There’s no doubt about it, the word “you” used in advertising and copywriting can make you more money. I have been studying persuasive words that can lead to increased sales and this word is by far one of the easiest to incorporate into your next sales/marketing/presentation copy. I have tested this theory out with sales copy for call-to-actions (CTA’s) and trust me, “YOU” does work.

Why

Generally speaking, most business sell something to an end user. Whether it’s a service or product, whether it’s business-to-consumer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B), there’s some kind of root sales strategy involved. Within the the sales strategy, you may or may not be currently outlining the benefits to the end user.

Since you are selling to someone, why not tell them directly by saying “you.” It’s the same concept behind the placement of CTA’s above-the-fold, and guiding a user down the ultimate path you want them to take towards conversion. You want to make your messsages to the end user as blatently clear as possible so there’s little confusion or in this case, optimial use of the consumer’s time.

Examples

Key examples include situations where you describe how your product/service can make life easier, better, faster, build revenue streams, etc.

Before: Karma, Co. can help boost sales figures.
After: You will have increased sales.

Before: Karma, Co. will deliver results.
After: You will results backed with tangible proof.

Before: Karma, Co. can help you simplify your work flow.
After: You can simplify and take control of your life now.

For the web, my theory is that if you can get a prospective customer to your website, why not do everything you can to make the user’s life easier. Web users are inherently lazy, don’t rely on them to “get it” or understand your messaging. If you can drive someone to your website, it imperative that you deploy every strategy possible to make the sale because it chances are, user’s do not buy unless you tell them to.

Be sure to keep this strategy in mind when you are writing new copy. Or better yet, look at your exiting material and see how you can incorporate this idea right now and then measure the difference between the before and after.

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I think spraying and praying has to be one of the worst mistakes new entrepreneurs can make. You know the story… Dale, new business extraordinaire, builds a new widget designed for the real estate industry but soon after sees applications in all sorts of industries ranging from janitorial to precision manufacturing. While it’s always nice for John to think big and outside the box, entrepreneurs trying to serve the masses can easily walk right into failure.

If you can’t keep that ego in check, sorry… you’re screwed

I believe the problem at the core root of things is simply, our ego. Thoughts of financial freedom, living a self-sufficient life, being known, being “the man”, etc. are all are all areas that newbies need to keep in check. You can write up all the business plans you want, have as many advisors around you as possible, but if you can’t keep that ego in check, sorry… you’re screwed.

You need to keep a leash on yourself

What entrepreneurs need to understand is that it’s ok to dream and think of different ways to apply product/service to different industries, but at the same time, you need to keep a leash on yourself. When I have the spare time, I am personally always thinking of new industries that I’d love to be involved with. I have an excel file that I keep these kinds of notes within and when I get close to learning one industry, I move to the next.

Yes, this is a slow approach and in the past 3-4 years, I’ve personally only moved to my second major industry (from automotive to wine). I take things step by step because I have a small business and I don’t have the financial and talent resources to invest into a dedicated R&D team. Not to mention being the sole decision maker at the end of the day means I just want things to run smoothly with as little headache as possible.

Unleash the power of the niche

I think a lot of times new entrepreneurs are scared of developing a product/service around a tightly segmented group because they assume that they will not be successful or get the volume of sales they want. In my honest opinion, that thought process couldn’t be further from the truth. When you tightly focus yourself around a niche or a single vertical, it allows you to fully invest all your resources into developing the best solution possible. You make life much easier when it comes to marketing, PR, and advertising campaigns because you will know specifically the areas you should focus your time and dollars on. You will also have a lot easier of a time building your business and personal brand that you so badly desire.

Do businesses that only do oil changes do poorly? How about those shops which only sell tires/wheels but not do general auto repair? How about specialty gourmet German shops?

Not all industries are built equally

When you focus your business’s resources in a single direction, you have the ability to learn all the quirks, and why things are done a certain way. For example, some online retailers of automotive parts accept credit cards online but don’t allow their payment gateway to automatically charge customer’s credit cards. To the customer, orders may look as they went through but behind the scenes, it’s something different. These etailers use their merchant payment gateways as the first step in fraud prevention and process orders manually. Why? Well unless you observe the industry, and talk to clients, you wouldn’t know that there just happens to be quite a bit of fraud that happens within that particular vertical. Manual processing of high dollar online orders and calling customers to confirm is how businesses within this group save a lot of future headache for a minimal investment of time upfront.

If you were developing an ecommerce solution and wanted to target the automotive industry, pieces of information such as this might be of value but any custom development around this issue may not translate over into other verticals.

The bottom line… divide and conquer

If you truly care about your business and you don’t want to treat it as some kind of money-in-money-out machine, you need to make sure you don’t spread yourself too thin. You want to make sure your business survives for the long haul and your entrepreneurial spirit as well. You need to make sure that you can be there for your clients and customers because you truly care about their success, not because you just want to grab their money and be done with them. The bottom line… divide and conquer. It’s methodological, it reaffirms your success, and at the end of the day, it’s just less headache.

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Location based services (LBS) is seemingly the new trend for marketing and advertising. I’ve been playing on/off with Foursquare for a little while but it didn’t take me long to realize the real privacy and security concerns that I have with the service. And just like big brother of social networking, Facebook, recently saw a slew of negative press around its own privacy issues, Foursquare and other LBS services may get slammed eventually as well.

Sharing TOO much

The main issue that I hate about Foursquare? By checking into venues, they know my habits. They know when I go out, they know where I go, and can fairly easily extrapolate how long I am there (assuming I check-in everywhere I go). The last time I checked, I didn’t need someone looking over my shoulder and being able to see everything I do in real life. Granted, I believe that only fellow Foursquare friends can see your actual movement activity, I doubt many users think about this privacy concern or that Foursquare makes it blatantly clear that your movements are publicly displayed to your friends (and that you need to be careful who you add as friends on their service). In fact if you keep reading, you’ll see that many Foursquare users are not smart at all.

Are you prepared to get robbed?

Earlier in the year, I came across a website called Please Rob Me whose sole purpose was to address this privacy issue with Foursquare and Twitter. The website used Twitter’s public search stream and scanned it for location based tweets. Since these tweets are public to all, in theory a burglar could easily track your habits and rob your home. TechCrunch reported that you can also use the filter on top of the site to show when specific people aren’t home (by their Twitter name), or sort by location.

Please Rob Me says,

The danger is publicly telling people where you are. This is because it leaves one place you’re definitely not… home.

Not so smart Foursquare users

You know what’s even more sad about all this confusion? When people add their home to Foursquare so they can get more checkin’s. There are a ton of examples of this going on within Foursquare and I think this is an area that Foursquare really should think about moderating somehow. Their service should be for real business venues, not private residences. Even more frightening, in some cases, many people may not even know their home address is listed on Foursquare publicly because a friend may have added it.

Think before you share

The bottom line is that you should all be aware of what exactly is going on with your information behind the scenes with you are using location based services. Personally, I only give up my location only if I have to. For example, I have a music app that I use for streaming radio on my iPhone and it for some reason asks me for my location upon starting up but it has nothing to do with the music. I think their sole purpose of collecting my location data is just for marketing purposes but in any case, I don’t want to give up my location to just listen to music. On the other hand, I am a little more comfortable to give up my location to Google Maps to get information about what’s around me because I trust Google’s policies a lot more than new startups such as Foursquare (although this may be debatable as well).

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Let’s get straight to the point shall we?

1. Social media is now the number one online activity beating porn & personal email (Nelsen Wire).
2. 2/3 of the global internet population visits social networks (Nielsen Global Faces & Networked Places).
3. The time spent on social networks is growing at 3x the overall internet rate, accounting for 10% of all internet traffic (Nielsen Global Faces & Networked Places).
4. Online, including social media, has become the most influential source in helping consumers make purchasing decisions (Weber Shandwick Inline Research).
5. Millions of people are creating content for the social web.
6. The next 3-billion consumers will access the internet from a mobile device making it that much more important to focus on customer experience.
7. If Facebook was a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the World only behind China and India.
8. Twitter believes it will have 1-billion users by 2012.
9. One-way marketing has come to an end… it’s all about interaction—listen first, sell second.
10. In almost all cases, social media is free.

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If you use Photoshop to create designs, here’s a quick tip—spell check! It’s a lot easier than you might think and it could save you some headache down the road.

There are two ways I can think of to ensure you have correct copy:

1. Type your text in a word processor such as Word and once you’re sure that spelling and grammar are correct, paste the text into Photoshop and style as needed.
2. Or type the copy directly into Photoshop (generally works best if you don’t have a lot of text) and go to the Edit menu and select Check Spelling…

I have known people to get into major issues in terms of this seemingly simple oversight. Years ago, a friend had a typo in some invitations he had made for a client and of course it wasn’t noticed until the customer came into the store to pickup his final product. Granted the client had approved the artwork by signing a proof, I’m sure you can imagine the turmoil when he came to pickup his product.

The takeaway: Save yourself and your clients the headache and dignity by simply spell checking your graphic designs!

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Now, this might be a touchy subject for some of you, but just hear me out before you start firing back. In my opinion, freelancers are NOT entrepreneurs. Well actually, I believe that freelancers are for the most part people who are on their way to entrepreneurship but are still figuring their situation out—a “half entrepreneur” if you will. I’ve polled a few people on this subject a few weeks ago and overwhelmingly it seems like the majority of you disagree. That’s fine by me, but let me explain my thought process.

To me, a freelancer is someone whose income is directly correlated to their work output. In other words, if a freelancer stops working, their income comes to a halt. On the other hand, entrepreneurs build sustainability. They can leave the business, take a nap, go on vacation, and expand their skills while STILL making money in the process. Just looking at this one comparison of freelancers vs. entrepreneurs, who do you think is more likely to be stable in the long run?

I don’t have anything against freelancing, but I think people need to change their mindsets in order to take freelancing to the next level.

Don’t judge me… I was in the freelance game for a little while too and don’t regret it at all. I made many valuable contacts and leveraged my freelancing opportunities to my advantage in order to build out my internet marketing company in Napa. My personal shift has gone from freelance web design & development (a very crowded space) to offering strategic internet marketing services to my local community. These internet marketing services consistently drive tangible results for clients while allowing me the freedom to step away at the same time—an autopilot of sorts. Granted I can’t, and more importantly I won’t walk away forever, I do have freedom. I can work on other projects, seek more clients, and help others while still making money in the process. The best part of my new company is that I get to help other businesses make more money—something that I love doing.

The takeaway: Freelancers generally focus only on the now while entrepreneurs focus on the now, the future, and the next opportunity.

A freelancer who can build a backlog of work is a suitable candidate for entrepreneurial nirvana whereas a freelancer who simply moves from job-to-job may not be.

When I was freelancing, I was really good at converting prospects into clients and building a backlog… whenever possible, I always tried to make sure that I had the next project lined up. That way when I was finished with my current client, I could easily transition to the next with as little downtime as possible. Of course there were times when I had no future projects lined up at all and thus began my personal woes of freelancing—instability.

Stepping back real quick, even when I had active projects as well as a backlog, I still made sure that I was planning for my next personal endeavor. When my work flow trickled to a stop, I simply shifted attention from client work to my own goals which included developing new services, training for new skills, networking, industry analysis, competitor research, etc. The process of making sure that I have new ideas and long term projects is an ongoing cycle and honestly speaking, a guilty pleasure. I always come up with crazy ideas (both crazy good and crazy bad) but I still make sure to write them down in a safe place that I dub my “master plan.” I then visit this list every once in a while to see how I can implement the ideas/projects into my existing lineup or develop a new service/product/company.

The takeaway: In my opinion, freelancing can make you money but it’s far from ideal. Be sure you are constantly working on your long-term “master plan” behind the scenes so you can better yourself, but make life easier for others as well.

In summary, here’s a simple overview of the freelancer vs. entrepreneur mindset

I’m not saying there’s a hard-line right and wrong between freelancers and entrepreneurs, but there is definitely is a distinction in the mindset of the two. Further, a freelancer can be just as successful as an entrepreneur. In any regard, focus on doing the best possible work you can for your clients/customers and build creditability within your community.

The bottom line: If you want to build a business that continuously makes money while you sleep, you must change your mind set. Develop a strategy to scale your products, services, and yourself while figuring out how to commoditize your knowledge for the masses.

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Have you ever gotten a free razor in the mail? You know, when Gillete or Schick releases a new razor, does one magically appear in your mailbox? I’ve gotten several free razors over the years. Have you ever wondered why they gave you a razor for free? The razor is just the way that you get hooked into buying the company’s more profitable products (the blades). The concept of giving something away at a loss in hopes to hook them is nothing new and this scenario is known as a loss leader. Sometimes it takes guts to run with a loss leader campaign but at the end of the day, it’s smart business… sell the razor blades, not the razor.

This has to be one of the best stories and concepts I’ve heard in a while…sell the razor blades, not the razor. It’s one of those common sense type stories that you might not think about on a day-to-day basis, but when it hits you, you get the ah-hah moment complete with the brightly lit bulb.

I can’t remember where exactly I read about the razor vs. razor blade concept but I do know that the article involved Robert Mondavi, and him teaching his son the concept. Think about all the industries that take advantage of this scenario. For example, Expedia takes guest rooms provided by hotels at a discount, marks them up, and sells them for a profit. Generally speaking, their markups are usually around $20+ a night. Hotels sell them rooms simply because of their large distribution channels and guests book through them because they generally end up with a cheaper rate than booking directly with hotels. $20 gross profit per room + thousands of properties, thousands of interested guests, multiple night stays, you’re beginning to see the power of the model.  They don’t have to deal with guest check-ins, housekeeping, room maintenance, etc. because that would be the razor. Instead, they use their distribution services to sell the blades and let the hotels do the work. Granted their net operating margin declined in 2010 something like 8.5%, their high volume of sales produces quite a bit of money. Quite an effective example of being a middle man if you ask me.

Do you have any other examples you want to share about selling razor blades instead of razors?

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I have no idea where I read/heard this quote from but I had this written down in one of my notebooks from a couple years ago so I thought I’d share with you. Garrison Keillor says, “Be well, do good work, keep in touch” which I think is a truly epic quote because it hits three major areas of being a successful.

Be well

Being well has to deal with staying healthy. If you are sick all the time, you can’t be as useful as if you weren’t sick…pretty straight forward right? Hit the gym, up your vitamin-c intake, whatever you need to do to stay healthy and productive. It’s also important that you don’t get burnt out because you try to take on more things than you can handle. Reduce your work load, learn the art of delegation, set a schedule and stick to it. Reducing stress is vital to long-term health for you and your business’s success.

Do good work

This is an area that I can’t stress enough…do good work. I’m a big believer in the concept of if you’re going to do something, you better do it right or not do it at all. Granted, sometimes there may be special situations where you have constraints such as the luxury of time. But besides those instances, don’t involve yourself with monkey business, half-assery, or BS. If you need me to put it another way: stop chasing every opportunity… quality over quantity.

Keep in touch

Stay in touch with your customers. Learn what their problems are and try to solve them. I think this is an area that a lot of people don’t take advantage of (myself to some degree) but it really is important to stay in touch. An example of a contact schedule of this for web designers might look something like something like this:

• During the initial contract process, keep your client updated about revisions, the status of the project, any potential delays, etc.
• After the project has been completed, make sure you get feedback about the project, how they liked working with you, how you could improve, etc.
• A few months down the road, make sure you do an audit on the website and let the client know about any trends you notice, revisions that could be made, etc. I personally search through client’s analytics data and browse the long-tail for new content creation suggestions on a quarterly basis.

The bottom line is that by being well, doing good work, and keeping in touch, you will keeps your clients happy, build creditability, and make clients feel reassured that they made the right decision in working with you. Unless you’re only after a short-term relationship with your client, keeping in touch will allow you to build long-lasting relationships for future work and referral business. After all, we all know how powerful word-of-mouth can be!

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Foursquare is one the hot new social networking applications based on geosocial/geolocation/location based technology. The particular space they’re in is a very hot topic and given that smart phone demand has been on the rise like crazy recently, the potential is huge. Business owners should definitely keep tabs on this sector (location based services) because we’re talking about another way that can help make or break your company. I’m talking the potential to be as impactful on businesses as online business reviews on traditional websites such as Yelp, Citysearch, BOTW Local, etc. With that in mind, here are some fast facts about the hot new startup:

As far as sector is concerned, there are competitors to Foursquare. Here are other geolocation social networking companies:

• Gowalla
• Brightkite
• Loopt
• Google Latitude
• Fire Eagle
• Hotlist

Do you use any of these services? What do you think of their potential?

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