Limiting Beliefs
We all have some limiting beliefs (at least I think so). Who would think that a guy with the nickname ‘Captain Typo’ could write four books ( one of which has won awards)? I am not an author (or so I thought)!
Let’s talk about what I consider to be limiting beliefs in internet marketing. There are so many different programs, theories and get rich quick schemes out there. If you just do Facebook ads, you’re going to get rich. If you follow this scheme, you do this thing, then you’re all of a sudden going to make some money. It often works if you have a solid system by somebody who’s been running it for a while and they understand how to integrate many of the things I’m going to talk about today.
Email Marketing Is Dead
Something I hear all the time is that email marketing is dead. That’s a limiting belief. Think about this, how much email do you get every single day? How much time do you spend answering those emails? It’s one of those limiting beliefs, especially with millennials or younger people, because they’re so used to texting and they think that Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, tweets, texts and all of the other stuff are taking over the world.
In reality, the majority of business is done one of two ways, either face to face or via email. The reason is because email is something that you can categorize, organize, enhance, you can add video, links and much more to it, and it’s semi-unlimited. I want to break down that barrier. Don’t think that email is dead. Email is less prevalent, because there’s so much spam out there, which is one of the annoyances, but the bottom line is people are still using email, as much if not more, than they ever have. The question becomes how are you using that email and how is it enhancing what you’re doing in your business?
If we look at a standard email broadcast that goes out, it’s like, “Okay, here’s my email newsletter.” Well, newsletters may be dead. What’s not dead is one on one email communications. That is you sending something to somebody and saying, “Hey, I have something for you. Can I get a response?” The nice thing about this is that thread of emails keeps growing and growing and growing and gives you something to latch on to. I have over a hundred and fifty folders on my computer where I can categorize each one of the messages. Some are purchases, some are clients, some are past clients, some are current projects that I’m working on that have nothing to do with clients like volunteerism. The bottom line is it’s really easy to categorize and build upon the messages that you’ve already sent. Trust me, email is not dead and we’re going to touch on that again a little later.
Posting As Only Your Brand
The second limiting belief I want you to think about is ‘I only want to be on social media as my business’. Okay, that’s fine. Create a business page, post all your stuff there and watch what happens. I have a couple of accounts that have thousands of people following them. I can post something to those accounts and I end up with maybe five or six people actually seeing it. People go on social media to engage with people, not so much with brands, unless you’re a huge brand like Coca-Cola, Harley Davidson or something that’s outside the box. As small to medium-sized business owners, people do business with people.
Think about this – where you get the most engagement on social media is when you post as yourself talking about every day things. That’s why there are so many groups out there that people create. They create groups because people will interact with other people inside of groups. The same thing goes for LinkedIn. You don’t have a real presence as a brand other than the people that work at my company and you can see that on the company page. There’s no way to interact on LinkedIn that way. You can have as many Twitter accounts as you want but frankly, people are interacting with you because you are who you are.
Don’t let that limiting belief of I’m going to be just my brand and I’m just going to be my business online get you. You need to be a person and interact with people as a person. The more you do that, the more they get to know, like, and trust you, the better chance you have of engaging. One of the reasons I do a quote of the day in the morning and a caption contest at night on my personal Facebook profile is because people engage with that. They comment; they like; they share. The more that people do that, the higher up the rankings in the algorithm I get found, meaning more people will see what I post.
If I just post on my business page, I get a limited amount of engagement. That limited amount of engagement can be enhanced when I share my business page posts to my personal profile. The only other way without doing that is to get ads and pay for advertising to get more people seeing what you’re doing on your business profile. It’s becoming less and less effective to promote on a business page or a brand page and it’s becoming much, much more important to engage as a person on social media.
The Money Is In The List
Limiting belief number three, money is in the list and the list I’m talking about is your email list. Yeah, there’s money in that list, but more importantly, it’s in the systems that you use once you create that list. I have a bunch of different lists. I use AWeber. If you want to learn more about AWeber, go to Brianloves.info/aweber and you get a free trial account. The nice thing about AWeber is, it allows you to add people to different lists and then you can combine them later. In each one of those lists, you can send out a series of follow-up emails or broadcast messages specific to what they want or need.
This weekend, while selling books on Amazon, I was able to get people to join my list by offering bonuses. What I did was, if they bought the book and came back and filled out an email form, they could download some valuable bonuses. Now, I have the opportunity to communicate with people that purchased on Amazon, because Amazon won’t give you that info. I could email again saying, “Here’s another bonus. Here’s something that you can engage with.” Let me take this one step further. The money is in the list especially if your list has made you money. So are you engaging in follow up? Are you adding people that have already purchased from you and communicating with them on a regular basis and giving them a reason to want to come back and spend again?
This is one of the places where many people leave lots of money on the table. They don’t think about the fact that someone who has already done business with them is going to be more likely to do it again. Now, if all you’re doing is selling, selling, selling, chances are people will jump off your list. If you’re providing great information, doing content marketing, and enhancing what they already purchased from you, then the chances of them purchasing again increases.
What you have to do is take a look at your QuickBooks. Find the people that have purchased from you. Maybe you have a membership site. Whatever it is, bring those people into the fold in your email marketing and communicate with them on a regular basis without shoving sales down their throat. Enhance what they purchased. Help them to better utilize it, offer tips, give them suggestions, or create videos. Whatever you can do to enhance their engagement with you, the better chance you have that they’re going to come back and buy again.
Final Thoughts
These limiting beliefs are incredibly important because they hold people back from doing things that have proven to work for many businesses. If you’re thinking that email marketing is dead, then you won’t email market or add people who have already purchased from you to lists so you can communicate with them. If you think that the only thing you need to do is engage in social media as your brand, you’ll try it for a while and guess what? People won’t engage with you because the algorithms just don’t let it happen. My suggestion for you is think about it, try some of these ideas and see how it works. Keep going with the ones that are working great for you and maybe continue to learn how to do some other things.
I would love to hear your thoughts and comments and maybe some other limiting beliefs you have overcome!
To learn more on this and other topics about Internet Marketing – visit our podcast website at http://www.baconpodcast.com/podcasts/
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