the “thank you” page is an odd muddle of free gifts and it’s visually not very easy to puzzle out how to access them, and there’s no offer on there. I said, “So you’re going to give them free gifts but you’re not making any offers.” I would think it will be quite a good idea to offer them the chance to put themselves in danger of buying something from you.” We laid out a nice, simple “thank you” page and I’ve given him the resources to go and outsource the making of that because we’ve got to stop with the old HTML pages.
So the other thing was that he was convinced that he should be seeing the traffic he was generating on Google Analytics. We both remembered doing that last time. So we went to see the page and we looked to the page source, and lo and behold, not only was there no Google Analytics on it, there was Google Optimiser code.
Now if anyone has got Google Optimizer code on any of your pages, you need to go and take it off fast because Google Optimizer as a tool has now been withdrawn. You have to set up a goal in Google Analytics and then you have to set up an experiment in Google Analytics to end up with that goal. That’s how it’s working now with split testing.
Where Is That Bloomin’ Code Coming From?
We couldn’t work out why he had the wrong code on, because we remember distinctly the last time we spoke to each other I had walked him through the process of putting Google Analytics on this page. So I said, “Open up your HTML editor and let’s go and get the code from Google Analytics and let’s put it on. This time I’m going to watch you every stage of the game because I want to make sure you’re doing it right.” Often what we say is, because we are pushed for time… “I’ll do it later after the call.”
Anyway, I suspected that was where it’s going awry. So we found the page and we edited it, and we put the Google Analytics on it; there was no Optimiser code on it. Then he uploaded it.
When you’re on a webinar there’s a few seconds delay – he was often doing stuff before I was telling him to do it. So I said let’s have a look at the refresh page and let’s look at the page code. Blimey, no Google Analytics on it and loads of Optimiser codes. So where is this page coming from? So we went back and we tracked our steps right from the start.
I said, “Don’t click anything until I tell you.” Anyone who works for me for any length of time knows that’s quite a common thing I say, “Don’t click anything until I tell you.”
I can be very strict.
What we found was that he was actually updating different versions of the page because his filing system in his folders was a little bit haphazard, should we say kindly. So every time he went in to do an amendment to this page, he was going to the second folder and not the first folder, and so he was uploading. Then when he went to upload the new page, he was often not loading the old page and not the new page that he just updated.
So we finally puzzled that one out. Actually, we found the version of the page that we had to put the Google Analytics code on and he just has simply uploaded the wrong one, which is heart-breaking really. Three or four weeks of traffic, we could have had a really good idea about how much he was paying for clicks, how many clicks that website was saying it was generating for him and whether Google Analytics bears that out, and he’d be able to tell me whether he’s generating any organic traffic as well. So it was a bit heartbreaking to realise that we’ve lost a lot of info. But we know now.
The Moral Of This Story Is…
The thing I want you to draw from this story is that you’ve got to be organised. Why would you willingly choose to work with your hand tied behind your back and sometimes a ball and chain on your legs too?
Tweet ThisSometimes, when I work with people and I say, “Highlight that there.” I can see that they’re highlighting it but they’re taking in a space afterwards, or they’re taking in the space before, or they’re taking in an inverted comma when they shouldn’t be, or they’re not taking an inverted comma when they should be. So, you’ve really got to be very, very precise. I’ve got to tell you, I am the most chaotic, disorganised person on the planet, but I have had to force myself to get more organised.
What We Are Really Talking About Here Is Tolerations
What we’re talking about here with my client earlier is tolerations. He’s rattling along at the speed of light because he wants to achieve stuff and get stuff done. That’s an admirable thing because he is an action-taker and I love that about him. But the problem is that he’s taking action in a muddle, and you can’t do that online; you just can’t.
You have to be totally and utterly organised, whether it comes down to using RoboForm to keep your log-in pages, usernames and passwords organised, or whether it comes down to your folder system you keep on your desktop.
For example, I always use to bully clients into having a “my websites” folder, and within that there’d be a folder in each of their websites, and within that there’d be a folder for images, and I would insist that the images folder would not have a capital letter – these are just little things but it makes it easier if you set up your websites folder as your server will look online.
My new VA’s is being driven mad by me because I want every title line capitalised as if it was a newspaper headline. I don’t want random capitals on random words in blog posts. I’m really particular about this stuff. I think that comes out of the ADD/OCD thing which is coming out of having to force order onto my own chaos in order to become an internet marketer.
So what we’re talking about with my client is he’s tolerating things. We’re all brought up to be tolerant people but you can’t become successful if you’re tolerant.
But it is a great place to start when you’re feeling frustrated or you feel like you’re not moving quickly enough, or you’re feeling like you’re working in a muddle and you’re overwhelmed. Start by making a list of the tolerations that are sapping your energy. It’s actually what they do – they sap your energy.
I will start with two columns of tolerations. I start with “the tolerations I can do something about” and “the tolerations I can’t do anything about” because the most wonderful thing happens. Once you start getting them out of your head, you start sharing tolerations with the universe or whatever, and even better if you pin them up on the fridge, then people start helping you zap your tolerations – and that’s the expression for it, you have to “zap” them.
You can’t look at the list of tolerations for long without starting to do something about them. One of the things I tolerate in this house is that my bedroom window is just a little bit too high up to be able to clean on the outside with the long-handled window cleaner we bought. I get to the point where I can’t bear it any longer, I’ll write it on my tolerations list, and then my daughter turns up and I make her go up a ladder with me holding the bottom of the ladder so she can do it. That’s a classic case of getting your teens to zap your tolerations for you *grin*. I have finally found a use for them. Actually, my teen is about to train as a beautician so I’ve worked out I’ll get thousands of pounds of free beauty treatments over the next 20 years.
It really is a very powerful process, and I’ll just give you one more example.
People work on computers where they have to swap from browser to browser. I’m in that situation sometimes because at the moment my Chrome is working with RoboForm but RoboForm tool bar isn’t showing which is driving me a little bit bonkers. But if I go to Firefox the driver thing needs updating, so I can’t look at videos on Firefox. So, I’ve got to stop at some point. I’ve got to stop working and I’ve got to stop tolerating these things, and I’ve got to sort them out.
Every single time you butt up against toleration, it’s taking some of your mental concentration, your mental energy away from what you should be doing or thinking about.
photo credit: fortinbras via photo pin cc
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