Thank you very much Derek. It’s really, really fun to be talking with you today.

I’m a geek by nature. I went to school and got my degree being a geek and being a software architect. I’ve always been in technology. I’ve always been lucky enough to be on the leading edge of a lot of different kinds of technology build.

Then I grew up in a family where my dad owned his own business. He was a general contractor who built houses and apartments and things like that in San Diego area. I think there have always been lots of different ways that were pointing to Kim is going to be an entrepreneur.

If I look back in my life I like to make a difference.

I’ve always wanted to make a difference for small businesses and it’s taken me a while to get here. My first company I created … we had this technology and I always worked for large companies. Wells Fargo’s Star Tribune in the twin cities. Used to be the 16th major metropolitan newspaper. You know what happened to newspapers.

At any rate, I started my company so that I could help small business. My first company that I created I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t create how to make it affordable for that small business market. I just couldn’t make it sustainable.

In about 2007 I had this “aha” moment where I realized what we could do and that was the forming and the creation of Genoo. Of course, it was also the big downturn in the economy in 2008. Timing not necessarily on my side but at any rate we were still growing and moving.

I keep looking for the leverage point for small business and that’s really been my focus – entrepreneurs and small business. I think that they mostly get the short end of the stick a lot. They’re the least likely to have all the resources to really do what needs to be done to really grow and yet they have to cobble all these different kinds of things together or be really, really reliant on the technologist to help them.

My whole thing is, how do we circumvent that? How do we empower those folks to really do well? That’s the driving factor behind what I do. I created a company to help do that. I was told by a lot of people “You don’t have a company. You’ve got a techie idea.” I just kept moving forward.

We’ve just put some things together and people seem to like what they get from us and the support that we provide and on we go.

On top of that you call a company to ask for help and then they tell you, “Well it’s not us. Go call someone else.” Or you’ve got your WordPress site. Say you have a WordPress site and you end up having an issue. You contact the plugin company that you’re trying to figure out and they say, “Disable all the plugins on your site.”

You still have the problem and you’re like, “My site is up. It’s operating. I’m taking money right now. I have an ecommerce site. What do you mean just turn everything off and see if I still have a problem? What are you talking about?” You have that too.

Here’s a couple of things I see. The first one is people … well nobody likes to admit this anymore and if you ask and it’s embarrassing to say but most people are still doing this and that’s sending an email to their entire list every time they send an email or batch and blast no matter what.

If I have a list and I’m going to send an email, I got to send it to the entire list. If you’re using Constant Contact or an AWeber or whatever, all you have are lists. You just have to choose which one are you going to send to.

That’s the part where people are going to get a big wakeup call that don’t start to wake up already.

I have an answer for that.

You can’t.

Doesn’t work.

Even MailChimp at the cheap end you can’t do … It’s all list based sending. You can only know certain things about that list as well. That’s part of what the problem is.

They can’t tell you really what a person or an email address basically on your list is actually interested in. All you get is this is what link they clicked and we have more and more statistics that show that doesn’t necessarily even tell you intent or tell you real interest.

You do have problems there, I agree. The current state of things and even when you watch public television here in the US I see over and over ads for Constant Contact.

You’re an email marketer and they show you how to put a coupon and blast it out to your entire list and all your customers. Now you’re a modern marketer. This is their ads and they have them running. It’s like, “Oh my God!”

That’s all you can get from that solution. I see them run here in public television. All the time we’re seeing those ads.

Yeah.

Here’s my first one. This is stunning. This shocked me actually when I found out about it. I couldn’t believe it. Do you know that the majority of bloggers out there on the internet today, people who are blogging, have no idea who their blog subscribers are?

They don’t know who they are. They might know how many they have but I think it’s only like 25% or 30% that actually know who they are.

Yeah they subscribe through speed burner or whatever. They have no idea who their blog subscribers really are. They’re using a blog email system where it’s all in a separate system. It’s not in anything that you can ever know anything about. That’s blog subscribers.

On top of that, imagine now we all know we get a lot of blog comment spam but the ones who actually take the time to comment that are legit you don’t know who those people are either. They comment on your blog. They’re actually engaged with you and yet you don’t know who they are. These are people that are interested in you. They’re interested in what you’re doing.

By God if they click the subscribe to my blog button which is the most generic form of call to action and you don’t know who they are and yet what you want is a list and the money is in the list and you want to send it, why don’t you know who they are?

Why don’t you care about not only that they subscribe but when you do an update to your blog, what are they reading? What are they clicking through on? What are they engaging with? Figuring these things out is as important as figuring out how to get more subscribers.

You don’t have any intelligence into that at all. To me seems to be a squandering of some really good capital that you can get there. For me number one is know who they are and pay attention and have a system that lets you know who they are.

Here’s the challenge and we said it right at the beginning. I want to start a blog so I just start doing a blog. Then it’s like, “I need to figure out how to get more subscribers.” You try and hook all the things together to get the subscribers in a way that you would know who they are.

If it takes you more than 3 hours to try and figure that out and I’ve seen people they’re like, “I spend a day and a half getting my thing set up with active campaign and now it’s finally working. Phew!” People only have so much patience and then they’re going to be like, “Hey just this solution.”

You won’t know who they are, but hey, I’m off to the races and people are at least getting emails. I don’t know who they are and I don’t know what they’re doing with the emails but they’re getting them. Then they’ll like me enough that they’ll come back and then maybe I’ll at some point find out who they are.

You just give away that part of your business or that part of being in control of things because it’s too hard to figure out.

I think that’s it also.

This one goes off the first one too. Number two is there are two critical questions to ask before publishing any blog post. Most people just publish their posts. They have standard sidebar that is the same on every single post that you have and you probably have subscribed to my blog thing on the call to action on your sidebar.

Here’s the thing that people are missing when working out how to get more subscribers. Here’s the first question. If a visitor loves this post, what could I provide that would deepen their knowledge or allow them to personalize this idea to their world? That’s your first question.

The second question is, if they don’t take my first offer, what is the second thing or action that would make a difference for them associated with this post?

Yes this takes a little bit more work than just pushing out a blog post but if you can answer those two questions and you can provide that in your blogpost, you will grow your leads way more quickly than just having a “subscribe to our blog” button.

Yes.

That’s right. It’s not trivial. I will put it this way. It has not been trivial to do that. I talk to people every day that are like, “Yeah we would love to do that but we just aligned on one thing and it’s on all our blogs.”

If you can do this you can generate …we did the study on how to get more subscribers and if you can get … in the same period we had one say “subscribe to our blog” call to action in the sidebar of everything we did a study and in that study we actually did what I call content specific calls to action.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself but we really looked at these two question and we answered them blog post same traffic coming in and we had a 6400% increase in our subscribers over just the generic call to action.

Yeah.

I’m just saying it’s a huge difference if you can tackle that. It’s massive.

The third one and you’ve already heard me say this is content specific calls to action are more powerful and you need to place them on your pages and posts when figuring out how to get more subscribers. It goes with two except for I’m also not just saying blogs. I’m saying on your pages.

If you have pages at your website, what is it that you’re asking people to do? There are so many times I see small business websites that when you look at them they’re gorgeous. The only thing that they have as a call to action is contact us across their main pages and then a subscribe to their blog on their blog pages.

When I look at that I just think “You’re basically appealing to only 4% or 6% of the visitors that come to your site.” Those that are actually ready to talk to you and you’re throwing away or you’re giving actually the other 94% to 96% exactly one thing that they can do short of talking to you which is subscribe to your blog.

The other piece of this is what we’ve discovered in learning how to get more subscribers is you don’t necessarily need a dedicated opt-in page for every one of these offers. Depending on how you can place those on your pages and have them be right there in front of people and they’re looking at those pages and they’re relevant to the content on the page, you can actually take care of it all right there without having a dedicated opt-in page and a dedicated thank you page.

You do it right there. Its minimal disruption to what they’re trying to get done and yet at the same thing huge value.

Let me talk to you about that. My next point is think about your CTA buttons and think outside the box. Most people just have a button. It’s a little rectangular thing. It says get “instant access” or it says “register now.”

While that’s fine we’ve actually explored buttons that we call infographic buttons. You have two states in a button. You have the state you see and as soon as your mouse moves over it, you have the hover state.

Actually we have buttons that move and change in shape and offer more information on the hover so that you actually have much more engagement. We did a test on a client site and we thought, “These are really fun buttons and calls to action.” We place them in the sidebar at the top.

That seems to get the most engagement – sidebar at the top. Here’s your challenge. If somebody is looking it on the mobile, what happens to your sidebar?

You’ve got to think about not only sidebar at the top for desktop, you’ve got to think about where do you place it in your post near the top where it’s there, where they’ll see it before they have to scroll too far. People will scroll on a mobile that’s one thing that we do but we’re not going to scroll all the way down past the comments to get to the sidebar which is where it goes is under the comments.

Most people hit that comment entry or they think I’m at the bottom of the page. We’ve seen that with responsive design, the sidebar that used to … at the top of the sidebar that used to actually work really, really well both on a mobile when it was nonresponsive. It worked really well on a mobile or a desktop.

When you go to responsive you lose the effectiveness of your sidebar for everybody that’s on mobile. It converts far less and hardly at all relative to a desktop placement.

I think whether it’s a slide down or it’s a popover those can be super, super effective actually. People hate them. I went to a conference one time and this person speaking said, “These are horrible and you should never use them.” I raise my hand and I said, “I’ve got a client that has converted more using that popup than you could ever imagine. Why would you say that out of hand without just saying why don’t you test it for yourself?”

Again, I say test everything on your audience and see what ends up being most effective. A lot of times the popups or the push down deals those can work really, really nicely with minimal real estate, right?

You also see the ones where you scroll down the page and they slide in from the right. You can see those too. I think all of those work to a certain degree. Just have to figure out with your audience what are they most responding to. That’s what we see.

Then it also helps if you know what’s the percentage of audience that’s on a smartphone or a tablet versus a desktop. If you know that about your audience, then you can also plan appropriately.

I was one of the last people to get on a responsive website design bandwagon. Everybody is like, “Are you kidding? It has to be responsive.” I’m like, “Really?”

I can’t wait to see what people are going to find out about lead gen when you go responsive and where you’re used to placing your calls to action because if you have to scroll, people don’t scroll. You’ve got this catch 22. You’ve got to handle the mobile situation and you’ve got to be mobile today and responsive.

Now there’s all the new design challenges that are coming up because I think it was MarketingSherpa that ran a study and actually proved that a nonresponsive site converts better than a responsive site on a mobile device because you can pinch and zoom. That’s right.

Then you’ve got this SEO thing because Google is out there saying, “If it’s not responsive we’re not going to rank you well when somebody searching on mobile.” Then it’s like “We all got to go to mobile. We all got to go to responsive so that we don’t kill our search engine rankings.”

You’ve got all of these different things coming at you and very few people have tested any of this because the metrics haven’t been easily there to say, “Here’s my metrics. Here’s how many actual leads I’ve gotten from mobile versus from desktop versus tablet.

Again another little metric barrier there to you really getting the full knowledge of what’s working or not working from your offers from what it is you’re doing.

Unless you can have statistics that show you on page A and page B here’s how many desktops and here’s your convergence. Here’s how many you know and all that. If you can have something that can help you do that, then it doesn’t matter that you split those out other than the fact that you got it.

The end of the day the pages have to come together and work both on responsive and on desktop and you’ve got basically a CSS challenge there in terms of how you actually handle your mobile display.

That’s correct. You have to actually understand how each one is converting. By the way all the way down to the lead level. There’s not many systems that will actually help you do that.

I know, right?

I was on number four of how to get more subscribers. I was talking about buttons and CTA buttons. Really saying think outside of the box. Your buttons have multiple states. Use them. There’s a program we use. I’ll just call it out right now. It’s Youzign.

I don’t know if you know about it but Youzign, Y-O-U-Z-I-G-N. Anyways, we use that and if you’re not a graphic designer, you can create really great buttons, multi-state buttons, they do them for ads and stuff. If you figure out …

I’ve got something I want to do that’s about 300 pixels wide and 100 pixels deep now you’ve got an ability to create something that can go on a page or a post that’s a nice button due to states of that button. You can give them some information and then give them more information when they roll over it.

You’ve got a whole different button performing for you than just your standard stock “click here, register now.”

Possibly. I’m not naming any names.

Youzign, It’s Y-O-U-Z-I-G-N.

It makes it possible to create these kinds of buttons. Anyway, we can go into that.

We just started playing with it. We started to see on one client site where we put them and we would place them and stuff. We figured that people will take one and then we’ll nurture people to take more downloads. They had a lot of really great content.

What we found was once we started playing with these buttons, what we found was that people can go on the site and they take six downloads in one session.

Can you even imagine? It was like how do you nurture it because now we only had 10. They kept moving through the site and they would just take them because they were just catching them. They were engaging them and they were clicking and they were going ahead and completing those lead capture forms and take in those downloads.

It was stunning how much better performing or how well they performed over just your standard little buttons that you see sometimes.

Neither am I. This helps and that’s part of the problem, you need a web dev techie and you need a designer and so you use Fiverr and you get some result that might be okay but you’ve got to wait. Then everything is delayed.

If you can get things done for yourself right now as you get an idea and you’re all excited you can actually deliver on it and create the call to action. Get it in there and have the popup form right there without waiting on all that stuff and paying that expense to get that work done. Now you’ve got some real power in your pocket.

You just got some real power to do what you need to do when the thought strikes.

Yes. We’ve gone through 1, 2, 3, 4.

Now that you’ve got things in place and you’ve figured out how to get more subscribers, then you want to start thinking about how you progress people along their path. You want to think about … my next one about CTA secrets is think about progression.

Topic-deep calls to action build real trust and authority. For instance we have three scoops and we call them scoops. The first one is the single biggest reason why your emails don’t get read. It’s just a simple download. It gives you these amazing tips about here’s what you can do to have your emails read and engaged with.

Then we have scoop two which is list or listening. It talks about this whole thing we started talking about as lack of segmentation and batch and blast. We draw a really big distinction between the two and what you can do to be more effective and have your leads really, really enjoy and love you.

Then we have the third scoop which is, when is batch and blast okay? Here we just told them never batch and blast. Then we have one that says, when is batch and blast okay?

We really dive deep in each one and by the time you read all three of those you end up having this knowledge about what you really need to be thinking about around your email. Topic deep CTAs build that trust and that authority.

What you want to do is set yourself up to make your next offer via email. Make sure you have a platform and people will forward your emails and you’ll get new leads because people are really enjoying you. Really you’re making a difference for them and they’ll be like, “Hey check this out. You’re going to want this.”

They’re going to share and spread more of the news for you. That’s always helpful.

Everybody I talked to has actually experienced this. You’re thinking, “Don’t they know that I already took their offer? Don’t they know that I’ve already gotten this and they gave me a thank you email and they’ve acknowledged that? I thought they knew me.”

Then you go ruin it because you can’t really track that. Anyways, that’s the fifth one for me on an opt-in secret is just think about progression. You can deepen that relationship in a really, really nice way.

Here’s what I see is that I went after that because I have a commitment to the small business, and I also know that at the entrepreneurial side.

The Genoo product set that we have is right at the same price point as Infusionsoft except for no setup fee. Then you start looking at, “How I really enable? What are the real problems that entrepreneurs are having?”

The guiding principle for me is what are those problems and how can they best be solved at a price point that works. I challenge myself and my staff to come up with solutions and email marketing tools that are affordable and empowering for that small entrepreneurial market.

That’s where we were focused when we came up what we now call WP Marketing Engine that runs entirely or is accessed entirely from within your WordPress admin.

There are several reasons why we did that and created that particular offering that gets at that small business space. I think typically it’s like, “What’s worth more … you got to go upstream.” The Infusionsofts of the world have taken I don’t know how much venture money.

At some point I’m not saying venture money is bad. I’m just saying that at some point you become beholden to those investors and they’re after getting their return. That puts a different strain and a different stress on a company in terms of being able to surf.

You saw that with HubSpot. HubSpot went upstream and started charging more and more money and they became … still people say “They’re for the small business marketplace.” If you look at spending $30,000 in your first year I don’t think that they’re for the small business marketplace.

You really have to start to look at, what really is going to serve? That’s always been a question that drives us. I don’t know if that answered your question entirely.

Our decision was I’ve seen the frustration of somebody trying to plug all kinds of things together. If you’re using emails marketing tools like MailChimp for instance they don’t even have their own WordPress plugin. Their answer is “Go out and search in the plugins directory and find one. Then install it.”

There’s 340 or something like that WordPress plugins for MailChimp that were all written by somebody else, not them. They don’t maintain them. If somebody writes one of them and they decide, “I’m tired of maintaining this.” and it stops now you’re open to vulnerabilities. If they don’t know how to code those plugins you’re open to vulnerability.

There’s no way that a small business owner or a small business marketer or entrepreneur that isn’t a techie knows how to decide which WordPress plugin to select.

Then you need that. You need an event plugin if you’re doing events or want people to register and to go to webinars or that kind of thing.

When you look at the things you have to cobble together, no wonder it’s a major pain in the butt and you have major holes in your system where you have to cobble things together.

What we kept looking at was “If they install our plugin, we have a plugin/cloud hybrid basically that they access right from within WordPress.”

We know how much WordPress gets hacked. Are you kidding? We ended up putting all the good lead data and your campaign data. That’s all up in the cloud.

If your WordPress site gets hacked or whatever, you still have all that data. It’s not hurt at all. It didn’t even get impacted by something that happened to your website for instance which with the plugin that runs entirely on your server, you would end up losing things. You would end up having compromises.

We wanted to protect that privacy data and all of that.

Your leads and your list and your campaigns and your metrics, we wanted to protect that from what has to be native on your WordPress but at the same time it looks like it’s all right there within WordPress and it takes less than 15 minutes to set up and configure and have it working with your WordPress website.

Our goal was we want you to be able to create forms and have opt-ins and popups and pages and all of that very, very easily without having to be a techie or having to rely on your web dev or WordPress expert so that you can operate your business and operate your marketing in that way.

That’s why we did it. That was the whole push behind us coming up with that solution.

It’s tracking pixel. The challenge with WordPress and I believe if you have any Infusionsoft solution or anything the mailer solutions will never have any problem because they don’t place the tracking pixel. They just measure your clicks through your emails.

For anything that does more like an Infusionsoft or like a WP Marketing Engine or Genoo, you want tracking. You want a tracking pixel. You want to know everywhere they go. You want to know what they’re doing so that you can trigger and automate other activities and actions that you need or want to do so that you actually build that relationship and trust and authority with your leads.

The problem with WordPress before we looked at really integrating with WordPress is tell an entrepreneur where to put the tracking pixel on their WordPress implementation and now you’ve got problem number one. We wanted to solve that.

The only way to solve that was to start offering a plugin that would work really well. Then one thing led to another. We were like, “This doesn’t work. This is complicated.” We just started to solve the problems.

You’re not going to get the delivery either. You’re not going to get it. The algorithms are not going to deliver your mail because you’re going to have a bad reputation for being a sender because the majority of people aren’t engaging with you and that’s the part that’s really going to kill a lot of people who don’t pay attention.

I’ll give you two things. The first one is you can go to WP Marketing Engine and that’s our site. Right on the homepage of our site we usually have some free training that you can take.

Right now if you go out there we’ve got a full set of training on calls to action. We have a full CTA training how to maximize opt-ins on your website and you can go to the homepage. You should be able to click and get that training.

You’re very, very welcome. Thank you so much Derek. I really appreciate talking with you today. It’s always fun.