Who am I??? Guys, I fell down and hit my head on the nightstand and I woke up with no knowledge of who I am and what I’m all about…
The first thing I did was sit down and log into my computer, and I discovered that I had 50 books. There was a sticky note on my computer that said, “Make it rain, or else.”
And suddenly I had to figure out how to make money from all these books!!!!
OK, I’m being facetious. But Amnesia Mode has officially begun.
I’m approaching marketing with fresh eyes, as if I know nothing. What will I learn, and can I implement some strategies that will improve my income as we end the year?
Fair warning that I see marketing differently than most. For me, marketing is very much about small improvements that add up over time instead of giant bursts. In other words, I’m quite conservative when it comes to marketing compared to the type of content I choose to write.
First things first, my first strategy is getting better at copywriting. I can’t think of a skill that correlates more with income, and frankly, I’d give myself a D in my copywriting abilities. I have flashes of brilliance here and there, but I need to learn to be more automatic with my copywriting.
I am rereading all the books on my Kindle related to copywriting, followed by a copywriting course that I bought earlier in the year but haven’t taken yet. If I improve my copywriting skills just by 1% every day between now and January 15, that’s a 75% increase in my copywriting abilities. That means better Amazon Ads, better book descriptions, better email newsletters, and better calls to action in general. As I look at everything in the marketing arena I can improve on, this is the biggest bang for my buck.
Second biggest bang is Amazon Ads, but that’s a short-term play.
LESSON LEARNED TODAY: Make sure your squeeze pages and email confirmation pages are timeless.
I happened to be reading an old copywriting book. It recommended visiting the author’s website for a free bonus. I clicked on it, but the website was super outdated…You could tell the author had moved on to other things. Yet, if the copy was good enough to get me to click through to the website, then the person probably had a steady stream of people visiting the website on a regular basis. How many people clicked away because the page looked old?
And then I asked myself: hmm…did the old Michael have outdated landing pages and squeeze pages? Am I committing the same sin?
LESSON EXECUTED:
I reviewed my squeeze and confirmation pages on both authorlevelup.com and michaellaronn.com just to see how they’d aged. Surprisingly, they all looked good. I made a minor sentence tweak here and there, and that should be good enough to last me a few more years. All the pages look like they were made yesterday, though the photos themselves are dated (but the subscriber would never know that).
This will ensure that I don’t give off “he doesn’t do this anymore” vibes when readers in my books or viewers from my YouTube channel click on my lead magnets several years into the future.
Also, I discovered that something was afoul with my Google Analytics dashboard. No idea how to fix it other than getting a new website in the future. It is what it is—I don’t pay much attention to my website metrics, anyway. That’s not likely to change with Amnesia Mode—99% of it is out of my control, and my analytics on YouTube are far more telling. But it does hamstring me with making a few data-driven decisions here and there.
MARKETING PARKING LOT (this will be where I capture items that I should do at sometime throughout Amnesia Mode. I’ll rank them here by their ROI—in other words, which ones will add the most value to my marketing and make me more money).
- Clean up old lead magnet links and redirect them. ROI: Could add a few more subscribers to my list per year.
- Zero in on any broken links and redirect them. ROI: Improves user experience on my website.
