04 November 2010 ~ 11 Comments

The First Foolish Success – FA021

Audio

This episode is loaded with valuable information. Inside the audio, you’ll hear us talk about:

  • Strategies for doing a product launch
  • How to increase conversions on your website
  • Some strategy examples from Amazon.com
  • How to create dual readership paths
  • More things you can learn from Izzy’s mistakes

This one is fun, and hopefully useful. Enjoy!

You can also right-click here to save the audio file.

[edit: Tim meant to say FTC and here are the guidelines for testimonials: http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm ]

  • http://www.musicisyoursoulfood.com Christian Jones

    Awesome guys, what an epic adventure that was ,…

    Izzy and Tim, this has made, for me, the 21st episode of Foolish Adventure, I have been on, and what a ride it was, i’m sure at one stage i started seeing colours, I’ll try and paint the picture for you here.

    I was really pleased to hear you started checking out web sites,….

    ….., maybe you could incorporate on these comments, some type of progress indicator.

    Although I’m only on about a 2, I was inspired by Shannons number 7 and look forward to getting there, and even following his own successes. You guys must be proud.

    The Zen type of ” Sentence Fragmentation ” is so well stated,….

    ….., I tend to like using dots and spaces, because it kind of makes me feel cool knowing i’m breaking all the rules of grammar I learnt in school,..

    ….Hey I’m pretty sure theirs a song in that last line…..

    Anyway this is my ” Nice Guy ” testimonial to you guys, as the two little voices inside my head, spurring me on to flip the bird at traditional ideals, and just get down and lazy with it. I am so not embarrassed or ashamed to recommend you,….

    …., in fact i am very proud to be part of it.

    Rock on gentlemen,… go forth and change the world.

  • http://www.thewoodhaven.co.uk HavenTom

    Shannon!! Congrats man! As a fan of WTO and your blog, I am so glad your are doing this. Wish you all the luck ;)

  • Thewoodwhisperer

    Congrats to Shannon and Izzy/Tim as well. Very cool.

    I thought you might find this funny. I sent out an email to my membership yesterday with a regular update, and after listening to you guys discuss the whole “hey everyone” thing, I decided to personalize it with the first name of the recipient. Its easy enough to do in aMember so why not, right? Well, I received exactly one piece of feedback, and it was from someone telling me they find personalized mass emails to be “creepy”, lol. So I guess that brings up a good point. Could the personalization actually work against you in some way? If your members are fairly internet savvy, of course they will know that you aren’t speaking to them directly. So could this be interpreted as disingenuous by some? Hence this one member’s “creepy” comment. I suppose in some peoples’ opinions, you should act like you are addressing a group when you are in fact, addressing a group. Otherwise its like getting in front of a group of people for a presentation, and starting by saying, “Hello John. Today we are going to talk about….”.

    I certainly don’t know the answer. Just thinking out loud. Curious what your thoughts are on this.

  • http://FoolishAdventure.com Tim Conley

    The best answer is to test especially when you are selling something. Though you won’t have to test too much since personalized messages have been shown to sell better–offline and online. You won’t please everyone and you shouldn’t even try. If I get a few unsubscribes, but I have a higher conversion rate I’m going to stick with the higher converting message. Only when unsubs jump up do I know my message is off.

    If your complainer hasn’t opted out, you can exclude him from the main list and send him a message that says Hey everyone to make him feel better.

    To address your metaphor, email is nothing like getting in front of a group to speak. Email is being read by one person not by a group. You do want to make sure your email message is personal and not just a newsletter. Though I have known of several newsletters that did well with personalization by saying, Hey John, here is your newsletter.

    But again, test.

  • http://FoolishAdventure.com Tim Conley

    Type your reply…This fits with what I was saying about email, but in a broader business sense. From Seth Godin on Alienating 2%: http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d83451b31569e2013488b45b30970c

  • http://twitter.com/iChris Chris Enns

    Hey guys, just listening to this episode and had a comment about one thing you mentioned.

    You talked about how having a “you signed up for this email newsletter at…. ” is a bad idea – which I don’t disagree with – but I know from working with both Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor (two email newsletter services) that they require some form of identification of how the person got on the list in order to comply with CAN-SPAM regulations

    Does AMember not require this type of thing or are there, shall we say, creative ways around this?

    Thanks! Love all the episodes you guys have put out. Definitely inspiring me!

    Chris

  • http://www.izzyvideo.com IzzyVideo

    Hi Chris,

    I use Aweber for email. Maybe it’s because subscribers have to double
    opt-in, but Aweber simply puts an unsubscribe link at the bottom of each
    email. Makes it easy for someone to get off the list.

    My point was that I definitely wouldn’t want to *start* an email with
    instructions on how to unsubscribe. I don’t think there’s a rule anywhere
    that says it has to be at the top of an email. That would meant that all the
    Apple emails I receive are breaking the rules too… :-)

    Thanks for listening!

    All the best,

    Izzy

  • http://www.bloggingbookshelf.com TristanH

    Another great episode, guys. I’m going to be offering some products pretty soon and I thought the information about the sales pages was great. Thanks!

  • Thewoodwhisperer

    Awesome. Thanks Tim!

  • Anonymous

    What a great episode guys and jeez thanks for all the press and kind words! Great stuff on sales pages, and I am working on some new stuff as we speak to start testing. I did however make some immediate changes thank to this episode and my click through rates to my free demo have increased! Right on.

  • http://www.izzyvideo.com IzzyVideo

    Excellent! That’s great news! :)