Today I’ve got a little guest post from my partner in the Make Them Buy Conversion Club,
Michael McCarrell:

What’s the biggest mistake advance marketers – let alone beginners – make?  It continues to surprise me, but over and over I see people focusing on traffic instead of conversion.

And I have a theory about why – bear with me for just a minute here – it has to do with biology versus technology, and the fact that technology is evolving much much more rapidly than our biology.

Why should you as a marketer care about biology? Because it’s unavoidable. As much as we like to think of ourselves as rational beings, we are much more emotional and ACT much more instinctively than many of us like to admit.

(In case you don’t think *you* are instinctually driven, try this experiment: try NOT to not jump when a black belt karate expert feigns a kick to your crotch. I don’t care how many times you are told, I don’t care how much rational explanation you get, how many diagrams, how many charts, how much experience he has, or how many times I tell you you’re not going to be touched, you ARE going to jump.)

The Painful Crotch Kick of Marketing

Our evolution from apes has taken millions of years and yet the Industrial Revolution began only 300 years ago.   Personal computers are, what 40 years old?   The Internet is what, 20 years old?  Can you see an issue with divergence going on here?

So why do advance marketers still focus on traffic even though they *cognitively know* that conversion is more important?

Because conversion looks, and in many cases is, tougher than getting more traffic.

And your biology dictates that it’s better to be doing something than nothing because

If you’re doing Nothing you’re a ‘sitting duck’, you’re helpless prey and…

The feeling of helplessness is one of the *most intolerable* of all human emotions

Meaning, at a biological, instinctual level – it’s better to work on traffic then to feel helpless – it’s better do something than feel helpless – even if that something is of little value.

And human nature makes us choose the seemingly easier route (with less work) unless we pause to seriously consider the alternatives.

So how do you overcome biology and get yourself focused on the things that will really do you good?

One – study conversion principles, and…

Two – and this might be more important – surround yourself with like-minded marketers (like us!)

We’re all very instinctual, emotional animals.  Successful marketers accept and even embrace this on a deep level, but they also put things in place to compensate for it…

What feels right isn’t always right…

Sometimes you have to feel worse to do better.

And what seems sexy isn’t always good for you.

I rest my case!

Won’t you join us? It’s ridiculously affordable for the moment.
Ridiculously!

Here’s a different kind of video interview I did with “Debbie the Office Doc” about a few pretty cool tricks for saving time in Excel and MS-Office.  Thought you might all enjoy!

To contact Debbie, please visit www.DebbieTheOfficeDoc.com

To join Glenn’s live site review webinars, please visit www.MakeThemBuy.com

The Most Disturbing Thing I Ever Did Online (Ever!)

Sometimes I talk to students who are very frightened of making a mistake and publicly humiliating themselves in their marketing… so I thought I’d share the ABSOLUTE WORST THING I EVER DID ONLINE, because short of pulling an “Anthony Weiner,” there’s no way you could possibly top this one.  If I survived something this bad, you can too.

OK, so the WORST thing I ever did on the internet was on September 12th, 2001.
Long story short, I started a WAR on the internet!

See, given that Sharon and I were psychologists just outside of NYC, right after 9/11 happened (literally the day after) we thought it would be a good idea to send out a broadcast to our 20,000 subscribers offering to do free support groups about the trauma.  We were genuinely motivated to do a good thing…

But here’s how it played out:

• Entered “9/11 Support Group” as the subject line
• Forgot that the system automatically pre-pended “GET PAID:” to the subject line because it was a custom email system built for recruiting focus group participants.
• Body of message was “Reply with your name, gender, phone, and age if you’d like to come to the group”
• The programmer apparently made a mistake and set it up so that when anyone replied, the reply went to all 20,000 people on the list. And then if people replied to THAT reply, that went to all 20,000 people too.
• The first reply was from a young woman who wrote: “I’m 24, female, and I’d like to come. My phone number is____”, and this went out to all 20,000 people with the subject line “GET PAID: 9/11 Support Group.”

As you can imagine, several hundred of these people replied back with incredibly irate messages… which, of course, proceed to be broadcast to all 20,000 people too.  And then they started fighting with each other.  Some even made death threats. And it just kept escalating!

It took us a few hours to realize what was happening and shut down the server, but by then the president of our trade association had called us to admonish us, along with most of our best clients and friends.

We spent the next week handling the angry phone calls and threats, day and night. We had to bring in attorneys.  We had to settle with the woman who wrote the first reply to avoid a law suit.

What a nightmare!

But you know what?

In the end, we were still standing…
The WORST thing I ever did on the internet (I dare you to beat this!) (TELL story of 20,000 people email fiasco on 9/12/2001)

Just thought you’d like to know what I did one time way back on September 12th, 2001.
Long story short, I started a war on the internet:

– Thought it would be a good idea to send out a broadcast to our 20,000 subscribers offering to do free support groups about 9/11

– Wrote the subject line as “9/11 Support Group”

– Forgot that the system automatically pre-pended “GET PAID:” to the subject line because it was for focus group participants.

– Body of message was “Reply with your name, gender, phone, and age if you’d like to come to the group”

– The programmer apparently made a mistake and set it up so that when anyone replied, the reply went to all 20,000 people on the list. And then if people replied to THAT reply, that went to all 20,000 people too.

The first reply was from a young woman who write “I’m 24, female, and I’d like to come. My phone number is____”, and this went out to all 20,000 people with the subject line “GET PAID: 9/11 Support Group.”

As you can imagine, at least 1,000 of these people replied back with irate messages. Some with death threats. And it just kept escalating from there.

It took us a few hours to realize what was happening and shut down the server, but by then the president of our trade association had called us to admonish us, along with most of our best clients.

We spent the next week living at the office handling the angry phone calls and threats. I had to bring in attorneys. I had to settle with the woman who wrote the first reply to avoid a law suit.

What a nightmare!

And while I’d never recommend starting an internet war on purpose in order to get the attention of your long-unheard-from clients… many of them sympathized with us once they heard the story and actually gave us MORE business.  (Crazy, right?)

So what should you take away from all this?

D.W. Winnicott said “The Nightmare We Fear Most is the One We’ve Already Been Through”…

The odds are, whatever mistake you make in your marketing won’t harm you to the extent you’re frightened it will.  Most entrepreneurs spend so much time worrying about what negative thing might happen if X comes to pass, they never stop to consider that if X happens, Y positive thing might be hiding behind it.

And since frequency of contact is one of the pivotal foundations for increasing conversion…

Your fear of communicating with your audience more is likely doing you more harm than their negative reactions might.

Food for thought,

Glenn 🙂

PS – You can still ask me LIVE questions about your marketing once a month in the MakeThemBuy.com club for just $9.95.