Website Building Chronicles - 4 - Facebook

I've spent the last couple days learning about Facebook marketing and how I can use it for my new edu-site - HomeschoolDad.com.

I purchased the young lady above's product for $97 and am powering through the 20 training videos. (It might be a little pricey for what it is, nonetheless it is helpful.)

I must say that despite being a Headbook-hater, the immense power of the platform is not to be denied - especially for someone looking to sell a product. It's really opened my eyes.

Facebook basically killed the growth of this blog - and it did so in two ways.

First, everyone started spending all their time on the social network; they stopped prowling the web for interesting and hilarious blogs.

And secondly, I myself never took the time to promote Marginalizing Morons on Facebook. I tried for a minute but didn't know what I was doing.

I'm seeing now that although my blog is too *general* for Google keyword optimization and promotion....that there are still many ways I could have, and can successfully promote it on Headbook.

Whatever, moving forward...

I think Facebook is so powerful from a marketing standpoint, that a well-done Fan Page can conceivably even preclude the need for a website altogether.

It's just easier for word-of-mouth and links to go viral on it than via the vast World Wide Web of unconnected and mostly anonymous people.

So I'm working on the HomeschoolDad.com Fan Page, among many other things, at the moment.

Oh and I also subscribed to a few Facebook marketing blogs. Thankfully, there doesn't seem to be too much to learning and implementing the basics.

See also:

Website Building Chronicles 1 - For Morons

Website Building Chronicles 2 - Eben Pagan Selling Me On Change

Website Building Chronicles 3 - The Sales Letter

Website Building Chronicles - 3 - The Sales Letter

Do y'all know what a *sales letter* is?

Of course you get them in your junk(!) mail nearly everyday.

But they are alive and thriving online too. In fact they are all over the freakin' place since stamps are cheaper on the web.

These days I've been working on my own for HomeschoolDad.com.

One expert resource I've found is Dan Kennedy. I had previously read one of this other books and was very impressed. All these other guys (like Eben Pagan) mention him repeatedly and Kennedy certainly lives up the hype, IMO.

I just procured Kennedy's The Ultimate Sales Letter: Attract New Customers. Boost your Sales., I devoured it, and must say it was very helpful.

You have to understand that these guys have VAST experience; they've split-tested everything from fonts to formats to diction; and have amassed expertise that we could never acquire independently.

Heck Kennedy's book is only $10 AND I did one better - borrowing it from my library.

The other thing you can do, of course, is just read a bunch of successful sales letters/pitches online!

In fact Tim Ferriss recently did a blog post on the dude who's made tens of million$ from "The Truth About Six-Pack Abs" info-products. So I watched his sales videos closely and jotted down a few important notes.

Building a sales page, website, ebooks, etc. is a *process*. What I've learned is to overcome my school-induced perfectionism and to just throw something up and tweak/refine on the go.

I grabbed some popular software to help make snazzy sales pages - OptimizePress - for $97 or so.

Actually when I'm done I will have SEVERAL sales pages to which I'll direct different audiences depending upon demographics, specific group bigotries, etc.

One thing that's holding me back, still, is that I'm not entirely clear WHAT I'm selling and TO WHOM.

But the more research and brainstorming I do, the more clarity I'm gaining.

See also:

Website Building Chronicles 1 - For Morons

Website Building Chronicles 2 - Eben Pagan Selling Me On Change

Website Building Chronicles - 2 - Eben Pagan Selling Me On Change

The guy is one of the biggest names in internet marketing. Apparently he's already sold over $100 million worth of info-products online. Some of you might recognize him as *David D'Angelo* of *Double Your Dating* fame.

Anyways I paid $1997 last week to sign up for his Guru Masterclass - in hopes that it would get me moving along with HomeschoolDad.com.

Well so far it most certainly has. I've learned from him that my innate aversion to *sales/marketing* is something I HAVE to exorcise if I want to remake myself as an edu-coach.

He's got me working on all the basic sales tactics that many of y'all who've been in that line of work are no doubt familiar with: an elevator pitch, copywriting, understanding the prospective customer, etc.

While most of it appears to be commonsense I submit it MOST CERTAINLY IS NOT. Plus it represents a whole new mindset for me. Eben asserts that online wantrepreneurs should spend 80% of their time on MARKETING and only 20% of their time on the PRODUCT. That certainly sounds shady, does it not? Whatever. Like it ain't SHADY to work for a hedge fund, a morally bankrupt corporation, the government, be a union thug,...

There are all these scientifically proven lines of conversation, tactics if you will, to get a customer to essentially do whatever you tell them . It's all about emotional hot buttons, sequencing, selling *benefits* instead of products, etc. For a successful marketer, the key is to not just help people, but more accurately you have to *help them help themselves* AND they will magically pay whatever you charge! Eben preaches this as nothing short of gospel.

I already gave it a whirl, sort of, and this new mindset landed me $12 or so right off the bat.

Yesterday there was a guy at the driving range next to me hitting balls. I instantly noticed that he was making a common error with his swing. A few minutes later his wife came by and told him that they had to go, that they were up next on the tee. Now I hit balls at this course a lot - recall I bought 40,000 range balls there last summer - and usually Hackers get to the course late, foolishly buy more balls than they can hit, and then have to leave a bunch at the range when called to the first tee. Obviously, ball-beaters like me scoop those extras right up.

I said to myself, I bet if I give that guy a tip on his swing he'll give me the balance of his range balls. But what a manipulative, slimy thought, right?

Well I interrupted his practice and told him he was casting real bad, releasing his wrist cock at the top of the swing. About 5 shots later he was beaming and thanked me profusely - even loudly asserting that I should *teach*. He then handed me an entire jumbo bucket of balls that he had sitting there and ran off to the tee.

Now I didn't know he had that many balls he had left but nonetheless, I was positively chilled by the way this played out - how the transaction unfolded just as I imagined.

The balls? Well a year or so later I've hit about 23,000 of them. My left hand is always calloused BUT my swing is at a whole new level!

See also - Website Building Chronicles - 1 - For Morons.

Website Building Chronicles 1 - For Morons

Even though I've been blogging for 6 years, there's a lot that I DO NOT KNOW about web publishing. In fact, since I've been using the user-friendly Blogger.com I never had to learn even the BASICS.

First you have to buy a domain name for $10 through GoDaddy or someone else. For lack of a better idea (and available keywords!), I bought HomeschoolDad.com. There's nothing there, probably won't be much on it for a while, and I may indeed find a better domain and switch it....but for the meantime that's my new site.  Trust me, it most certainly will not look like that much longer.

Then you have to pay someone to *host* your content - I'm using DreamHost for something like $5 a month.

These are the easy steps that most of y'all, even the Luddites, know well.

But then I installed Wordpress - a *semantic personal publishing platform* - and the complications started to arise, er....the learning curve started to steepen.

Normal blog publishing can be done in much the same manner as with Blogger.com - by going to the right website and simply *logging in*.

But the major reason for going with Wordpress is that as an *open source* platform, one can add all sorts of gadgets, plugins, and software embellishments to the bones of their website. Many are free but the good, snazzy ones cost $$$$ and, to the frustration of relative n00bs like myself, require manual installation and potentially mid-level HTML coding.

Another thing I learned, after a few hours of angst on Saturday, is that to communicate with my new website, I have to FTP - File Transfer Protocol - whatever files (i.e. software, plugins, video files, PDFs...) I want to utilize on my website. Who knew? For that you have to download one of the many FTP programs available. Upon the advice of Paul Mitchell, who's much further along with his commercial website....I went with Core FTP Lite. And even after figuring all that out, downloading the uploader, and whatnot I still had problems zipping files up to my website. I had the freakin' *port number* wrong!

Apparently there's a whole lot more to it. There's *encryption* for FTP-ing; I can enable others (*clients*?) to upload files to my website; etc. Arrgghh!!

Meanwhile I'm still baffled by *roots*, *subdomains*, *directories*, etc. I never know what files go where OR what 80% of the files I see in these folder freakin' are. Such are the bumps and potholes along the stubborn DIY path, I guess.

I told y'all I was a n00b!!!

Though the wealth of techno-information I have get up to speed on is vast and daunting, not only am I fully capable, it's also invigorating to USE MY BRAIN for a change. And that was one of the major problems with my career as a trader. After 15 years watching the tape, I could trade with my eyes closed. Someone could give me $100 billion today to allocate and I could do it without ANY of that useless analyst research, without a trading desk *team*, without expensive *sales-trader* brokers, without reading the WSJ, etc. All I would really need is a PC and a buxom secretary and I'll bet my positions would just as *good* as what these slick skimmers come up with.