From Jonathan Jay You are invited you to come along to the next SuccessTrack Business Club meeting on Saturday 4th April, in central London, for just £1, PLUS we’ll send you a huge pile of marketing DVDs and CDs! I am inviting 25 business owners to join our existing members for a fantastic day with four speakers and networking sessions, with no commitment to join, just to come along to see if you fit in with our entrepreneurial, motivated and ambitious business owners! You’ll meet four experts who will share their knowledge and experience with you: Emma Wimhurst (“Zero to £3 million in not time flat”); Mark Perl (discovering the secrets of professional networkers); Paul Shrimpling (how to make your business easier to manage, less prone to problems and more profitable); and Andrew Ludlum (essential marketing strategies). You can read more about the speakers here: https://successtrack.infusionsoft.com/link/2d87e72200/30d400 During the day you will mix with other like-minded business owners, make new business contacts and discover new joint venture arrangements- just like members do every month. £1 TRIAL MEMBERSHIP I am offering a trial membership to just 25 business owners; register as a trial member today and take advantage of our £1 special offer. We won’t activate your full membership until AFTER the April event – so you don’t pay another penny unless you decide to become a full member – just £97 + vat per month. PLUS: Not only can you have the free trial membership, I’ll also throw in a massive pile of my best DVD’s and CD’s for just £1! Read more about that special £1 offer here, but remember, that’s all you pay upfront, your first meeting on 4th April is free and you can cancel any time: https://successtrack.infusionsoft.com/link/2d87e72200/33e140 If you would like to become a trial member and come to your first SuccessTrack Business Club meeting free of charge (and claim the £1 bonus) on Saturday 4th April, please call us on 0845 029 7767 right now as we can only accept 25 business owners this month. Call now if you would like to be one of the 25 business owners on this trial membership. Best wishes Jonathan Jay Founder and Managing Director of SuccessTrack Helping Business Owners Make More Profit in Less Time With Less Effort Business Owners – claim your free marketing book at www.successtrackonline.com

Jay Conrad Levinson is the most successful business author in history, thanks to his best-selling Guerrilla Marketing series which has sold 20 million copies, been translated into 56 languages and is now required reading on MBA programmes. SuccessTrack: What are three things that a business owner can do in the next month to improve their marketing? Jay Conrad Levinson: ‘I love this question because I know it is so important. The first thing is to start with a seven-sentence plan. The Guerrilla Marketing Strategy is only seven sentences long. If you don’t start with a plan it’s like entering a battle and the commander saying, “Ready, fire… aim!” I’ll tell you what the ‘seven-sentence’ Guerrilla Marketing plan is… if you write a Guerrilla Marketing plan it should never, never take longer than five minutes because you’ve got to trust your instinct when you write these short seven sentences. The first one tells the purpose of your marketing: what do you want people to do physically? Do you want them to click to your website, make a phone call, or visit your store? The second sentence is the competitive advantage that you’ll stress to achieve that purpose. Everyone has benefits but you probably offer competitive advantages that your competition does not offer. The third sentence is your target audience. Remember, you may have more than one target audience. The fourth sentence – the only long one – details the marketing weapons that you’ll use.’ SuccessTrack: What do you mean by ‘marketing weapons’? Jay Conrad Levinson: ‘It could be speaking at a club or writing an article for a newspaper, offering free consultations, giving free seminars, using classified ads, getting better search engine placement online. It means being able to operate on the Internet inexpensively and effectively. It could be writing good subject lines for your emails. ‘We have identified 200 marketing weapons and of those, over 100 are free. They are on our website (www.gmarketing.com). ‘Once you’ve selected those weapons, you move to the fifth sentence which describes your niche in the marketplace. What do you stand for? Is it quality, economy, value, convenience, speed, or innovation? ‘The sixth sentence tells your identity not your image because image is a lie, defined in the dictionary as “a façade”. You ought to describe your identity in your marketing plan. ‘The seventh sentence tells you your marketing budget and it should be expressed as a percentage of your projected gross sales. In 2007, the average American and European business invested 4% of their gross sales in marketing. ‘That plan should only take you five minutes to write because you’re going to trust your instincts and they’re all short sentences. ‘The second thing you’ve got to do to really make marketing succeed for you is to commit to that plan. That’s very hard. Most marketing lies in graveyards because it was abandoned too soon. Most people in business don’t have a clue how fast marketing works – it does not work fast. It works eventually. If you do it right, it works all the time. If you try to get it to work fast, it will die on the vine before it even had a chance to reach fruition. You have to hang in there and commit for a long time – three months, six months, or a year. I don’t like admitting this but mediocre marketing with commitment works better than great marketing without commitment. ‘And the third thing is achieving balance in your life. I now work a three-day week.’

Carl Galletti has fast become one of the leading direct and online copywriters in the world today. He’s written sales letters for marketing gurus like Jay Abraham and Gary Halbert. And now he shares his copywriting secrets with you… Carl Galletti: The New York Times once ran an advert with the headline ‘What Everybody Ought To Know About The Stock And Bond Business’. It was a page-long advert with 6,450 words. The print was tiny. There wasn’t a coupon – the offer for a free brochure was buried deep in the copy. However, the advert ran once and it got 10,000 responses. It just demonstrates the point that if you have something interesting to say people will read it. How long should your website copy be? As long as it needs to be to get the job done. Here’s another little trick that a lot of people don’t use. Bring out your big guns first because if people aren’t convinced by the best thing you have to say upfront, they’re not going to be convinced if you put it later. You’re going to lose them. They’re never going to finish reading your copy. If you have something that’s convincing to say and it’s halfway through your copy, what you put before it is less convincing and you’ll lose the person. Put the convincing stuff first and that will create the fuel to get them interested and they’ll read the other stuff more easily.

An estimated 700,000 small businesses are using the social networking site Twitter with 6,000 more joining every day, according to a recent O2 survey. Small and medium-sized businesses are looking to Twitter as a way to cut marketing costs and directly communicate with clients and potential clients. The poll of 500 small firms found that 17% are already using Twitter, with 25% of these SMEs signing up to the social networking site in the last month. Nearly a third of those surveyed said they had saved up to £1,000 since signing up and 16% claimed that they had been able to save up to £5,000. “The increase in small businesses using converged devices such as smartphones combined with the simplicity of Twitter represents a fantastic opportunity to further raise their profiles and increase efficiency,” said Simon Devonshire, head of small business marketing at O2. SOURCE: www.newbusiness.co.uk You can follow SuccessTrack Founder Jonathan Jay on Facebook and Twitter (www.twitter.com/SuccessTrack)

By Jamie Turner with The 60 Second Marketer In this article, you will learn: 20 questions you should ask in order to differentiate yourself from your competitors. One of the most important things you can do as a company is to figure out what makes you different from your competitors. By drilling down deep and asking yourself these 20 questions, you can help define what makes you different and why that would be important to your customers. 1. What are we at present? 2. What do we want to become in two to five years? 3. What is our greatest opportunity in the next two years? 4. Why is that such a great opportunity? 5. What would we need beyond our company’s current strengths/positioning/products to seize the opportunity described above? 6. What is our greatest threat? 7. Are these threats that we can control? If so, what should we do to control them? 8. What do we do better than anybody else? 9. When we win, why do we win? 10. How does our customer benefit from what we sell? 11. What are the top three reasons customers have bought our products or services? 12. What are the typical objections to a sale? In other words, when we don’t gain a new customer, what is the reason given? 13. What percentage of next year’s revenue is expected from new vs. existing customers? 14. Going forward, what are the essential attributes of our target customer? (Industry segment, size of organisation/corporation, demographics, job position, motivators, internal and external influencers, buying habits, key message points, factors in buying decisions, associations, publications, trade shows.) 15. Who are our key competitors? 16. What type of work do we most enjoy? 17. Who is our competition targeting? 18. How do we wish to be viewed in relation to our competition? 19. What is the typical sales cycle? 20. What values, personality, and attitude do we want to project? To do this properly, you should grab your seven top executives for a “10 to 2″ meeting (a meeting that runs from 10am through to 2pm and includes a lunch). You’ll be surprised at the amount of healthy debate a meeting like this can uncover. Remember, success in business isn’t just about strategy, it’s about execution. You can talk about differentiators all you want, but if you don’t put your findings into action, you’ll have wasted your time. Good luck! Jamie Turner lives in Atlanta, Georgia and helps run The 60 Second Marketer. He has spent more than 25 years helping corporations such as AT&T, Cartoon Network, CNN, Motorola and The Coca-Cola Company grow their sales and revenue.

Am I being a bit too dramatic? I suppose so – but tonight is the LAST Armchair Seminar (for a while at least). Business owners have been sending me questions to answer for the last eight weeks and after tonight’s call, I’m going to take a break for a while. If you have never joined me on a Monday night – let me explain what happens: You are given a phone number and PIN code. At 7pm this evening, you dial the number and hear me answer – very quickly – all of the most pressing marketing questions posed by business owners like you. That means that you can email me a question on marketing – today – to info@successtrackonline.com and I’ll give you the very best answer I can tonight – live on air. You can dial in from your car, office, home or armchair and listen to an entertaining and informative 45 minutes of non-stop marketing know-how. Click this link to register and join me tonight. www.successtrackonline.com I hope you can make the very last Armchair seminar, this evening, Monday, at 7pm. Best wishes, Jonathan Jay Founder and Managing Director of SuccessTrack P.S. And while you’re at it, you might want to take a look at the next Strategic Marketing Weekend – also the very last for a while. Grab a place with 99 other business owners and really get to grips with marketing your business successfully! Click here for more info before your competitors do! www.successtrackonline.com

The most successful copywriters use the following steps to create winning sales letters. Step 1: Preparation Learn all you can about competing products and the people who buy your products or services. Know everything there is to know about them and don’t take your current knowledge for granted. Step 2: Get to Know Your Product, Its Features, AND Its Benefits First document the features of your products or services. Features are nuts and bolts like the size of the engine on a car or the number of speeds on a kitchen blender. Benefits are the emotional gratification that features deliver. Step 3: Create An Offer They Can’t Refuse A compelling offer means different things to different target audiences. Figure out what your target market needs and wants, and then construct the most irresistible offer you can. Fill it up with so much perceived value and such small risk that your prospect will find it hard to say no. Step 4: Pick Your Communications Format Are you doing a direct mail packet? An online sales letter? Is your offer a letter or a postcard? Will it have a photo, a graphic, a mail-back tear-off sheet, or a scratch-off code number for your website? Where your message will be used guides how it is written. Step 5: Fill Your Head With Headlines This is the critical step where you will (and should) spend 80% of your time. Write lots of headlines…50 to 100…and then test them to pick a winner. And hold on to the also-rans. They come in handy as sub-headlines. Step 6: Create A “Sticky” Opening Your opening immediately follows your headline and its job is to build so much excitement that it propels the reader deeper into your copy. Step 7: Present the Benefits of Your Features This is where you build an emotional case for your offer because people buy on their emotions first and justify their decision with logic later. Use tons of facts, word pictures, differentiators, and benefits, benefits, benefits, to create an emotional connection with your prospect. Step 8: Make Your Case with Evidence A prospect has no reason to believe your claims, so provide solid information that supports what you say. This “evidence” can take the form of testimonials, statistical results, news articles, quotes, celebrity endorsements, etc. Step 9: Explain Your Offer If your offer sounds too good to be true, tell your prospects why it is true. Explain what you’re doing and why it’s important for the consumer to act immediately. Step 10: Give Your Best Guarantee It’s in your long-term best interest to offer the absolute strongest guarantee possible. If you remove any perceived risk for your prospects, you’ll get a lot more of them to act on your offer. Step 11: Make An Urgent Call To Action Ask them to act on your offer immediately. Tell them exactly what to do step-by-step. Step 12: Include A Post Script After the headline, the postscript is the most often read part of a letter. “The ask” (what you want from them) and a restatement of your key benefit should be in the P.S. A well-written postscript can substantially boost the response to your letter.

Don’t be afraid to expand on the benefits of your product or service. People who are interested in buying are interested in details. It’s meaningful that you tell them in emotionally compelling detail how your offer will make their lives better. Getting the Benefits Right Based on your research, you know that your audience wants certain things. Right? They want the results or the benefits that your product or service delivers. They don’t just want the features. In fact, they don’t want your product or service at all. They just want those results or benefits. So, you should have a full and complete list of all the benefits of what you’re selling. If you do, great. If not, make one. Write down how each feature will benefit your customer. Now, paint a word picture of the person having achieved the result of the first benefit. Then the second. Then the third and so on. You should tell the reader the benefits of buying from you instead of your competition. If you don’t…they won’t. The body of your sales letter should give the reader every excuse to buy your product. Your headline got them to read the letter, your intro story created some emotion, and your guarantee and call to action will hopefully close the deal. But it’s the body of your message that must convince the reader that the product will benefit them personally, and fix their unique problem. Involve the reader in the letter by bringing it to life with a steady flow of interesting information. Write in an active voice. Build on your sentences and paragraphs so the reader is encouraged to continue reading. Every sentence needs to be interesting: a reader can become bored quickly. Make your offer stand out by highlighting benefits, not selling features. People don’t buy products or services; they buy the benefits derived from their purchases. Remember, you’re not selling ‘dining room tables’, you’re selling ‘a joyous haven where families bond and friendships flourish’. There’s a big distinction between the two approaches. Use bullet points or arrows where appropriate to make your sales letter easier to read. Your sales letter does not have to be limited to a single page, particularly on the Internet. What’s the best length? That will depend on your target market and your product or service. Many businesses who use sales letters find that longer sales letter are more effective. When you’re creating your first sales message, I advise not going over three pages…or about 1,000 words. The shorter length will allow you to get something up and out more quickly. And since you’ll refine your sales message based on testing results as well as more testimonials and endorsements as time goes on, you have plenty of opportunity to add more content on an ‘as needed’ basis.

The fundamental point of managing your time effectively is to get the results you want with the minimum amount of stress. It’s easy to be busy, to spend entire days in a frenzy of activity, only to find that you are no closer to achieving the results you want because you’ve been focused on the wrong thing. Time management is about achieving the results you want not about being busy. The first step of time management is to decide exactly what it is you want to achieve. Once you’ve decided what you want and where you’re headed, you can work out what you need to do to achieve it. If you don’t set clear, inspiring goals, you’ll waste countless more hours in frenzied activity. Goal Setting Think about what it is you want to achieve in different areas of your life: in your business, your finances, your relationships, as well as your mental, physical, social, and spiritual health. When you set your goals, choose outcomes that motivate you. Your goals need to be important and worthwhile to you. If the goal is too easy or too difficult, you’ll lose motivation and lack the energy to achieve it. Imagine having to explain to someone why you must achieve your goal and then write that down and keep it in view. If you find yourself faltering in your efforts, read it and remind yourself why that goal is so very important. Your goals must be SMART, that is specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time bound. Once you’ve decided on your goals, write them down (or type them). Create an action plan for all of your goals, detailing what you can do from today to achieve them. Prioritise When you prioritise your day, you choose to work primarily on the important tasks, those that take you closer to your goals. Knowing what your goals and therefore priorities are keeps you on track and helps to minimise stress. A crucial aspect of time management is understanding the difference between activities that are: • Urgent and important • Not urgent but important • Urgent but not important • Not urgent and not important. To Do Lists Write down all the tasks you need to carry out. Identify those that would come under the ‘urgent and important’ heading. They’re the ones that you need to focus your energy on and do first. Make time during your day for non-urgent but crucial activities like planning, designing, developing, etc. When you’re confronted with non-important but urgent tasks, determine exactly how urgent they are. Often, their ‘urgency’ will dissipate under close scrutiny. Activities that would come under the heading ‘non urgent and non important’ are ones that need to be minimised (if not stopped altogether). This kind of ‘To Do’ list means that you retain control of your time and energy. If any of your tasks or projects appears overwhelmingly large, chunk them down into manageable pieces. Keep chunking them down until you have something that you can begin work on immediately. Managing Interruptions One way to minimise interruptions is to delegate tasks that take up your time but don’t take you closer to your goals. Now Take Action Of course, setting goals, scheduling, prioritising, organising and writing lists are only valuable if you take action and make use of the information.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN perform four basic tasks. They use programmes called ‘bots’ or ‘spiders’ to ‘crawl’ the internet looking for pages. When they find and crawl the page, they can then store the details in the search engine’s database. This process is known as ‘indexing’. The search engines also process queries, returning results based on what has been typed in by internet users. (The words people type in to search for information are known as ‘keywords’). The search engines rank the results, based on how relevant each website is to the enquiry. Search Engine Optimization is all about creating pages that search engines find to be the most relevant matches to the query. Danny Sullivan of www.SearchEngineWatch.com says crawler-based search engines determine relevancy by following a set of rules known as ‘algorithms’. Exactly how a particular search engine’s algorithm works is a closely-kept trade secret. One of the main rules in a ranking algorithm involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page, says Sullivan. Pages with the search terms appearing in the HTML title tag are often assumed to be more relevant than others to the topic. Search engines will also check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page, such as in the headline or in the first few paragraphs of text. They assume that any page relevant to the topic will mention those words right from the beginning. Frequency is the other major factor in how search engines determine relevancy. A search engine will analyse how often keywords appear in relation to other words in a web page. Those with a higher frequency are often deemed more relevant than other web pages. Search engines may also penalise pages or exclude them from the index if they detect search engine “spamming” (if a word is repeated hundreds of times on a page, to increase the frequency and propel the page higher in the listings). Search engines watch for common spamming methods in a variety of ways, including following up on complaints from their users. Crawler-based search engines have plenty of experience now with webmasters who constantly rewrite their web pages in an attempt to gain better rankings. All major search engines now also make use of “off the page” ranking criteria. Off the page factors are those that a webmaster cannot easily influence. Chief among these is link analysis. By analysing how pages link to each other, a search engine can both determine what a page is about and whether that page is deemed to be “important” and thus deserving of a ranking boost. In addition, sophisticated techniques are used to screen out attempts by webmasters to build “artificial” links designed to boost their rankings. Another off the page factor is click through measurement. In short, this means that a search engine may watch what results someone selects for a particular search, and then eventually drop high-ranking pages that aren’t attracting clicks, while promoting lower-ranking pages that do pull in visitors. As with link analysis, systems are used to compensate for artificial links generated by eager webmasters. A query on a crawler-based search engine often turns up thousands or even millions of matching web pages. In many cases, only the 10 most “relevant” matches are displayed on the first page. Naturally, anyone who runs a website wants to be in the “top 10” results. This is because most users will find a result they like in the top 10. Being listed 11 or beyond means that many people may miss your website.