Entrepreneurs-Journey.com

For me the web started around 1997 when I received my free dial-up Internet account from my university when I started undergraduate studies.

It appears some people were a bit quicker than I was…

The 100 oldest currently registered .com domain names

1. 15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM
2. 24-Apr-1985 BBN.COM
3. 24-May-1985 THINK.COM
4. 11-Jul-1985 MCC.COM
5. 30-Sep-1985 DEC.COM
6. 07-Nov-1985 NORTHROP.COM
7. 09-Jan-1986 XEROX.COM
8. 17-Jan-1986 SRI.COM
9. 03-Mar-1986 HP.COM
10. 05-Mar-1986 BELLCORE.COM

Click here for the rest…

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The new vBulletin powered forums are back!

Yaro’s Internet Business & Blogging Forums

I’m still getting used to the new forum system but I think vBulletin is going to impress me. With all the plug-ins available it reminds me a lot of WordPress, which is awesome (all the great free WordPress plug-ins being a major reason why) and although vBulletin is not free, it looks well supported by a large community.

Forum Passwords

If you already have an account in my forums you may need to reset your password to login in again. You can do this by entering your email into the password retrieval tool.

Big Thanks To Nick From DotZero.com.au

My good friend Nick back in Brisbane did the conversion of the previous invision board forum into vBulletin. He’s the owner of DotZero, a Brisbane web design services business. I’ve known Nick for a while now and if you need any IT stuff done he can probably help.

New Users

If you have never checked out my forums now is the perfect time for your introduction. The forum is growing into a tight-nit and supportive community focused on Internet business and blogging - two of my favorite things!

Please come by and say hello or post your question in my forums sometime soon.

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If you are like me you send out email newsletters on a regular basis. I only use text based email newsletters and I always need to format the width by using character spacing restrictions. You can read why I do this in my article - Formatting Email Newsletters - Should You use Plain Text or HTML?

In that article I recommend spacing of 60 characters as a good rule of thumb, although today I generally use 50. Each time I prepare a new email newsletter I go to a format text tool and I figured a lot of other people probably do this too, so it would be handy to have a tool right here on Entrepreneurs-Journey.com - so I set one up!

Email Format Tool

You can find the new Format Articles and Text Tool at:

http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/format-text.html

The tool is very easy to use and costs nothing. It’s based on the script at Web-Source.net.

I suggest you bookmark it ;-).

Enjoy!

Yaro

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This is a little off topic but it’s too cool not to post it.

Back when I used to play Magic: The Gathering as a teenager the company behind the game went to all kinds of trouble to legitimize it as a real sport. I’m not sure if they were the first to do it, but they coined the phrase “mind sport” as a marketing technique I presume to convince parents that if little Johnny wants to play cards with dragons and elves instead of say baseball or football, it’s not that big a difference - Magic is a sport after all!

I just came across this great video of another “sport” struggling for recognition. This girl certainly has a gift when it comes to stacking cups…

Thanks to Life Goggles for the find.

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I’m living in a new rental in Toronto for the first time on my own in this fair city, as opposed to living with family as I usually do when in anada. So far I have opted not to have a television since cable access seems to be the only way to get any good channels here and I don’t see the need to pay for something that ultimately makes me less productive. At least that is the theory, but I am having major entertainment withdrawals and not laughing nearly as much without the Simpsons, Family Guy, Seinfeld and my new favorite, Robot Chicken, in my life.

In particular there is one time I usually have the TV turned on where I am missing it the most - when I eat. It’s hard to use a mouse and the web when you are eating, so the computer hasn’t been an apt replacement for the good old tube during meals. Since I work at home I often cook myself a fresh lunch and have a “lunch break” with my friend the television, and frankly I miss this ritual, though I’m not sure how much of this problem is merely a bad habit I’ve formed over the years (very likely).

What is a television addict to do?

I turned to my best friend, the Internet, and started looking for movies and TV online. I’ve never been much of a YouTube casual movie watcher looking for giggles - I want full length episodes of sitcoms, dramas, movies - basically television online, on demand - heck I’d even pay a dollar or two for some movies or television shows if I could download and watch them instantly. I’m not a torrent downloader because I’m trying to avoid any somewhat “suspect” activities, so I’ve been looking for legitimate solutions.

Unfortunately the era of digital delivery of television entertainment online has not yet arrived in 2006. The options are few and far between and frankly stink, so I gave up looking.

Instead I’ve discovered the joys of public domain entertainment, otherwise known as movies and television that are no longer copyrighted and can be distributed freely without risk of legal retribution. I’ll be honest with you - the selection is minimal and most of the stuff is old, but it’s getting me through my addiction and I usually finish eating and get back to doing productive things anyway.

The Day The Earth Stood Still

That little background story was a segue into my business lesson for today’s blog post (yes it had to be in there somewhere!).

I watched an old 1951 black and white sci-fi movie called The Day The Earth Stood Still, which while not being the most amazing piece of cinematic glory, has it’s moments and certainly makes me laugh now and then. Nostalgia is always fun.

At one point in the movie the main character, an alien, causes all the power in the world to stop working for thirty minutes. So nothing works at all and the earth basically “stands still”. However he pulled this little trick with the proviso that he would not cause any harm to anyone. While I was watching all these cut scenes of places around the world with no cars moving and all these people mulling around wondering what happened, it dawned on me -

“What about the hospitals? What about the planes that were flying in the air?!?”

I think shutting down hospitals and planes mid-flight would surely cause some harm to people?

Five minutes later the plot continues with a bunch of important men sitting around a table talking about what happened. One man explains the situation based on reports coming in from around the world and it appears that not everything had been shut down:

The hospitals and planes in mid-flight were still working. Nice.

My question had been answered and I didn’t have quite as much scorn for the movie as I may have had previously. It just became that little bit more legitimate in my eyes because they had adequately answered my question - in fact specifically addressed the two areas of concern I had.

Predict What Your Client Will Ask You

So what on earth does all that have to do with Internet business you ask? Aha! Remember everything is the same, and everything has a lesson for us relevant to business hidden away somewhere. Here’s what I am getting at…

One of the very first lessons I learnt from professional copywriters was to ensure your copy answers the questions that a prospect has going through their head as they read your sales page.

This technique was developed originally by face-to-face salespeople who would manipulate a prospect by answering questions on-the-fly based on how the potential customer reacted. A good salesperson removes all buying barriers by carefully guiding the conversation and knows the right triggers to use based on verbal and non-verbal communication.

This principle translated to the online world resulted in the long sales copy page. The long sales page attempts to answer all potential questions - points of resistance - that a prospect has before making a purchase. Since you can’t respond dynamically to a prospect’s communication cues online, the sales page must anticipate the most vital questions that the whole potential marketplace of customers may go through.

Imagine how powerful it is when a person is somewhat interested in your product and is reading the sales page and a question forms in their head, and then a paragraph or two later that specific question is answered.

Prospects may have concerns about whether the product is right for a certain type of business or person, whether there is a guarantee, can the product be used to solve a specific problem, how about size, shape, color, endurance, relevance, timeliness, applicability, quality, compatibility, ease of use, etc. All of these characteristics may relate to questions or concerns your potential new customer has about your product and when your sales copy directly answers their question a feeling of satisfaction will wash over them.

Yes, this is the right product for me because they know what I want and what situation I am in. I now have justification to buy.

That’s the feeling you want to elicit in a person when they read your sales page. If you can anticipate all of the common questions asked by a typical consumer of your product you will increase your conversion rate.

How To Anticipate Questions

If you are very close to your product and know your market well initially you should be able to come up with a handful of typical questions and roadblocks that prospects may go through in their head before buying. You must address these questions in your sales copy.

There are also standard responses or triggers - questions that the majority of consumers ask themselves before buying that sales copy can address, which professional copywriters will include in almost every sales page. Things like the money back guarantee, examples/case studies/testimonials from other people just like you who have had great results with your product, help to remove psychological barriers to making the purchase. I’m not a professional copywriter though, so if you want more assistance you might want to try Michael Fortin or Dan Kennedy or John Carlton.

A good copywriter can step into any industry and anticipate the questions that people will ask about a product after spending time researching the market. It’s something that is not easy to do. Personally I know the industries I work and play in well enough because I do it every day but there is no way I could write effective sales copy for different industries without first researching a lot about the needs and intricacies of the client-base in that industry. That’s one of the distinguishing factors that separates the good copywriters from the average - their innate (and refined through research) ability to understand the marketplace.

In your case you should at least know your market well enough to brainstorm potential questions to get yourself started. All you need to do is step into the shoes of your customer and think about what they may be concerned with before buying. If you can’t do this, put a survey out and ask - get the data straight from the horse’s mouth so to speak. If you can anticipate the concerns of your prospects and address them during the sales process you will increase your conversion rate. It’s as simple as that - but of course, test it to be sure ;-).

Yaro Starak
Copywriting Drone

Learn more about Internet business in Yaro’s Forums.

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