James Schramko Podcast

Episode highlights:

02:30 – What to expect from this series

04:21 – Does click-through rate affect ranking?

09:17 – What does Google want?

09:38 – Action steps

12:00 – Mobilegeddon and its impact

14:43 – Action steps

15:34 – Is Google displaying these results more?

16:46 – Action steps

20:43 – Quick recap

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Part 2 of the series

Part 3 of the series

Transcription:

James S.: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today is a very special series we're doing, especially relating to SEO. Even more so because it's a counterintuitive SEO tune-up series, it's a three-part series, and I'd like to welcome my guest for these three shows, James Reynolds.

James R.: Hey James! How are you doing?

James S.: Doing great. Now, your name is probably familiar to many of our listeners because you have been involved in certainly the SuperFastBusiness community for many years. Of course recently, you acquired SEOPartner, which is the search engine optimization business that I started, and you became a very active client in. What's that saying, you liked it so much, you bought it.

James R.: [laughs] Pretty much, yeah. Yeah, we've become a very large customer for SEOPartner and was getting fantastic results for us, and it just made sense as the next evolution of my business to bring that supply source in house to service more of our own customers and to reach some new ones. So it's been a really nice progression for the business and a good match for everyone.

James S.: Right. So you've got a few different ways that people deal with you. Of course your main business name is Veravo. You've got a podcast out there as well, called Traffic Jam. You have your agency facing SEO business, is it OK to mention?

James R.: Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

James S.: Yup, that's SEOSherpa.com. And of course, you now own SEOPartner.com, which is predominantly dealing with agencies who deal with end users. Through that department, we always had a very strong research and development focus, with a full time team looking for the next thing, looking for signals in the market, running tests and experiments and keeping an eye on the news. Anyone visiting SEOPartner.com would see the blog gets updated daily with the latest findings from all around the industry.

I think what made you very successful with the SEO was keeping an eye on things out there and having a finger on the pulse. So this series is about some of the select tests that you found that had surprising results. You first talked about this at the SuperFastBusiness Live event in Sydney. You then had a very content-heavy blogpost prepared for SEOSherpa.com, and we'll link to that in the show notes to SEOSherpa.com/seo-experiments, where you detailed 16 experiments.

What we thought we'd do today, over the next few series, we'll just cherry pick some of the most surprising results and go a little bit deeper in...

Discover the 4 things you need to cover in your sales copy to persuade your customers to complete the purchase.

In the interview:

03:21 - What is it exactly you’re offering?

05:28 - A formula to establish your offer

06:15 - The most powerful line

09:40 - A story on product dumping

12:37 - Men vs. women

16:56 - Who are you?

21:16 - Do these cliches still work?

26:07 - Establishing urgency

33:20 - Quantifying time

39:16 - Chewbacca goes viral

Powerful business resources await you inside SuperFastBusiness membership. Click HERE

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. I have my good friend, Kevin Rogers a.k.a. CopyChief.com on the call. Welcome Kevin.

Kevin: Thanks for having me James.

James: Kevin, you've been here before, and you still came back.

Kevin: I did. Yeah. Well it took me this long to heal. But a lot of talk therapy and I have decided to give it another go.

James: The reality is of course that you came over to Australia and presented at SuperFastBusiness Live event. Your presentation was rated as one of the top presentations we've had at the event because the content was incredible. You have an ability to explain things in an easy-to-understand way. I'm not saying that you're simple. I'm just saying that you explain things clearly.

Since the event, we managed to have the recordings and members to SuperFastBusiness who didn't attend the live are still being able to watch it and I constantly get great feedback from your presentation. In fact, recently, I pulled out the 4x6 cards and used them for a project that I was working on because it's still one of the most tangible, easy sales systems to use when it comes to writing up some copywriting or putting an offer in a way that makes sense.

So today, we're going to specifically cover, of the elements of that, so 10 components that you need to know to have great copy. But there are four essential components that I don't think you talked about too often. Maybe one or two of them but certainly a couple of them are overlooked by a lot of marketers. Are you ready to share these with us?

Kevin: Yeah, happy to.

James: This will be awesome. I know that it's hard to sort of compress things down into little jewels because I mean you make a full-time living from CopyChief.com, where you have a copywriting forum. You have lots of copywriters and business owners in there talking about this stuff all day long. Anything we talk about today, if a listener wanted to find out more and dig deeper into any of these topics, I do recommend CopyChief.com. It's the solution that I've been sending people to, whether they're a business owner looking for copywriters or whether they're really interested in tuning up their own sales muscles and wanting to be able to write good copy.

With that said, let's talk about these four essential elements in your 4x6 system. Let's start with the first one.

Kevin: Great. Just to quickly establish, these are the four things that if they're not covered in your sales copy it’s very difficult for your prospect to complete the purchase. Like you said James, some of these are overlooked, some of them are obvious but still not executed as well as they could be, and some are a little less obvious.

What is it?

So number one is the most obvious thing in the world....

Find out why and how SuperFastBusiness switched its logo, and what change can possibly do for your brand.

Podcast highlights:

01:02 - The thinking behind the new SuperFastBusiness logo

03:00 - Does your designer get you?

04:20 - How to help your designer

06:29 - What good design can do

07:34 - From the designer’s perspective

10:10 - Getting pre-launch feedback

14:05 - What customers had to say

16:20 - Key points for a logo design brief

18:22 - Avoiding cliches

20:03 - Some color psychology

22:18 - The lifespan of a logo

23:11 - If you’re thinking of a new look…

24:22 - Why strong branding is essential

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, we're talking about design, so that means I've brought on a design expert. Welcome Greg Merrilees.

Greg: Good day James! How are you man?

James: I'm great. And you are my design expert. Thank you very much.

Greg: Thank you. It's good for me as well. I mean designing for market leaders gives us good exposure. So thanks for being an awesome client.

James: Well you've got a website called Studio1design.com. We're going to be talking about design and the process of design. In particular, why did I change my iTunes logo? That's really the topic. If you've ever seen Zoolander, you're familiar with the blue steel look. Well, we ended up with the orange graphite look or the orange carbon fiber look. Greg, let's talk about the process of what happens between me deciding that I needed to change a logo to us ending up with a new logo. Are you up for that?

Greg: Yeah, sure man, yeah.

The process of changing logos

James: So the first thing is when I was looking through the iTunes logos, I noticed that mine is nice and it kind of fits in with my brands. It's got the usual colors like blue, and a picture of me and the logo of the business. But it's not standing out. It really is not eye-catching. Originally when we did that logo, we were just making it consistent with our Facebook banner and our website, and just being uniform and consistent, but I had this urge to make it really stand out because I've noticed that a lot of the top shows have eye-grabbing podcast logos. And you only get a small bit of real estate and you're in the mix there with hundreds of other podcasts, probably thousands, but let's just limit it to the top 150.

My goal with the podcast is for people to notice my podcast first because I can't get them subscribed until they notice it. Once I get into it, then I want them to be able to easily recognize it when they're scrolling through their list of podcasts or on their Apple TVs, etc.

So the first driver for this was me, in this case, the customer, saying, "Greg, I need my podcast logo to stand out." Let's talk about what flips into your process here. Greg, as the professional designer, what do you do next?

Greg: Yeah. Normally, we would have a pretty in-depth questionnaire for these types of things especially with a new client, but because I know you and I know your audience and we've designed for you quite a few times in the past, your brief to me was literally that, "I need something to stand out, can you show me some radical ideas, I've got no reference, I just want an eye-grabber." Just based on that, what goes through my mind is, 'OK, I know James Schramko. He's straight to the point.

How much fun have you been having lately?

In this episode:

00:28 - A question for you

01:29 - Why you need fun

02:27 - How to have more of it

03:56 - A tip to act on

04:39 - Who do you hang with?

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Transcription:

James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, I've got a question for you. Are you having enough fun?

One thing I've noticed when I'm coaching people, especially at a high-level, is that when I do an onboarding diagnostic, I ask them to rate various aspects of their life from zero to 10. A common one that comes back with a low number is that they have fun or any kind of play or activity that's exciting. I think that's such a shame.

I know that it's very popular out there in the business world to champion seriousness, and workaholism, and grinding and hustling. But there is often not a discussion around balancing that out with fun. You know that I've been speaking about the importance of sleep several times on this podcast. I've even had a sleep expert come along and talk about that. We've done infographics on the topic.

The need for fun

But today I really want to challenge you to incorporate fun into your schedule. Why is it important? I'm pretty sure that if you have fun, you're going to be a nicer person to be around, you will be able to operate your business in a more effective way because it's exhilarating for you and you're recharged for it. You'll probably even live longer. I'm sure there's some science around that if I would look that up. There's a lot of quotes on the topic. "In every real man, a child is hidden that wants to play." That was Friedrich Nietzsche.

So what am I talking about here? I'm talking about breaking up that boredom and stop being so serious. Do something that makes you smile.

"Do something that makes you smile."CLICK TO TWEET

Have something that you look forward to that makes you laugh, that when your head touches that pillow at night, you're really dreaming and looking forward of this fun thing that's coming up, and when you wake up in the morning, you don't need an alarm clock, and you don't have a hangover feeling of overtiredness because you're excited about the thing that you're going to do today.

Make it routine

I actually build in fun to my daily routine. So how do we do this? We think about things that we would do. If we didn't have to work for example. If you just had every day to yourself, which is a great position that a lot of entrepreneurs can get to, and I've experienced a lot more time freedom over the last few years, what is it that you actually gravitate towards? What would you do if you weren't getting paid for and it didn't matter? I'll give you a couple of ideas.

You might be looking at things like PlayStation, surfing, cycling, going to the gym, visiting places, like theme parks or zoos; maybe you do skiing, or water sports, or mountain sports; boat trips, jet skis, maybe you like to go to the movies during the week. Imagine that, during the week between nine to five, going to the movies.

Discover the extras that will make your website both attractive to visitors and more profitable for your business.

Episode highlights:

02:14 - This gives you full control of your brand

03:40 - What happens to a mock-up

06:39 - The back and forth that occurs

08:54 - Getting to know the customer

10:40 - Preventing shopping cart abandonment

13:39 - Are you surveying your visitors?

16:21 - Understanding your visitor’s behavior

19:20 - Quick summary

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Part 1 of the series

Part 2 of the series

Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. This is actually part three of our Website Tune-Up Series. I have my good friend and long-time website development partner and owner of RecommendWP.com, Dave Wooding.

Dave: Hey James! Thanks again for having me here. I appreciate it.

James: We've been having fun on this series. We've been helping people tune up their website. If we go back to the first episode, we were talking about what to do when your website is broken and how to even know if it's broken. We were talking about mobile-responsiveness, hosting, images, broken themes, Frankensteins, broken cores, all that good stuff. If you haven't listened to that episode, go back and have a listen to that episode just to make sure that your website is working properly.

Then in the second episode, we talked about going beyond the basics. How to actually add content properly using a schedule and an orderly sequence of having the correct page titles, and tags, categories, images, and headlines, and lists. That was just good basics. And then we sort of delved into how to connect things like autoresponders and membership solutions and making sure we pick the right solution. And you got the right person to help you hook it up. So they can all be automated. People can move seamlessly from your website to a membership solution and they can pay you, and if they no longer pay then it stops them having access. All of those good things. They're totally achievable, they're fully automatable, and you should be enjoying that.

Today, we're going into the supercharged stuff. In our Website Tune-Up Series, we're going to talk about what can we do now to take it up a notch. We'll have a look at some of the things that I'm doing with my website and that Dave's helping people with at a high level. Let's kick off with the first one, Dave, and that would have to be having your own custom design. Why is it important to have a custom design instead of just grabbing something off the shelf?

Why do you need to have your own custom design?

Dave: So custom design basically gives you full control over the look and feel of what you want to present out to the world. You can definitely get some good pre-done themes, get them customized a little bit to match what you want, but if you want to go the full route and you want to have for instance a site that's truly dedicated to a sales page that has a call to action or presents v...

Part 2 of the Website Tune-Up Series tackles content, behind-the-scenes setup and how to integrate with other services in your business.