Successful Blog

What I Learned from an Irresistible Billionaire Entrepreneur

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Listening and Learning

When a good heart thoughtfully shares experience, listening comes easily. I know because last week I had the privilege of hearing Clay Mathile tell the story of his life as an entrepreneur. It was a quiet, late morning conversation that included my friends and colleagues, Barry Moltz and Anita Campbell. We were in a small meeting room at Aileron — the $130 million campus that Clay built to pass his success on to others.

“Entrepreneurs can solve almost all the problems we have in this country, in this world,” said Mathile in an interview with CNN Money.

The Iams Vision and Focus

What Clay talked about while we were with him was the vision and the focus that built the Iams Corporation. His vision was clearly stated in a story.

Clay was born in the poorest times of American history, in one of Ohio’s poorest cities. From the time he was 6 he wanted to own his own company. He wanted that company to be the best at what it did and to provide jobs. In 1970, when Clay was considering a job for Iams, the little known pet food brand was having difficulties. While thinking about the opportunity, a thirty-something Clay visited a relative at nearby farm shared some time and left a bag of the dog food for the man’s farm dog. (Anyone who’s seen a farm dog knows that’s a dog luxury!) A few weeks later when the Iams decision was pending, Clay returned to the farm to have another conversation. The dog that ran out of the house was so remarkably changed that Clay didn’t recognize him! This dog had a beautiful, bright eyes and high energy!

Clay’s thought was “This is what people want for the pets they love!” His decision was made. The change in that dog became the vision that turned around a company. Mathile joined Iams in 1970, helped turn it around and took complete ownership of it in 1982. In August of 1999, Clay sold Iams to Proctor and Gamble for $2.3 billion.

The rest of the Iams story includes years of learning.

“It took me 5 years to realize that I was selling a dog food that dogs wouldn’t eat in a package that consumers wouldn’t buy,” Clay said in humility of someone who loves learning. “Then it took me another 5 years to fix the problem.”

But throughout our extended conversation, the themes of learning, vision, and focus were inside every answer to every question.

  • We stayed focused on our mission to be the most recognized provider of dog and cat nutrition.
  • We realized that dogs and cats were our customers and that our employees needed to be people who loved dogs and cats as much as the people who buy our products.
  • We trained every person and had dieticians in every region.
  • Pictures of dogs and cats were everywhere throughout the company — on desks, on walls.

It was clear that everyone shared the same vision … of delivering great pet nutrition to make a difference.

Aileron

Now, Clay has put his money to investing in other people — entrepreneurs who are building their own businesses. The beautiful campus, Aileron, and fabulous team who run it have the vision and the focus to be the ultimate individualized professional management resource for small business owners. I’m paraphrasing how Clay Mathile said it, but his words so reminded me of my dad that I can’t help but think I got the meaning …

There is no higher philanthropy than being an entrepreneur, because entrepreneurs create jobs for other people.

The wisdom of one man changed me in one short meeting. I’m grateful for the contribution I was able to make to the Course for Presidents at Aileron.org in June.

I look forward to going back soon.

Clay Mathile is irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

3 Mistakes and 3 Essentials of Blog Marketing

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By Pawel Reszka

Still think blogging is the exclusive territory of hipsters and chronic over-sharers? Think again! Blogging is a money-making powerhouse – that is, assuming you monetize your blog correctly in the first place. To understand the right ways – and the wrong ways – to monetize your blog, let’s look at some of the most common mistakes beginning bloggers make when it comes to cashing in.

Mistake #1 – Not Investing Time in Your Blog

First of all, let’s get one thing straight. Blogging isn’t an “if you build it, they will come,” type of game. According to BlogPulse, there were nearly 156 million blogs online at the beginning of 2011 and that number continues to grow every day. Simply registering a domain name and installing WordPress isn’t enough to attract visitors and guarantee sales in this competitive marketplace.

So although this first mistake doesn’t specifically relate to the monetization models you implement on your blog, it’s worth remembering that it doesn’t matter how great your advertising strategy is if you don’t have any traffic coming to your site. Whether you decide to pursue guest blogging, blog commenting or a number of other traffic generation strategies, keep in mind that investing time in growing your blog and your audience is the first key to effective monetization.

Mistake #2 – Poorly Chosen Advertising Models

Of course, getting visitors to your site won’t guarantee sales – to do that, you need to choose the most effective monetization models for your blog.

One of the biggest mistakes new bloggers make is simply tossing up a few Adsense blocks and assuming that counts as a monetization strategy. It’s not that Adsense won’t earn you money, as there are certainly internet marketers out there earning six figures through this program. It’s that Adsense, in general, is the lowest possible form of income for most blogs. Here’s why…

First of all, it’s incredibly difficult to make Adsense ads look like they’re a part of your site and not just some tacky blocks of advertising scamming up your pages. Very few people manage to achieve this integration in a subtle, sophisticated way – for most bloggers, Adsense ads are always going to look like, well, ads. This detracts from your blog’s message and discourages people from returning to your site in the future.

Even more importantly, Adsense represents one of the lowest possible payouts in the blog monetization worlds. Assuming someone clicks through on one of your ads, you earn a few pennies – maybe a dollar or two, if you’re lucky. But then you’ve lost that visitor for good. There’s no way you can convert that visitor into a long-term, high-value customer since they’ve left your blog through the Adsense link. For these reasons, most bloggers would be well-advised to steer clear of Adsense entirely!

Simply placing affiliate banners indiscriminately throughout your site isn’t much more effective. If you decide to promote affiliate products, they should be integrated into your site in a holistic way. Maybe you recommend a particular product as a part of a tutorial, or maybe you demonstrate using a particular affiliate product in a video. By providing context for the sale, your visitor will be much more likely to purchase than if you simply paste a banner into the sidebar of your site.

Mistake #3 – Failing to Capture Visitors

But no matter how well you integrate affiliate promotions into your blog, they still aren’t the strongest way to monetize your site.

This is because Adsense ads and affiliate banners represent a “one off” relationship with your readers, where you’re essentially limiting the potential of each visitor to the value of one sale. For example, if you use Adsense banners on your site, you’re hoping to generate one clickthrough per visitor; or, if you place random affiliate advertisements throughout your blog, you’re hoping to generate one sale per person.

The secret to earning money through blogging is that the potential value of each visitor can be much, much higher if you take the time to set up your site as a complete sales funnel.

Rather than copy and paste the technical definitions of “sales funnel” and “back-end sales,” let me give you an example…

A visitor stops by your blog and likes what he sees. Your writing style is good and your free content is valuable, so he decides to subscribe to your email list. As a bonus, he receives a free report that you delivered as an incentive to sign up. Inside this bonus is an affiliate link or a sales message for your product or service, which results in the first sale for you.

But that isn’t the end of your relationship with this visitor. Because he’s now a part of your email list, he receives regular notifications about your newest blog posts, some of which promote other affiliate products or your own products/services.

He’s also notified whenever you launch a new product or service, and because you know he likes your work, he’s much more likely to buy your latest promotion (and their related upsells) than a cold lead who’s visiting your blog for the first time. Over time, this relationship can result in hundreds or thousands of dollars of product purchases and upsells.

Sure beats earning a few cents off of an Adsense clickthrough, doesn’t it?!

Of course, it’s one thing to say that a well-built sales funnel is the key to monetizing a blog correctly –it’s another thing entirely to actually do it! So let’s take a look at the most important features of a back-end sales funnel.

Sales Funnel Essential #1 – Email List

Although it’s possible to set up a simple funnel without an email list (in most cases, the sale of a product leads to one or more “one time offers” for higher priced products or services), maintaining a list of potential buyers and communicating with them regularly makes it easier to convert one-time blog visitors into buyers and to generate repeat sales from these customers.

Sales Funnel Essential #2 – Your Own Product

Generating affiliate sales can be a good way to earn money off your blog, but having your own product (whether that’s an ebook, video training course or coaching program) is where the real money lies. Yes, there are some greater administrative demands compared with simply promoting affiliate programs, but ultimately, you’ll earn more when you control the distribution of your product versus sending your visitors to someone else’s sales funnel.

Plus, considering how easy it is to outsource writing, video editing and other forms of product creation these days, there’s no excuse not to have your own product!

Sales Funnel Essential #3 – An Upsell

Once you’ve convinced someone to purchase your product, don’t drop the ball by ending the transaction there. You know that the buyer is interested in your products or services, so why not encourage them to spend more with a well-chosen, high-quality upsell?

If you sell an info product, consider offering a “premium” version of your product with more resources and tools. Or, if you sell a service, offer a package deal or complementary service to avoid leaving money on the table.

By taking the time to correctly build out your sales funnel, you ensure that the time you’ve invested into your blog hasn’t gone to waste. Just remember – you don’t have to implement all of these elements at once. You can add them over time, but the faster you complete your funnel, the faster you’ll start making more sales!

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Pawel Reszka is an internet marketer who runs Affhelper.com, a blog where he shares some valuable tips about affiliate marketing and making money online. Check out his site for super affiliate techniques and strategies.

Thanks, Pawel. Useful information on affiliate marketing is always valuable.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

How To Connect with Your Customers Where They Already Are

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A Guest Post by
Nisha Sandhu

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If you have an e-commerce business, many of the consumers who visit your website, regardless of the demographics, are participating in social media networks and sharing information on the internet. This means that the possibilities for marketing your products and services online are virtually endless, and there is a vast array of social networking channels for you to leverage, including YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

With e-commerce, the most important factor in marketing via social media is selecting the best channels to reach potential customers. You can discover where your target audience likes to congregate by doing the following:

  • Polling those who visit your website or asking them to complete a formal survey to learn more about them.
  • Using Trackur, Social Mention or a similar free tool to get the information you need.
  • Leveraging relevant user information, which can be easily done with Facebook.
  • Studying the job postings, back links, keyword rankings and special announcements regularly to determine what they are doing in regard to e-commerce.

You should also conduct a “competitive audit” of your most serious competitors. Include the social networking sites where they participate, study the content they use, the number of hits they receive on every site, and the methods they employ to promote their products, services and special events on social networking sites.

In order to grow your business regardless of the social channels you use, attract consumers by offering them something they will never find anywhere else, such as promoting a contest. This should drive more traffic to your website and add to the number of your Facebook fans as well, if that applies in your case. You should also consider offering some incentive to those who follow you via social media, such as a discount coupon or free shipping, provide advance notice of a new product that will soon be available, or invite your customers to learn more “about us.”

  • Along with that, you might want to take the following steps as part of your online marketing strategy:
  • Share interesting news stories or messages that you gather from external sources.
  • Add a blog to your website and send the content to your e-commerce marketing accounts.
  • Ask for feedback from those who visit your website.
  • Include relevant videos and pictures to create interest in your company.
  • Make it easy for customers to buy the products you highlight by adding a link to the order page.

These are just a few ways to connect with customers where they already are.

Have you tried others?

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Nisha Sandhu is an Editor at merchantaccountforum.com, where she researches and writes online business advice for new and growing businesses.

Thank you, Nisha!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

What Is the Best True Story You Could Tell about You?

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Following or Finding a Path 2

2016 GeniusShared Read from Liz StraussLeaders Choose the Stories They Live

As we grow up, we hear stories about ourselves: how we learned to walk, how we learned to talk, how we behaved, how we treated our siblings and friends. The stories predate the ability of our brains to remember the events. So we rely on the people telling them.

In incremental ways that grow larger over time, the stories people tell and the stories we tell ourselves become the definition of the person we see in the mirror. And when we’re in doubt about who that is, we’ve learned to look outside — to the stories — to describe the person we are inside. … if we just listen, pay attention long enough, the people and the stories will tell us who we are and why we’re here.

How many stories in your head are told from someone else’s point of view?
How many stories in your head are told by a weaker, smaller, less experienced version of you?
How many stories in your head are untrue?

Leaders live up to their best truth.
Leaders choose which stories we live.

What Is the Best True Story You Could Tell about You?

Leadership is taking responsibility for who we are now and who we will be. If we want to know our uniqueness and own it, we have to evaluate the stories we’ve been living and believing to decide what we know is true. We need to think deeply on the stories we’ve been telling about ourselves.

Leaders know their uniqueness and own it. We don’t need to invent a new tale. We need to recognize the true story of who we are as the leader we’ve decided to be.

Our cells are genetically programmed to do some things better than others. Our brain needs to pay attention to what our cells know. We can see the answers throughout our history and in our experience. Here’s how to do that …

  • Collect the stories about yourself — true stories of your life.
  • Identify and share the stories that make you stronger. You’ll know them because you like what they say about you.
  • Stop telling and believing in the stories that hold you back. File them as historically true but irrelevant.
  • Recognize your values by seeing them in the true stories of your life you choose.
  • Use your values to keep your true story true and valuable for everyone you serve.

Reflect on the stories you tell about yourself and decide which are those that truthfully represent the best value and values in you. Decide which stories truly define you and which ones can be left behind as now meaningless. Claim the true story that is your uniqueness, your skills and your abilities, your image, your traits, and your potential.

When you do that, you’ll take command of who you are now. That’s when you’ll begin to see your fit and purpose — how you individually meet a need or solve a problem in a way that no other person can. You’ll attract people who share those values. You’ll find it easier to talk about what you do, because you’ll know that your life stands a proof.

You’re the only one qualified to identify your true story — you are the person who has been living it every minute of it. Take the idea seriously. Listen to what you know about yourself.

What is the best true story you could tell about you?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Related articles:
The Only One
Business, Blogs, and Niche-Brand Marketing

Guess What? Customers Really DO Respond to Online Ads

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A Guest Post by
Diana Pohly

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If you’ve been getting new customers by running online ads, here’s some good news for you. New research from Google (http://www.youtube.com/v/Xpay_ckRpIU?hl=en&fs=1) has shown that the online ads you place on websites really do work. In fact, they work better than most people imagined. You can see it in this YouTube video.

For its test, Google saturated specific test market areas with online ads for specific company products, then measured consumers buying in those regions against buying elsewhere. And the ads worked. Here are some highlights:

  • Online ads attract customers and sell more. In the Google study, a national retailer ran online ads in 59 target markets for products in one product category and saw a 2 percent increase in sales in that category, compared to sales in other markets where no ads were run.
  • Online ads create a “halo effect.” Companies that ran online ads achieved an across-the-board increase in spending for a range of products, not only for the products that they advertised online.
  • Online coupons deliver results too. Coupons improved sales 2.5% for the products they promoted and thanks to that “halo effect,” resulted in a 1.6% increase for all product sales.
  • Online advertising offers a significant return on investment. Companies that participated in the test earned as much as a $10.00 return for every dollar they spent advertising online.
  • Offer something that is attractive, desirable, and free in exchange for contact information. For example, let visitors enter their email addresses to get a discount coupon for one of your products, a free sample, a chance to win an iPad, a free yoga lesson in your studio, or a complimentary technology training session from one of your consultants. Be generous! Remember, you may never have a chance to win that customer again.

So let’s say that you are running those online ads and people are visiting your website to either buy or investigate.
How will you make the most of the fact that they are there?

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Diana Pohly is with StepbyStepMarketing and she’s happy to offer you high-performing strategy recommended in this free downloadable report

Thanks, Diana!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Hunter S. Thompson and Which Is Easier: Learning the Tools or Leading the Team

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Writing and Leadership

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A couple of weeks ago in a meeting with Tim Sanders, (@SandersSays) Carol Roth (@CarolJSRoth) and Mark Carter (@MJCarter), Tim brought up a writer I hadn’t thought about in the longest while — Hunter S. Thompson, the King of Gonzo Journalism.

Hunter S. Thompson
Hunter S. Thompson, Miami Book Fair, 1988

Hunter S Thompson has been haunting me since.
In 2005, I wrote about the night my husband and I watch a television rerun of an interview with Hunter S. Thompson. . . .

It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. That someone says something so profound. So true. That it’s your own truth. Even though you’ve never put the words together, you’ve known their meaning deeply for what seems all of your life. I can’t tell you anything about the interview with Mr. Thompson, except one question and his answer.

The interviewer, who sat off camera, asked the reporter/writer which he thought was easier — writing or researching?Thompson, sitting on the back porch in what was his work area and speaking in a writer’s frugality with words, said without hesitation, “Researching is much easier, because no one can help you write.”

I’ve spent years working with young writers. I could coach them. I could say what wasn’t working. I could make suggestions on how to approach the problem. But at the end of the day, I couldn’t help them write. I had to stand back and watch them struggle.

A writer is a batter standing at home plate waiting for the pitch, a tennis player waiting for serve to come over the net. A coach can watch and report, but the coach can’t hit the ball. Comments marked in whatever color I choose are meaningless if a writer can’t interpret or internalize them. I can suggest technique, but I can’t teach heart. I can’t fix the writing. If I do, I become the writer.

It takes heart, soul, intuition, understanding, and flexibility to be a writer. It takes practice, persistence, and patience. It takes trust. It takes an artistic ability to blend structure with expression in the way a composer brings notes together to move people to feeling. It takes tears. Writing is hearing the music of the language and the nuance of how words come together to make meaning. Writing is talent teamed with trial and error. Writing is more than putting words on paper. It is experience and problem solving. It takes life to make a writer.

I wonder at how we have the same experience with so many things, yet we reach a faulty conclusion about writing. We drew in school, yet few of us say we are artists. We played ball, yet few of us say we are athletes. We did mathematics, yet few of us say we are mathematicians. Still so many of us say we are writers.

It’s no wonder that I am so aware of my differences.

I know that no one can help me write.

No one else can be the writer I am.

As I sit here today, reflecting on this, I realize that precisely same is true of leadership.

It takes heart, soul, intuition, understanding, and flexibility to be a leader. It takes practice, persistence, and patience. It takes takes trust. It takes an artistic ability to blend competence with compassion in the way a composer brings notes together to move people to feeling. It takes years.

Leadership is hearing the music of work that reaches into people’s hearts and the nuance of work that reaches out to make meaning in the world. Leadership is talent teamed with trial and error. Leadership is more than pulling people together. It is experience and problem solving. It takes life to make a leader.

I keep thinking that Hunter S. Thompson were asked which he thought was easier learning the tools or leading the team, he might have said,

“Learning the tools is much easier, because no one can help you lead.”

Do you see what that means?
No one else can be the leader you can be.

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!