Yahoo!’s Cancellation Of Their Employees’ Ability To Work From Home

The news about Yahoo! no longer allowing their employees to work from home anymore opens up quite a few issues about “work”, productivity, and results. The main focus on the articles I’ve read about it focus on whether employees “slack off” when they’re working from home, or whether the studies are true that working from home actually increases productivity by 10% – 20%.

To me, those aren’t the main questions:

Of COURSE employees “slack off” when they’re working from home… Just like they slack off when they’re in the office. The only difference is, at home they can slack off in their pajamas. By one estimate, the number of hours of *actual concentrated work* that gets done per day by the average white collar worker is about 2 to 3.

Regardless of what the actual number of productive hours is (2, 3, 4, 5) that still leaves plenty of downtime. A lot of bosses would prefer knowing their employees are at least stuck in a cubicle during that downtime instead of watching TV at home – even though the end result is the same.

Personally, I can’t get creative work done in a noisy office / workspace.

In my last business, I had an office with several employees working there, and even with my office door closed, hearing muffled phone calls and discussions in the background were enough to distract me when I was trying to write sales letters and to other creative activities.

Eventually I just started working in the peace and quiet of my home office (much better!) and only coming in to the actual workplace about once a week for a couple of hours. Luckily, I had a business partner who didn’t mind being in the office to keep the employees in line.

We did have salaried employees working from their homes in other parts of the country, and it worked out well because they delivered the results I asked for, and that’s what doing a job should be all about – results.

Working from home benefits the efficient.

I worked at McDonald’s in high school taking orders, and my customer line at my register literally moved twice as fast as some of my fellow employees’ lines.  Did I get paid twice as much? -Nope. In fact, after working there for over a year and getting my first raise from $3.10/hour (minimum wage) to $3.20 an hour (a ten-cent an hour raise), a couple months later the minimum wage was raised to $3.35, and my ten-cents above minimum wage raise wasn’t retained, meaning I was back to working for minimum wage just like someone who had been hired yesterday.

Most businesses don’t reward results nearly enough.

If you hire two website designers, one at $20/hour and the other at $40/hour who do identical work, and the $40/hour worker works three times as fast as the $20/hour worker, which worker is cheaper? -The more expensive one.

Most businesses don’t pay one of their employees double just because the accomplish more than twice as much as other employees. So you wind up with this:

Super-productive “top” employees get frustrated, because they’re working harder/faster than others but not getting rewarded for it. Their solution: Find another job.

Letting good employees have “flex time” by working from home is one way to reward them if you don’t want to pay them more: Working at home, they can finish their work when they finish, without being stuck in an office for the full 8 hours. They’re way less likely to leave and look for another job that’ll force them to be in an office full-time.

The whole discussion is interesting to me, because it gets to the heart of how to gauge someone’s value, how to gauge their results and productivity, and makes you realize that for a lot of jobs, having a warm body in the office for 40 hours a week says absolutely nothing about what actual work or value you’re getting from them.

In Sales, It’s What You DON’T Say That Closes The Deal

As you know, your sales letter and your selling process are the most critical thing to your success. You’ve probably heard lots of tips on what you SHOULD say in your sales letters to increase response. Today I want to talk about something equally (if not more) important:

What you SHOULDN’T say.

Writing a successful sales letter is like building a house of cards. The whole thing can come toppling down through a single misstep, through a single error. In writing sales letters, the thing that’ll kill response more than anything else is to make a statement that appears to the reader to be untrue.

A sales letter is based on the claims made by the writer, and a good sales letter backs up those claims as much as possible with facts, figures, and information.  But ultimately, it’s not the facts and figures that convince the reader to buy, it’s the trust that is built in the sales letter.

This is an important point:

A sales letter can quote all the facts, statistics, and information in the world, but the reader still has to take most of the claims made on faith. If the reader has any reason to mistrust the statements made in the sales letter, you’ve just lost a sale.

Consider this example:

Let’s say you tell your spouse that you’re going to visit a friend for awhile and that you’ll be home by 8:00pm.

At 3:30am, you walk in the front door.

Your spouse is livid: “Where were you? What happened? Why didn’t you call?!!”

Then you start into your sales pitch. (The sales pitch you’re using to try to avoid being kicked out of the house:)

“Well, you know my friend lives halfway up the mountain, and on my way up I blew out a tire and was stuck on the side of the road. My cell phone didn’t get any reception up there, and I realized we didn’t have a spare tire in the car. I kept trying to flag down other drivers, but no one would stop. It was awful, I was stuck there with no way to contact you for hours…”

So far so good, that sounds like a reasonable explanation. Then you go one step too far:

“…And that’s when the spaceship landed and I was abducted!”

-Oops. Pack your bags, the sales pitch failed.

Here’s important point #2:

For the sake of effectiveness of the ad, it doesn’t matter whether the statement that appears to be untrue is true or not – Obviously, I don’t expect you to lie in your sales letters, (that’s illegal!) but if it APPEARS to be untrue to the reader, you’ve made a terrible mistake.

Here’s an example:

A few years ago, I did a wacky sales experiment, and offered $100 bills FREE on the Internet. All the recipient had to do was pay the $10 s&h fee to have the money rushed to them by overnight delivery.

It wasn’t a lie: I was fully prepared to give $100 to the first person who responded, but no one did  – Because it SOUNDED like a lie.

That’s an extreme example, but it doesn’t have to be that extreme for the House of Cards to fall.

Another example:

I was recently reading a pretty strong sales letter for an online product that came with resell rights. It looked good until the author said something like:

“If you just sell one copy a day, you’ll make $xx,xxx in a year. Anybody can do THAT. Heck, my GRANDMOTHER could do it!”

- Warning – Warning – HOUSE OF CARDS FALLING!!!!

OK, guess what: That’s a load of crap. “Anybody can sell one a day for a year, even my Grandmother.” That’s an out-and-out blatant lie. These types of exaggerations can just kill your response, because they cause your potential reader to not trust you – and for good reason!

When I’m hired to rewrite clients’ existing ad copy, what I remove from their existing ad is often as important as what I add.

Here’s a checklist of things you should leave out, or at the very least test leaving out (you shouldn’t make any changes to your sales letter without testing the response -It’s impossible to predict what will help or hurt an ad, the only way to know for sure is to a/b test it.)

1. 1) Information that doesn’t lead to the sale (cut out all sales letter “filler” and just keep the bare-bones info that promotes the sale).-Your sales letter can be as long as it needs to be to provide all the relevant facts, but it still has to be concise, and everything in it needs to lead to the sale. Don’t include a laundry list of things in the sales letter that don’t strengthen your case.
2. Dubious claims EVEN IF THEY’RE TRUE, unless you take the time to back them up with unquestionable proof.
3. Prompts to order before you’ve stated your case fully. You need to have proven the value of what it is you’re offering before you throw a price at your prospect, otherwise your prospect won’t fully understand the value of what you’re offering, will probably think your price is too high, and stop reading the sales letter before you’ve fully educated them of the value of what you’re offering.

In Conclusion:

Read your sales letter with “new eyes” from your potential customers’ point of view, and see what you can REMOVE from your sales letter to increase its effectiveness.

Think of it this way: Your potential prospect is like a scared rabbit who has been attacked in the past by all types of marketing predators. Have you ever tried to catch a frightened animal you were trying to help that thought you were the enemy? It’s tough!

The only way you can hope to succeed is to quietly, carefully convince the rabbit that you’re approaching it to try and help, that you’re not a predator. It takes patience. It takes soothing talk.

Every false or questionable claim, every boorish statement, every push for a sale that’s not in step with the natural selling progression will send your “rabbit” high-tailing it for the hills, and for good reason.

Happy “hunting”.

To your success, Tim Gross

P.S. – Everything I talk about presumes you are selling a worthwhile product that will enhance your customers’ lives in some way. If you’re not, no amount of marketing techniques will keep you succeeding for long.

How To Create Your Own Online Monopoly

A typical question asked by beginning affiliates is: “Can I link directly from my ad to the affiliate page, or do I need my own landing page first?”

The answer is, “It depends”. But more importantly, it’s the wrong question to ask.

Most people want to simplify their sales process, but the best way to increase your success is to complicate it.

Here’s why…

One of the great – and horrible – things about doing business online is that it’s so easy and inexpensive to get started. For a few bucks anybody can register and host a website which essentially “puts them in business”.

It’s great because it lets YOU start an online business cheaply and easily. It’s horrible because it allows other people to also start cheaply and just copy what you’re doing successfully.

So unless you’ve got some “hush-hush” traffic source or resource that gives you some type of advantage, how can you compete with these people who want to knock you off?

Answer: By making it harder for them to compete with you.

The simpler your sales process is, the easier it is for others to copy you. If you have a one-page sales letter that’s doing really well, others will see that and just copy what you’re doing.

If you’re having potential customers subscribe for more info and then using a followup series of emails to help make the sale, that’s harder to copy.

If you have multiple upsells for related products and post-purchase products, that makes it even harder for a competitor to copy you.

If you’re using video presentations, if you have strong testimonials, if you’re going out of your way to establish trust with your potential customers, if you’re selling with your own unique voice and personality, all of those things make it harder to compete with you.

Your ultimate goal is this:

You want a potential competitor to look at what you’re doing, and think, “Ugh, that looks like to much effort and work to compete with this, I’m going to target a different niche.”

…And that is how you can build your own little “monopoly” by making it harder for your competitors to copy you and make them not think it’s even worth the effort.

My Free Sales Letter Generator Is New And Improved

A lot of people take advantage of my free sales letter generator, and I’m glad they do… You just follow the recommended steps for each block of text using my examples, click the button, and you’ve got a complete sales letter guaranteed to include the proven, most effective elements needed to increase response.

I just improved the output page formatting, so it’s ready for you to copy & paste into your own sales page. Not only does it force you to follow the basic steps of a good sales letter, but it’s great for overcoming writer’s block, because instead of staring at a blank page, you’re just editing each individual element.

By following the simple steps, you’ll wind up with a superior sales letter almost automatically, and it only takes roughly 20 minutes.  Need a better sales letter? Click here to try it now, I think you’ll be pleased.

Don’t “Spam” Your Own Customers

I received what looked like a typical spam email today, it even had the words “work at home” in the return email address URL. I normally wouldn’t bother, but I did a search in my inbox for the sender’s name, and surprise surprise… I had purchased a  software script from his company a couple months ago.

The software was quite good, but I wouldn’t remember the seller’s name if my life depended on it. And that’s why in my opinion he’s making such a big (and incredibly common) mistake in sending out his newsletter updates.

Back in the olden days of the Internet (10 years ago, when you’d lose your connection if the hamsters got tired) overzealous spam filters would punish you for having any “subscription / why you’re receiving this” language in your emails, so some people removed them.

I didn’t and never have… I’d rather have a few emails get blocked than to have people not remember subscribing. If you’re on any of my subscriber lists, at the top of every email is something like this:

{!firstname}, You sub-scribed on {!signdate ss}) when you you either purchased a product from me or subscribed for video training. If you no longer want updates, just click the link at the bottom of this email.

I highly recommend using similar language if you have subscribers you email. Why would you want your recipients to misidentify your (hopefully valuable) communication that they requested as unwanted spam?!

For specific product lists, my “you’re receiving this because…” message is even more specific, listing the specific product or website they purchased from.

(Oh and by the way, if you’re reading this and are NOT subscribed to my free online newsletter, well that’s just crazy… You’ll get instant access to over 6 hours of valuable video training as well as other bonuses. You can subscribe right now at: http://www.InternetMarketingCourse.com )

Anyway… Remind people who you are. For instance, I’m the guy who’s been running online businesses since 1994 and goes in spurts of creating really helpful marketing training for his subscribers and readers mixed with disappearing for months at a time when he’s working on other things that grab his interest, heh.

How To Create Successful Banners (With Before/After Examples)

I’ve done a lot of banner advertising, and there are some very simple ways to increase your click through rate and the success of your banners.

I’ve actually taken a bunch of banners and re-worked them to show what I would do to improve their effectiveness. The actual critiques start at the 2-minute mark:

In the above examples I’m dealing with some very small banners, 234×60 pixels, which is the size allowed in signature files on the Warrior Forum, but the same ideas and techniques apply to all other banners as well.

If you have any questions or comments about it, let me know.
-Tim

Future Of Display Advertising (According To Google)

Google made predictions about what the future of display advertising will be like in 2015. What with them being SkyNet and all, I figure we should take their predictions seriously.

Anyone involved in direct response marketing should be very wary of this statement:

Today, the “click” is the most important way that advertisers measure their display ad campaigns, but it’s not always the best measure especially if an ad campaign is designed to boost things like brand awareness or recall. With new measurement technologies emerging, in five years, there will be five metrics that advertisers commonly regard as more important than the click.

With that said, I’ll be curious to see what their magical five metrics will be.

To me, the most interesting development for video ad formats they’re rolling out with is:

We demonstrated some new video ad formats we’ve been testing on YouTube that we’re calling “TrueView”. These will roll out later this year. These ad formats give people the option to skip an ad if they don’t want to watch, or to choose from multiple ads the one they want to watch. Importantly, advertisers only pay if the user chooses to watch their ad.

I’ve had ongoing success in the past with “forced choice” banner ads, where a user has to choose between certain banners to click on in order to access whatever it is they want. There are tricks to it, and I’ll be watching these developments very closely.

Ethics & Legalities Of Being An Affiliate Marketer

There have been multiple forum threads lately about people believing it’s OK to copy (steal) a vendor’s squeeze page without asking for permission and put it on their affiliate site to build their own list to promote the vendor’s product.

The belief seems to be that since they know a couple of vendors that wouldn’t care if they did that,  somehow they extrapolate that to believe that ALL vendors/merchants are OK with that.

It’s a fallacious argument. The truth is, it’s both unethical AND illegal to do that. Let’s look at why:

Simply put, the vendor’s promotional materials are copyrighted, and just because you’re an affiliate doesn’t give you permission to use anything they don’t give you permission to use. Case closed.

Here’s just some of the ways a vendor could be damaged by affiliates who do this:

Subscribers to the affiliate squeeze page (which looks just like the vendor’s own squeeze page because it was taken verbatim, including the logo, etc) could be mislead into subscribing to a list they don’t want to be on. That’s deceptive.

Continuing on, the affiliate could choose to promote the vendor’s offer through followup emails that are hypey or misrepresent the product offered. It’s nothing new for affiliates to over-hype an offer, but subscribers could mistakenly attribute the hype to be coming from the vendor, not the affiliate.

The affiliate could promote competing products to their list that was built through using the vendor’s squeeze page.  In other words, the affiliate is leveraging the vendor’s creatives to build a list they promote other products for other than the vendor.

The squeeze page that was copied could have a “test headline” that the vendor quickly decided wasn’t appropriate. For instance, maybe a weight loss vendor did a quick test of “Lose 10 Pounds In 7 Days Guaranteed” as the squeeze page headline, only to learn that it breaks the FTC advertising guidelines regarding specific results claims.

Even if the vendor quickly changes their headline to be in compliance, if rogue affiliates copied that potentially illegal headline and continued to use it while representing themselves to BE the vendor, the vendor could come under scrutiny of the FTC due to the affiliate’s use of their squeeze page headline.

Those examples just scratch the surface of all the reasons why it’s damaging to the vendor for affiliates to use/steal their content without permission.

Most vendors provide an affiliate tools section for affiliates, giving them banners, text links, headlines, and ad creatives for them to use. That’s what the tools section is for: To tell affiliates what they CAN use.

Affiliate marketing covers an enormous amount of ground. Someone who is primarily a Clickbank affiliate may get the impression that vendors in general don’t care too much about how a sale is made as long as they make money.

On the flipside, an affiliate network like Commission Junction has merchants that explicitly state all the many ways that affiliates are not allowed to promote them.

Some people try to weasel away from the issue by saying, “I always think it’s better to ask for forgiveness rather than ask permission” News Flash: When it comes to copyright theft, that’s a terrible idea.  You can get sued for doing it ONCE, and it doesn’t matter what your stated intentions are.

If you don’t believe, me, Google this phrase:  sued for using without permission

On a final note, I learned my lesson about not doing something that “everyone else is doing so it must be OK” in High School. Parking was full at my local beach, but there were about 100 cars all parked on the road leading to the beach that had “no parking” signs on it.

I figured… Well, if there’s 100 other cars doing it, it must be OK.

When I walked back to my car a few hours later, every single car on the road had a parking ticket on it, including mine.  Lesson learned.

When it comes to online business regarding copyrights and trademarks, the rules ARE posted, and it’s your job to find them and understand them. Saying, “I didn’t know” after you use copyrighted material (whether it’s text, images, whatever) doesn’t get you un-sued.

My Recommended Video Production Tools

I’ve been doing a lot of video product stuff lately and have gotten multiple questions about what gear (camcorders, mics) I use and what software programs I use to edit, so I’m going to list what I use and recommend.

Camcorders

I’ve just upgraded to the Canon HF S100 for HD video:
Canon VIXIA HF S100 HD Flash Memory Camcorder with 10x Optical Zoom

Here’s what I like about it:

1. Tapeless, so I don’t have to capture video from tape to computer, which always seems like a hassle.
2. Also, with my last video camera the tape created a “buzz” sound that got picked up by the internal audio which was annoying.  Since this is tapeless, there’s no tape buzz noise.
3. Very high-def HD at maximum settings. I’ve got a good video-editing computer to handle these large files.  For slower computers, it can take awhile to work with large video files.

Keep in mind expense-wise that if you get a flash memory-based camcorder like that you’re either going to need to get a 16 GB Flash Memory Card minimum (around $40) or a 32 GB Flash Memory Card (around $90) as well as the camcorder.

If you’d rather use a camcorder that uses tapes, I recommend:
Canon VIXIA HV40 HD HDV Camcorder with 10x Optical Zoom

I was using the older version (HV20) until it broke recently. If it hadn’t broken, I’d still be using it.  Benefits of the HV40:

1. It records to tape, and tape is cheap to archive (ie, store the full tape and you’ve always got a backup)
2. Video isn’t compressed like it is with flash drives. Some people think the video quality is slightly higher.

One thing to be aware of:  With the above 2 camcorders, they’re recording in HD and you can’t just burn them to DVD, you need to use software to convert them to the smaller DVD format.  That’s fine when I’m using it to create my training videos and I want to have the highest quality possible.

However, if I’m recording family events or personal stuff, recording in HD is too much trouble.  Non-HD camcorders still do a very nice quality job.  For a non-HD (tapeless) camcorder, I recommend:
Sony DCR-SR45 30GB Hard Drive Handycam Camcorder with 40x Optical Zoom

1. The file sizes are much smaller
2. Records in standard 720×480 so it’s easier to burn to DVD
3. Easier to edit video on slower computers

Microphones For Camcorders

Built-in microphones for camcorders are OK, but they’re not great.  If you have one of the above Canon Camcorders, the easiest upgrade is to get
Rode VideoMic Directional Shotgun Mic w/Mount

…It’s just a mic that mounts on the top of your video camera, and it significantly improves audio quality.

1. Good for recording multiple people talking
2. Improves audio quality and comes with a direct attachment so you don’t need any other hardware to mount it on your video camera.

When I’m recording myself speaking into the camera, I use a “Lavalier Mic”, those are the little lapel clip-on mics that you see people wearing on talk shows.  I spent a lot of time checking out the audio quality versus price of different lavalier mics, and I decided on:
Audio-Technica AT899 – Wireless microphone

It does a really nice job, very impressive.  You need a microphone XLR-to-3.5mm adapter if you want to connect it to the lavalier mic to your camcorder, just a little adapter like this:
3.5mm (M) – XLR(F), (wired for stereo mics.), 1 ft.

Video Editing Software

I’ve always stuck with the Sony Vegas software for video editing, I’ve found it much easier to learn and more intuitive than Adobe Premiere and other products.  I went all-out and bought the full video editing package last year:
Sony Vegas Pro 9 Professional Video, Audio and Blu-ray Disc Creation Software for Windows – Slip Sleeve Version

However, it is a little pricey.  There’s a simpler version that I also purchased first (I own version 8, it’s virtually the same), it limits the number of audio and video tracks you can add to your products, but in practicality you don’t usually need more tracks than it provides anyway.

Considering it only costs about 25% of the above pro version, it’s an extremely good bargain:    Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 Platinum Pro Pack

If you’re trying to make decisions on video production gear and software, I hope the above recommendations are helpful. The above products have worked very well for me, and I spent a lot of time researching each of them before I purchased.

P.S. -Be very cautious about buying electronics from websites with crazy-low prices that you’ll find listed in those “shopper/comparison” type websites.  Those comparison-type sites will show 5-star or 4-star ratings for questionable companies because they make commisions when you buy, but if you want accurate feedback on websites selling electronics gear check somewhere like reseller ratings.