Unsubscribes: When Letting Go is Good for Business

Small business owners work hard into generating and expanding their email lists because they are perfectly aware that each contact corresponds to a potential customer whose lifetime value will boost the business’ bottom line and revenue growth.

A lot of things go into capturing these leads which makes it tempting to cling to them if they regrettably choose to unsubscribe. That’s acceptable because when you’re a newbie to email marketing, having someone unsubscribe from your list may seem like a personal rejection.

As the number of unsubscribes swells, you might even feel that you’re hitting the bottom completely. You may start asking yourself questions like, “Am I doing something wrong? Why are they getting upset? Why are they unsubscribing?” You might even think of toning down your message.

Truth be told, there’s actually no need to worry about unsubscribes at all.

Every day that a person sends out an email to over half a million people, he could possibly get over 1,000 unsubscribes—that’s incredibly a lot. But 1,000 unsubscribes is just a tiny fraction of the list. In essence, it’s nothing to be worried about.

In fact, not only should you not worry about unsubscribes—you ought to like them instead.

Here’s why.

If someone dislikes your message (or some aspect of your personality, or your offer, etc.), then you surely don’t want them to be on your list from the very start.

If they stay on your list, there is a possibility for that person to either mark your email as spam, which will adversely affect your deliverability, or they won’t open your email, which will lower your open rate. Without you knowing, you may even be shelling out just to have that subscriber on your list despite ignoring your message. So, you’re better off removing them from your list and moving on.

Another thing that factors into unsubscribes concerns your overall messaging. Think of it this way: your marketing ranges from hot to cold – and what’s in the middle is lukewarm.

The most horrible thing to do in your marketing is to be lukewarm—because it’s like you are striving to appeal to everyone. And when you start pleasing all people, your message will eventually turn weak and generic, and you surely wouldn’t want that.

Instead, you want to sort your audience. You aspire to earn your raving fans, while identifying some people who don’t really like your message. And that’s perfectly fine.

Consider Howard Stern, for instance, the radio “shock jock” in the U.S. Howard Stern polarizes his audience. A lot of people really like him, at the same time a lot of people strongly dislike him. But he makes an absolute fortune nonetheless.

The same is the case for many prominent celebrities—Oprah, Rosie O’Donnell, Justin Bieber—they all have a multitude of unfaltering fans, but they also have people who would rather veer off from them.

A more valuable use of your time is to put a lot of effort on the big picture items, just like growing sales. Instead of holding on to one email contact, let go and acquire another 20 or 50 email addresses.

Set your mind in terms of abundance rather than zeroing in on the small details that weigh nothing much in the long run. Remember, letting go is sometimes what you need. You’ll be pleased you did.

Source: When Letting Go Seems Impossible

You Are a Brand- It’s Time to Share Your Personal Brand With Others

What is a perfect example of a brand? You, my friend, are a brand.

An artist. A photographer. Life coach. Presentation expert. Alternative energy entrepreneur. Website developer. Skin care clinician.

This is not a trend. This is social media, publishing, marketing, sales, work, play, passion and everything you read about all rolled into one.

1. Define your audience.

Tell yourself this: The focus of your blog—and all of your content—must be your readers. What do they need? What are their pains? How can you help them?

Of course, doing guesswork is possible, but chances are, you’ll run the risk of being wrong. One ideal way to removing the guesswork is to conduct a survey. You can ask a few specific questions to uncover demographic and psychographic information.

From the results of your survey, you’ll be able to profile your audience and work toward developing a more focused content with a higher probability of connecting with your readers.

2. Create a clear value proposition.

What is the unique thing that you can offer to your audience? Are they going to get something from investing their time in your content? What resources do you offer? Do you offer resources to help people work smarter? Leadership insights? These are just some examples of questions you should be asking yourself before proceeding.

What you need to do is to create a succinct and simple answer and you have your value proposition. However, you may have to experiment with your value proposition and revise it from time to time.

What will serve as the framework for all your efforts is your clear value proposition .

3. Write a compelling brand slogan.

Always be aware of the level of noise in media today and then recognize how critical it will be to make a strong impression quickly.

A great way to address this challenge is to put your value proposition into a slogan.

Here are some good examples:

• Lifehacker’s slogan is “Tips, tricks, and downloads for getting things done.”
• Social Media Examiner claims to be “Your guide to the social media jungle.”
• Ramit Sethi promises, “I will teach you to be rich.”
• Feldman Creative promises to “Turn on the power of online marketing.”

Now, how can you summarize your brand promise in a concise slogan?

4. Show yourself.

Of course, the best thing you should remember is that people want to connect with people, not merely brands.

One way is presenting a great photo of yourself which helps establish credibility and build trust. It also helps you connect via social media.

You can do this by simply getting a great headshot that captures the real, authentic you. You can invest in a professional photo shoot or if you prefer not to part with the money, hit up a friend with a quality camera and a command of portrait photography.

Always go into the session with a plan. You have to tell the photographer the impression that you aim to create, the you you’re looking to capture.

After reviewing the photos, pick one headshot to use on your website and across all your social media networks.

• Working at your computer
• Analyzing your client’s data
• Coaching one-on-one
• Facilitating a small group meeting
• Recording a podcast
• Shooting a video
• Speaking before a large crowd
• Autographing your book at an event
• For the photo that will serve you best is simply you looking into the lens smiling, looking friendly and approachable—with no distractions.

5. Establish a look.

Any brand that is memorable, your personal brand included, should present itself consistently. Using a variety of logos, colors, and fonts will confuse your audience.

Develop a look for your personal brand with simply the following:

A professionally designed logo

A pleasing color palette

A limited menu of fonts

Then you can now apply the standards you created to everything—your website, business cards, advertising, etc.

For now, you’re off to a good start….

‪#‎BEUNSTOPPABLEwhileBRANDING‬

Source: Personal Brand Examples

If You Consider Yourself a ‘Newbie’ This Is for You

There’s approximately 200,000 people on a company’s mailing list who regularly receive varied emails every week.

We label them into 3 categories:

1.)  6 figure + earners-people who are making steady sales online and are building their business full time.

2.)  Those who are working their way to be part of category one, and who are making sales here and there with rising frequency. All they need is to spend more time redoing the actions that brought them those sales, and instituting systems to do more of those actions in their behalf.

3.)  Newbies and / or those who’ve been striving to make internet marketing work for years, but still get meager results.

If you’re in the first 2 categories, you may get off now and quit reading this because this message is not intended for you.

If you’re in category 3, please stay as it’s you who we’d like to speak to today.

The main reason why you’re not earning positive results is because you haven’t got the knack of the basic concepts of this industry. Or you’re just not putting them into practice.

Don’t feel bad, it’s never easy learning something new for the first time – especially when there are a number of people all informing you they have the ‘secrets’ in your email inbox all the time.

It’s possible that no one has ever discussed with you and went into details on how all these pieces fit together.

Most of the people sending you emails about marketing are obviously marketers. Their job is clearly NOT to teach you what works.

It’s to sell you their products.

We’re no different, just maybe a little more clear-cut.

But in most cases, a majority of them won’t let you know the truth. Let me say that again – they’re going to reveal the truth, but it will be the secondary concern behind telling you what needs to be done to get the sale.

For example, if they intend to sell their product which happens to be related to developing web pages, they’re going to tell you that you definitely have to create these pages on your own, and that knowing how it is done is fundamental to your success.

What they’re not going to tell you is that you can outsource it for even half the price of their training course primarily because that does not go along with their objective (to get you to buy.)

Therefore, everything you’ve learned about marketing is about complicating things than they actually are – leaving you confused, overwhelmed, puzzled about which information to believe in, and weakened with inaction.

We intend to change that. Believe that being clever in the market can help you become pretty good at making difficult concepts simple.

Source: Internet Marketing Basics for Newbies

Food Allergies As Holiday Frustration?

Imagine you arrive at your holiday destination you have been looking forward to for months and on day 1 you are confronted with food allergies and food intolerances in your family.

Those nasty unexpected things like food allergies that can screw up your idea of the perfect start of you well earned quality family time. I use the word idea purposely. Because I found out it that is just what it was. In our mind we make up that vacation has to be perfect, but vacation is like any other day in life. You have to take care of the most important things in life first. And well if you have food allergies and intolerances popping up that’s kind of in the category urgent.

So we, the Dutch Nomad Family, arrived in our home country after 24 hours of traveling that it took us from Bali. Within 48 hours Thijs started showed symptoms of food allergies, which affected his skin and caused itchy eyes.

We already know cheese is a no go for us. Can you imagine this being the case for a Dutch Vegetarian! But as with everything, you do get used to it and at some point the joy of eating this Golden Delicacy doesn’t match the negative effects on your body.

So after only 2 days of leaving our home in Bali Thijs started developing a rash around his mouth, which over the next 2 days spread all over his face and later his arms and legs. While dealing with ignoring a jet-lag, the cold, catching up with friends and keeping a business running, my fogged mind and off balanced body where working hard on observing food intake and comparing it to Thijs’ normal diet.

It may not be a surprise that the big change was the amount of candy, ice cream, bread with “hagelslag” and “beschuit with muisjes”. My kids do get candy, ice cream and bread back in Bali, but that would be in the form of an organic fruit lollipop, energy balls, sugar free candy, 80% dark chocolate, 1 slice of sourdough or black rice bread with almond butter and occasionally a vegan ice cream.

When I got to this point of realisation it became simple, but also hard. Why hard? As I said earlier it takes some time to get into a rhythm a again and than you have to deal with an issue on top of kids wanting to play, eat and enjoy the stuff they don’t normally have. However, something being a challenge has never been an excuse. So I talk to friends, share on Facebook and start finding places I can buy gluten free foods.

I just want to take time here for a sec to sympathise with all moms who have gone through this and are confronted everyday with food allergies and related issues. I’m proud of you that you found your way through all the food labels that almost always says traces of gluten, nuts and seeds. Unbelievable even in the organic health shop this disclaimer is on the oats!

As you I found my way through all the labels and found gluten free products. So I bought gluten free breads, crackers, vegan cheeses and spreads. Stocked up on fruit and raw vegetables suitable as snack and felt ready to start our road trip. I also started using TripAdvisor to look for Vegan Restaurants. This actually has brought us to some awesome unexpected places during our explorations and has made us meet lovely like-minded and inspiring people.

Having our travel food supply in order I realised I needed to do something about the symptoms of Thijs his rash as well, so I got a prescription from the doctor.

Parallel I search in the awesome database of Integrative Nutrition (my health and lifestyle tribe), watched a module on food and simple preparation by Joshua Rosenthal. Totally inspired by his “simple cooking” approach I feel empowered to pull this of during traveling as well. Grateful for the reminder of letting the kids help me with food preparations I get the feeling this food challenge it’s becoming a family effort and joyful experience instead of a weight on my shoulder.

Click here for a FREE Integrative Nutrition Class

A little side track confession from my side: it always surprises me how I can forget my normal patterns so easily when I board a plane and get into traveling mode.

A week into our travels I can now say that the frustration I felt in the beginning has developed to accepting and surrendering to the circumstances. As strange as it may sound it turns out Thijs his allergy actually gives me the opportunity to gather new experiences and connect to people on the subject I love most in life: the relation between health and lifestyle and the role of food in that.

I feel here lies one of my biggest tasks as a mom, educating my kids on food and the effect on it on their body. Unexpectedly this subject has become a part of our holiday itinerary, but as we love exploring, this will for sure provide us with new fun nomadic experiences.

As we were in Paris, I made Thijs and Isis aware on how they feel after they consume some of the local food. And believe me, they have to think hard when I ask them to put the pleasure of eating a croissant in perspective to life experiences like going to the summit of the Eiffel Tower. I commit myself to educating my kids on the value of a happy and healthy lifestyle and how it will affect the way they feel and therefore what they will accomplish in life.

Enjoy Local Foods, Eat Wise and ‘Bon Appetit’!

Inge, Tom, Isis and Thijs aka Dutch Nomad Family

Source: Dutch Nomad Family

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