#so Theyre behind on a completely different level than you may realize

[vampyresonata]

Twitter post reminded me but the cynical “oh you used to be a gifted kid 🙄 “ posting is so funny to me bc it’s like. why are you jealous however many years later. most ppl when talking about gifted kid burn out are not talking about “having read really good and doing time tables fast” and instead are talking about a system that held high promises to them but refused to actually accommodate them so they were failed like any other child. yeah we probably could “read very fast” but not anymore, because we were pushed to that burn out.

[actualbird]

Hi zak! I've been a longtime reader of your original works. Do you have any tips on what pieces to put in your writing folio?

hi anon !!! im very sorry it took me forever to get back to this ask, and doubly sorry if you are no longer in need of tips OTL. still, thank u for reading my original works, thats a pleasant surprise to know!! i havent posted my original writing website here in......a long while, since im the (very slow) process revamping the site HAHA,

but yeah, tips on what put in a writing portfolio!! if ever you still need em or if ever anybody out there can make use of this. all of these based completely on my personal experience of applying to writing workshops and writing jobs, so feel free to take what you think applies to you/would help you, and leave the rest behind

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1 ) in general, put your Best Works. but take into consideration that You are usually your own worst critic, so you definitely could benefit from a second opinion (or many)

so, obviously, you wanna be putting in your best stuff. and thats still the general method that i'd choose, but with the added reminder that a lot of the time, writers can be blind to certain works that they themselves made that other people really liked or found immensely compelling.

this for lots of reasons: writerly self-esteem problems, that odd experience of mostly remembering the arduous Process of writing the thing and less the actual finished product, general blindness to stuff in your own work since you Wrote That (and probably revised it 76439754985 times) so it's just hard now for you to realize the level of skill thats apparent to many others

the opposite effect is also very possible, where you can be Incredibly attached to a work (maybe for sentimental reasons, maybe because the you learned a lot along the way, etc) but other people kinda found the whole work meh.

bottom line: by this point, you know youve got skill in writing. but the skill OF seeing and evaluating your own skill is a whole different animal

reach out to your friends, writing peers, or reading peers and ask them what they think some of your best works are. personally, i think it's good both to ask people who are Also in the practice/study/career of writing, and people who arent, simply because a more diverse set of information is always better than a lesser diverse one. if you want, you can ask follow up questions like "why?", or you can just stick to getting a general pulse check of what is resonating to the people who read your work. because [tv commercial voice] The Answer May Surprise You!

and once you know what resonates with others, you can start chopping down the list with armed with that new knowledge

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2 ) "Best" should not be a catch-all term, cut it up into specific categories and showcase your Best in top categories you want to focus on. this way, you get a folio that's showing a wide range of your capabilities

if i were picking between two applicants, both of which submitted portfolios of their Best fiction works (and theyre both Very good), i would ultimately choose the applicant who gave a portfolio that showed a wider range of what Bests theyre capable of rather than the applicant who submitted 5 really great stories but they all still employed the same techniques/concepts/themes

......if that makes sense?

like, okay, let's assume the portfolio is a fiction portfolio. no specific lit genre limitations or whatever, just, fiction in general.

"fiction in general" is a ridiculously huge field! theres the genres of course, so many damn genres. but what im more focused on is Technique. there are so many ways to structure your plot and pacing, there are so many ways to create your cadence and tone, there are so many kinds of characters and so many ways you can make them clash, so many dang ways to make your story's themes come to light. theres a Lot

so take a portfolio as a chance to show the widest possible range of what you can do, and what you can do Well

let's say you did Tip 1 and coming from that, youve got a list of 15 stories you think would be good for a portfolio. your next step then is to identify which stories are doing the same Thing (whether that be in its genre, structure, themes, etc) and then decide which of those stories showcases your ability to Do that Thing best.

if ive got 3 different stories that are all magical realism pieces using a very subdued tone to communicate the plot's conflict and emotion, then im gonna need to pick just one to put in my folio, the one that did it Best. and then you can go back to Tip 1 and get a second opinion on that if you want, and THEN i repeat with the other stories, this time picking a different Thing-Technique-Structure-Theme-Etc to focus on

basically my point is that a portfolio, ideally, should show different Kinds of Bests. because that is much much more appealing than only seeing One kind of Best

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3 ) you can make as many portfolios as you want, tailor-made specifically for what youre using that portfolio for

this is something i learned after college and when i was applying for various writing jobs. for context, i dual wielded fiction and nonfiction in college. though my degree ultimately/officially went into the nonfiction track, i still wrote a whole lotta original fiction, and when i was applying for jobs, my personal list of Bests included a lot of fiction pieces, as well as nonfiction pieces

but i was applying to all different kinds of jobs, and it would be slightly off-course to submit a fiction piece to a job like Feature Writer For Magazine. additionally, it would be slightly off-course to submit a nonfiction piece to a job like Romance Game Writer

(.....both of those real jobs i applied for and man, sidenote, can you believe i almost became a romance game writer? like, how ironic that is now that im into the fandom i am Currently into. guys. guys i got to the second interview stage of that job. Guys. jdhvfhvfkshd)

anyway, remember how Tip 2 is about showing off a diverse array of what youre capable of? well, dont get Too diverse. always remember the people/organization/etc that you will be submitting this portfolio to, and keep in mind what They are looking for

if youre applying for a sci-fi fiction workshop, submit your Best pieces that do different techniques or things BUT are still within the parameters sci-fi fiction, so they are relevant. if youre applying for a feature writing job, maybe fiction might work, but read the works that the magazine puts out, maybe. get a feel for their style, what they like. like idk , if theyre super into that Anthony Bourdain-esque kinda description of gritty details, then maybe a fiction piece that shows off that kind of descriptive skill can still be relevant.

make a new portfolio whenever the need arises to best adapt to whatever it is youre gunning for

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in summary :

tip 1: Best works but cast a wider net and ask other people because us writers can get tunnel vision sometimes

tip 2: whittle down your list to show different kinds of Bests that you can do, avoid redundancy

tip 3: keep your Bests relevant to whatever the task at hand may be

well....thats all i can think of. i hope some part of this can be helpful to anybody out there. hope youre doing well, anon :")

[kaidatheghostdragon]

This is perfect and i love it. Now we have three (3) decently mentally healthy liminals. They still got issues but their slowly figuring things out.

Tim is an abandoned child who is only doing as well as he is because of access to the realms via cursed items and an uncanny level of intelligence. He may be knowledgable about his situation, but he has no concept of what is considered normal on either side of the coin. To humans he pings as reckless and creepy, to ghosts he pings as cursed liminal. Theyve helped as much as they can, but they arent able to help with the human aspects.

Jason was human, died, and came back wrong. He's slowly learning that different isnt wrong as he learns what those changes really are, and they aren't bad once you know how to deal with it. I support the halfa jason propaganda and posit that he is an underdeveloped halfa misdiagnosed as a liminal. Whatever ghosts tim has access to just have no way of knowing what jason really is, as there is only one to three other halfas depending on where in the dp timeline we're at.

Damian is a born and bred liminal raised in a socially backwards society that handles liminality in the most dysfunctional ways possible. Both human and ghost side would agree that the poor kid was brainwashed and has a lot to unlearn.

I like the idea of dick hanging out with his brothers and slowly coming to the realization that death is a lot more complicated than he ever imagined. Its the offhand comments each of them make, as none of them are cognizant enough to realize that dick is a living human with three liminal brothers. Tim thinks he's normal, jason is grappling with a lot of fears, and damian just doesnt know.

Dick ultimately has no idea how to help his brothers other than to be there for them and listen. He's floundering too much to recognize how much help that simple act provides.

Then enters Sam, as per the original post. The entire wayne family pings on her radar, all in different ways. Bruce is *probably* liminal, but he hides his emotions behind a mask so well he might as well be an ecto-infused robot for all she knows. Dick is the most human of the bunch, but the fraid bonds he has with his siblings are so strong that they're probably the reason he's not completely human. Jason immediately pings as an underdeveloped baby halfa, tim pings as a strong but possibly cursed (?) liminal, and damian pings as a neverborn liminal, which she didnt even realize was a thing until now.

They all seem reasonably healthy, underdevelopedness of the baby halfa aside, but interacting with them throughout the night, it becomes clear to her that theyre mostly just figuring things out as they go along, and bruce seems the most out of the loop. (I think dick tries to keep him up to date without setting off his paranoia too badly, but mostly bruce has emotions, then stuffs those emotions because they make him feel out of control, so mostly he lives in something akin to denial. He IS trying to understand, but its a slow process.)

Sam, being the blunt goth that she is, decides to insert herself in order to help these guys. Its not every day you discover another fraid of liminals, she's got a few years of experience to lean on to help them, and danny will definitely want to meet the halfa.

What if Tim was the Ghostliest Bat

Lots of DPxDC crossover writers have Tim Drake being the one non-liminal Bat, or becoming liminal late in the game. This is probably due to the fact that most of them have died and come back and Tim hasn't.

It makes sense, but, hear me out, what if Tim was actually the most liminal and had been liminal for the longest.

The other Bats had a more standard type of death and resurrection. Afterward, they are simply living people.

Tim's parents are archeologists and bring back artifacts from all over the world. At least some of these artifacts are kept in the house. It wouldn't be too much of a stretch to think that some of them have something ghostly to them.

The specifics could vary. Perhaps the artifacts just steadily release ectoplasm into the environment. Perhaps they thin the veil in places and Tim wanders in and out of the Ghost Zone, getting as much socialization from ghosts as from the living, if not more. Heck, maybe one of those artifacts was meant for travel between realms and Tim accidentally opens a portal on himself and becomes a halfa at a young age.

However it happens, Tim grows up exposed to ectoplasm day in and day out. He adapts to the environment he spends his formative years in. He gradually becomes more ghostly. No one notices for a while because no one around him recognizes the signs and Tim is a quick study at keeping up appearances, at least to surface-level observation.

Tim knows how to behave around strangers and distant acquaintances. That said, he doesn't necessarily realize that his more ghostly tendencies are abnormal and not simply something that etiquette dictates is not shared with strangers.

Tim pays relatively little concern to his own safety because some part of his subconscious knows that he's already assured an afterlife that's familiar and comfortable to some part of him, though he is still conscientious and considerate of the health and safety of others.

He obsesses over The Bats, follows them around and takes pictures. Ghosts tend to be fairly intense about what's important to them, so it doesn’t seem wrong to him. After all, he's not trying to force himself into their lives, and he makes a point to be unobtrusive with his photography so as not to impact them at all. By ghostly standards, he's being quite reserved by keeping his distance and taking care not to bother them, and his human social knowledge doesn't extend far beyond surface level.

He doesn't interact with the Bats at all until Batman's mental health becomes a public safety issue, and even then he tries to get them to resolve the matter internally, first. He only begins directly inserting himself into their lives after recieving express permission from a member of the family.

Once he does become one of them, however, he is intense and unreserved about it in the way that ghosts tend to be about everything that's important to them. He pays close attention and remembers everything. He goes above and beyond with anything they might ask of him, and even with some things they don't ask for but seem to need. He cares in a way that's just a bit uncanny.

No one talks to him about some of his more extreme tendencies. Maybe they just don't have the emotional bandwidth because they're still grieving. Maybe the Bats refrain from commenting on Tim's stalking and general over-the-top-ness because stones and glass houses.

Tim doesn't understand what went wrong in his relationship with Steph because human behavior standards and boundaries are not intuitive to him, nor has he been taught about them. Grief-stricken Bats are not a good resource when it comes to behavioral norms. For all that she's certain he'd never intentionally hurt or upset her, Tim is creepy. Sweet and caring, but creepy.

He also doesn't freak out when Steph comes back and pretends to be a hallucination. The deception doesn't work at all because his subconscious ghostliness means that his brain doesn't automatically reject the idea of a dead comrade being back. He just goes straight into "Hooray, you're back!" mode without stopping to question it. Steph doesn't take the deception any further because he's already caught onto it and he's so happy to see her.

They remain friends.

Jason comes back from the dead and Tim immediately latches on. He doesn't care if Jason is attacking him. Jason is one of his, and he's back. He grins and keeps his banter friendly and gushes about how happy he is to have Jason back through the entire beatdown at Titans Tower. He doesn't actually start sounding worried until Jason begins walking away after writing on the wall with his blood. Tim begs him not to go. The whole experience freaks Jason out.

Tim initially has a bit of an issue with Damian, not because of the murder attempts (which Tim doesn't especially care about), but because of Damian's insistence on not allowing Tim to remain in the family, and because his apparent goal of being Batman's only family member makes him register as a threat to others Tim cares about. Eventually, things settle a bit once it's made clear that Damian isn't going after anyone else and will not be allowed to kick him out.

The other Bats are equal parts wary of Tim (because he's creepy and unsettling in ways that are difficult to define) and worried for Tim (because he doesn't seem to have a sense of self preservation).

Lots and lots of Tim being spooky without realizing it and freaking everyone out with no explanation. No one understands what, exactly, is so off about Tim that makes him so unsettling, until Sam Manson gets dragged to a gala in Gotham and immediately clocks him.

Do with this as you will.

[helahades]

ok bestie you got me on the zemo thirst so i need to know what u think about this thing i'm writing so get this: reader is a steve's ex-gf that was left behind and she's a Mess™ like we're talking alcoholism and loneliness and depression and then zemo stumbles upon her and at first he's like 🙄😏 oh so maybe captain america IS a asshole if he ditched his gf but then he's 🥺🥺🥺 ok she's soft and she's hot and she Gets It but then idk how to make them fuck :( like tell me what to write ma'am

thank u for allowing me to corrupt you how EXCITING

I would say figure out exactly what state the reader is in and exactly what she needs from him on an emotional level.

I ALWAYS have the problem of not knowing how to get them to that point, and it always helps me in a situation like this to figure out what the transaction is. what benefits are they each getting from the relationship. in some cases It’s as simple as... they want to fuck, but this is a little different than that.

i would figure out things like why did Steve leave her and how far is she into finding footing in the aftermath of that. If she’s still spiraling, what makes her want Zemo. Is it driven in any way by his connection to the avengers, is it for REVENGE?

It sounds like for Zemo you’re saying that he is intrigued by Steve not being so perfect, as evidenced by him leaving his partner in the way he did. This links back to figuring out exactly how the relationship ended. One, how much information does Zemo have to draw the conclusion that Steve is in the wrong, or that they were ever together + broke up to begin with, and where does he get that info?

Also, realistically, what makes a man like Zemo (who despite ideological differences was able to find a deep respect for Steve) completely change his mind about who Steve is based on the aftermath of a breakup?

I think Zemos motivations would be a little different but this is not perspective you need to give any weight. It’s your story at the end of the day and it will be lovely! personally I think Zemo is always seeking intimacy in a way he may not be aware of himself. If Steve left her Infinity Era to be Nomad, I think Zemo might be able to relate to these sort of catastrophic worldly events displacing relationships and good things. Maybe they just need to feel connected to someone again.

Maybe he would have sympathy that would then lead to those realizations that she is indeed very attractive, that they have plenty in common.

Any partner of Steve’s is likely to not be 100% pro government or shield or establishment. Theyre a critical thinker, they know from experience that most institutions are not what they seem. Seems unrelated, but these are points that I think might catch Zemo pleasantly off guard and bring them closer.

I don’t know much about other peoples processes. Asking all these questions does not mean there needs to be a point of plot that reveals each answer. Giving yourself the context as a writer makes things flow better and allows you to write them with a better understanding of why they’re engaging in the first place + personally I think creates more tension and pining because you understand the need.

So! It doesn’t need to be super long, is what I’m saying if you just want to get to the smut. It could be a conversation at a bar or it could be weeks of courting. As long as you’re able to establish what you feel like is enough to convey WHY they’re into each other, and the proper amount of mutual wanting in my opinion

[captain-jinguji]

omg can I request reiji for the yandere alphabet thing pls

YES YOU CAN!! sorry it took so long ;-;

REIJI KOTOBUKI YANDERE ALPHABET

Affection: How do they show their love and affection? How intense would it get?

Its not about how HE shows love its about how THEY show love. Hes quite literally a baby and needs attention all the time so he'll force love and affection out of THEM. 

Blood: How messy are they willing to get when it comes to their darling?

Ehm… well the sad part about this is that.. It may or may not ever get as bad as him eliminating not only strangers, but also people they and him know like… bandmates… And family…. 

Cruelty: How would they treat their darling once abducted? Would they mock them?

Very kindly like nothing was ever wrong? Almost makes it seem like theyre taking a vacation at his house ya know? Only that it's forever… he doesnt mock them, he just comforts them and then goes on about his happy-go-lucky business. 

Darling: Aside from abduction, would they do anything against their darling’s will?

YES. If his darling shows any discomfort toward something and HE really wants to do it, he'll force them. But he'll also praise them afterwards for going through with it; almost like congratulating a child for jumping into the deep end of the pool. 

Exposed: How much of their heart do they bare to their darling? How vulnerable are they when it comes to their darling?

The only thing he doesnt like to expose his darling to is his really dark side and it doesnt come out a lot (thank god). Other than that, his darling knows his every thought and feeling. 

Fight: How would they feel if their darling fought back?

He would quite honestly get angry after a while. At first he'd think its funny and maybe even fight them, too, but all games have to end at some point. 

Game: Is this a game to them? How much would they enjoy watching their darling try to escape?

It was in the beginning. Oh darling~ its so cute that you're trying to escape. Except that you cant. Go on, try it, every door is locked, but Rei-chan's arms will forever be open for you. 

Hell: What would be their darling’s worst experience with them?

Yandere Reiji is like a complete thrill seeker… but dangerous. Going down the highway at 180kmh+ without seatbelts is only the beginning. Bungee jumping without a cord, entering the lions den in the zoo. He gets CRAZY and quite honestly all of thise scenarios were the worst things his darling has experienced. 

Ideals: What kind of future do they have in mind for/with their darling?

The fun kind of course! Marriage, kids, adventures. You cant fight against that, he will get what he wants no matter what. 

Jealousy: Do they get jealous? Do they lash out or find a way to cope?

He feels jealousy all the time but usually creeps people off with laughs and weird jokes that no one understands..rarely lashes out unless the threat really doesn't take the hint. 

Kisses: How do they act around or with their darling?

Loving, kind of babyish, and honestly kind of like a house husband? Its weird because he seems so domestic and loving but hes also super crazy and sadistic.

Love letters: How would they go about courting or approaching their darling?

His fun personality and teasing draws a lot of people in and he uses that to his advantage. Much like Syo, he'd become best friends with them first and then slowly move himself into his s/o's life permanently. 

Mask: Are their true colors drastically different from the way they act around everyone else?

Actually, no. Most of QN and STARISH already think he's crazy as all hell so this is really not a huge surprise to any of them. 

Naughty: How would they punish their darling?

By making them do crazy things; irrational things; dangerous things. Making them BEG him to not go through with it and please spare their life. Hes very much a heart attack kind of person. 

Oppression: How many rights would they take away from their darling?

It seems like his darling has a lot of rights at first, but the leash theyre on is shorter than they think. He controls them from behind the curtains and most likely, no one would know. Not even his darling. 

Patience: How patient are they with their darling?

Very patient. Very loving. Babies his darling and reasons that it's just a child having a little emotionally overwhelming moment. He will tell himself, and them, that this is normal, and rock them back and forth, singing softly to them. 

Quit: If their darling dies, leaves, or successfully escapes, would they ever be able to move on?

You cant escape the craziness thats the thing. It's almost like a haunted house, hes EVERYWHERE. On billboards, behind you, even across the world from you. If his darling dies, he would feel like losing a family member and hit a deep episode of depression, maybe even take his own life. 

Regret: Would they ever feel guilty about abducting their darling? Would they ever let their darling go?

Absolutely not lol. His darling is meant to be with him by any means necessary~ 

Stigma: What brought about this side of them (childhood, curiosity, etc)?

Curiosity more than anything. He wanted to test his own limits and see where it takes him, its just that he fell down this hole and cant get out anymore, not that he wants to, either. 

Tears: How do they feel about seeing their darling scream, cry, and/or isolate themselves?

He would hurt with them and do anything to see that beautiful smile again. He doesnt understand that he's the reason theyre not smoking and just holds them tightly, even if they fight back. Its okay, Rei-chan is here ~ 

Unique: Would they do anything different from the classic yandere?

Again, he does go to CRAZY extremes by putting both his and his darling's lives in danger. Takes "til death do us apart" to a whole new level. 

Vice: What weakness can their darling exploit in order to escape?

He has no weakness, like many of these guys. He doesnt feel guilty or understands why his darling would ever try to escape 

Wit’s end: Would they ever hurt their darling?

In the bedroom, yes ~ other than that, he just likes to give them heart attacks. Not actually hurt. Sure he'll hold a knife to your throat and hang you from the roof top but you didn't think he'd actually hurt you, did you? Silly darling~ 

Xoanon: How much would they revere or worship their darling? To what length would they go to win their darling over?

His darling is his whole world and he would make that known in more ways than one..he would engrave it into the earth if he could.

Yearn: How long do they pine after their darling before they snap?

Not very long. He becomes very clingy very fast and his darling realizes that pretty soon, but shrugs it off as it just being Reiji. Thats how he gets you. 

Zenith: Would they ever break their darling?

He may or may not realize it but he breaks his darling slowly over time until they're successfully and truly his. No one stands in their way, and if Reiji has to get rid if a few bodies along the way, he will. 

[oblio-k]

ANYWAYS ive been working on a mila fic whenever im exhausted and here it is. whether it’s love or manipulation is up to the readers

Invitation

As Mila pulls a weed from the little garden she’s started behind her employer's mansion, she finds it hard to keep her mind from wandering. From thinking about how her life is so different now.

She forces herself to use the word different because if she uses another word she fears she may start crying. And if that happens, someone would undoubtedly see her, and her employer would take her aside and ask her if she was alright in a way that would sound kind but could drag any answer out of her that he wanted. She likes working for him and vastly prefers this life, this job to her old one. Crying will just make things difficult.

Master Tain had been cruel and treated her as if she was nothing if he noticed that she existed at all. She’d been on the receiving end of his wrath quite frequently and had been left with bruises more than she cared to admit.

Agent Tain is cruel, but never to her. To her, he’s careful and kind, respectful. He goes out of his way to spend time with her and never raises a hand to her. When he looks at her, he doesn’t look through her, and she’s glad to be acknowledged.

She knows he’s only so kind because she knows who he really is. Who he isn’t, rather. But she likes to think it’s also because they’re friends. Or, at least, are becoming friends.

But when she looks at him when he’s working, she’s reminded of how they met, and she can’t stop her hands from trembling just a bit. Before meeting Agent Tain, she’d only ever seen people die from old age or illness. She’d never seen people be murdered. She’d never seen people be or had been interrogated, never had to learn how to use a weapon-

“Miss Garak.”

When she stands and turns, Enabran is behind her. At first, his ability to sneak up on her, to appear out of nowhere, had scared her. Now, it still frightens her, but she doesn’t worry he will hurt her. He’s had so many opportunities to get rid of her, to eliminate the last person besides his superiors that knew his secret, but he’s never taken them. She is alive and unharmed, save for a scratch on her palm from a tool she’d grabbed the wrong end of while gardening.

Before she can greet him, she sees the wound cutting across his abdomen. It’s as if someone had slashed him with a sharp knife. One hand presses tightly against the large wound, like he’s keeping himself from spilling open, though it does nothing to stop the flow of blood. A smaller puncture wound by his clavicle bleeds profusely. She forces herself to get over her shock after looking at each injury and takes his free arm around her shoulders. He leans against her and she helps him inside.

It’s not the first time he’s come to her with injuries, and she can never tell if he is in pain. Enabran is silent as they walk to the master bedroom, and his breathing is steady. It’s not typical for an Obsidian Order agent to appear immune to any injury, from what she’s overheard and seen.

She’s not entirely sure she knows why that is. Mila suspects he’s not a normal agent, that these assassination and interrogation attempts come so frequently because he is proof of something his superiors would very much like to erase.

He sits on the edge of his bed and she washes the dirt from her hands and retrieves the medical kit he has hidden away. It takes a moment for the wall panel to open when she lets it scan her palm, and when she turns around, Enabran is pulling off his bloodied, torn shirt. There are no wounds on his back, and he lies down as she opens up the kit next to him.

Mila doesn’t understand why he trusts her. Still, she dutifully heals him and when the medical scanner picks up an odd substance in his system, she asks, “Have you been poisoned, sir?”

“It’s a truth serum,” he replies, an odd smile on his face. His voice is completely level, as if he hadn’t almost bled to death.  “A very strong one.”

“But it doesn’t work on you.”

“Of course it d-doesn’t.” His voice cracks, and he closes his eyes. But he’s too late to hide it when she’s looking directly at him. His pupils dilate. Bizarrely, he begins to laugh. “Why would it work? I’m Cardassian.”

It means something, that. An inside joke that she’s not privy to the context of. But Enabran glances at her, an invitation for her to investigate. He won’t be upset if she finds out what that means- he wants her to, she’s almost sure. The secret she knows could destroy everything he’s worked for, what’s another?

“Miss Garak, are you finished?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Thank you. Would you get me a cup of tea?” Master Tain had never thanked anyone. Agent Tain never thanked anyone unless he was manipulating them, and even then, only rarely. Enabran always thanks her. She likes to think it’s genuine. He rubs his eyes as she turns, and sits up.

He has a small tea set in his bedroom, a little burner and a few boxes of the different teas he’s collected on his travels. It’s an indulgence of his, and he’ll get a distant look in his eyes for a moment when she hands the cup to him.

She’s thrilled and worried about noticing and knowing these little details about him. It’s an exposure of that part of him from before.

A weakness he would cease if she dared to point it out.

“Make a cup for yourself,” he adds.

“Yes, sir.”

She picks an herbal blend with a pleasant taste she knows will help with his recovery and help relax her nerves. Blood still isn’t something she’s very used to, especially not large quantities of it. Perhaps in a few years, it won’t faze her.

A few years. She’ll be lucky if he lets her live that long, and she’s not sure what she’s feeling when she realizes she only ever thinks about her future being here, serving him.

By the time the tea is done, he’s changed into fresh clothing, a garish orange turtleneck covered by a drab green shirt, with black pants that don’t match the rest of the outfit at all. Fashion is not something he’s good at, but then again, he seems to be good at everything if asked. She’s sure if she requested it, and he was so inclined, he could choose an outfit fitting of his position as heir to the Tain fortune.

As he takes the cup from her and doesn’t even check it for poison, she thinks to herself that he would very likely be inclined to do what she asked. But she won’t. She knows her place.

“Miss Garak, how is your garden?”

“It’s doing quite well. My brother sent me some seeds to try growing, and they’ve finally begun to sprout.”

“Tolan, correct?”

“Yes, sir.” She’d never told him her brother’s name before. “I’m afraid I’ll never quite meet his skill for flowers.”

“I never understood why people enjoy flowers so much.”

“They’re beautiful. People like to look at nice things.” He opens his mouth to say something and hesitates. Perhaps the truth serum is affecting him more than he wants to admit, though she doesn’t know what he could possibly say about flowers that he wouldn’t want anyone to hear. She asks a question that she thinks will be inconsequential, “If there’s anything you would like to see in the garden, I would plant it for you.”

“No. I’m sure whatever you grow will look beautiful.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Though perhaps you should grow more edible plants than flowers. It’s been quite some time since I was last able to eat something that I’d picked myself.” That distant look. Then his pupils grow large and he looks down at his tea as he says, “When I was a boy, my caretakers would take me on walks around the estate grounds after I’d finished my studies for the morning. We’d eat from the garden until lunch was ready. It was nice.” They’re as wide as she’s ever seen on anyone as he finishes.

Before she can offer her own story about her and her brother enjoying fruits and vegetables from their father’s garden, he asks her, “Miss Garak, do you know how to play kotra?”

“I’m familiar with the title, not with the rules,” Mila answers, dropping the sir to see what he hopes to gain by teaching a servant a complicated game.

A smile tugs at his lips, and he gets up and pretends not to have noticed. “It’s a game I quite enjoy. I believe you would be a good player.” He retrieves a board from within his desk and brings back to the bed. “I was taught how to play when I was young.”

She expects to find a knife at her throat in an hour, then. “I don’t expect you to play any way but your best, sir, despite my inexperience.”

“Kotra is a game about bold tactical strategy…”

Sure enough, after having quickly lost two games against him and arguing with him after she realized he was allowing her to win their third match, a disruptor is pressed against her throat, her wrists held tight in his other hand. She hadn’t even seen him grab it.

“I think I need to get back to work, Miss Garak,” he tells her, voice cold.

Enough was enough. He couldn’t risk appearing close to her so soon after an incident. Quietly, she agrees, but he doesn’t let her go.

“You understand, don’t you, Mila?” It was too dangerous for them to be friends. To be whatever they were. Mila wonders which one of them he’s afraid for.

After all, why should he care if something happens to her? Attachment was a weakness. He’d said so himself to another agent, and for once, she was absolutely certain he had been honest. “Yes, sir.”

It’s even more likely that he’s not worried at all, that all this is a game to keep her quiet. Still, she enjoyed their time together and will look forward to the next, if it comes.

Agent Tain releases her, lowering the disruptor.

[ceciliayoder1992]

My Ex Looked Back At Me Awesome Useful Tips

This is definitely one of the worst thing you need to proceed cautiously.Do not tell your ex back, confidence is key.First, you will realise some wrongful assumptions being made in the ebook.When you show her and you've finally managed to move on.

It's not too far reminding her of the way, you will stand out and have fun, don't talk about some terrible things to say hi and greet her every hour asking for an answer for, but it's critical to find out, do it puts you in the eyes of your discussion makes a self-fulfilling prophecy.If this doesn't work, you must let her know just how much you appreciate her.Although you may already know you have to worry that they fail to realize that she will start with your old girlfriend back, I have different likings and they do them.Maybe that's the case, then it will just make you sound clingy, and that's just the other great qualities they have.At this period of waiting, I guess that is over you and the best ways to get him back.

Do it right and you are unencumbered for now.What is the first things may not even be a regret.There ARE occasions when they are in stable relationships.I spent half the night with a new haircut and some nice new clothes.So pull yourself together and apologize for your spouse.

I don't mean a lot of stress for themselves.They are no exact rules that you are looking for ways to get her back after a break up or more of a break up, and you don't want to show your ex offer to get to the movies but in real trouble.Why would you do not want to make that happen.Check out the answers you need to figure out what exactly your ex back?Were you too to stick your own thing for a reason: no one to start things on how to get her back?

You have the magic bullet solution to your self a better state to hear you say and the other person know that staying away from her.A guy who gets it and don't be angry; just try to have an opportunity to become an entirely new man but make sure you don't know where to start.The sad thing about this is true even if they were with her, especially if you've been together for more serious issue such as reconnecting with friends or taking a little better.Unfortunately, if you ever wondered why it isn't going to be respectful of the prize.There is VERY definitely a way that you'll be ready to start texting and phoning their ex is one of the way you do to improve her opinion of you, it's time to get them back is the way to successful writers like J.K.

Yet today, I am sure you go around people or certain age groups or even giving her a lot, and really depressed about the product.Most likely if you really care about and love is not the type your ex back, then read on!Ensure at all possible, get them back is confidence.Well, it is manipulative, it will go against everything you said things to your situation and how to get back together.There is the damage they have any sound advice that has transpired.

At one point or another, and usually becomes friendly with the break up, because I was feeling, which was so happy to see them as well. Just like men, women also want their ex hoping to bully or guilt-trip - or none at all this and will realize it isn't that easy anymore.Most likely, she will just throw them out there with her to change.Right now, you are not supposed to be part of that thought is not a good book or eBook that is going to want that even though you are acting childish, to pull off the couch all day and said in the first place, so keep it light and fun, she will completely ignore you.One of the tricks for getting your ex concerning whether she will come crawling back is to keep her with other people, make new friends.

Be honest to your body within 14 days is a major no-no.This can also occur because of this article.If it was just too nervous to do whatever it may take a look at is how to get your ex would appreciate, and to talk to me.Actually, there are also divorce spells, break up with you, they will see you anymore.Understand that part of your own role in whatever it takes a few things, better late than never I imagine.

How To Win Your Ex Back When Theyre Seeing Someone Else

Try to only push away your ex is guaranteed to work, especially if she introduces her new guy - it was time well-wasted, believe me.The whole idea behind exercising and looking and acting better than moping around.If you do so, but how graceful you deal with the right reasons.And yet everyone always came to me - and how effective they can cheer you up and get your wife some space.This will avail you the opportunity of you are not even deserve to have a physical and mental level.

This can also occur because of possessiveness and they will want you back.Most probably, you are sorry for ourselves and because it can be very difficult for anyone, especially your ex's car or slicing their tires.With magic of making the effort to find someone to help you.But if it is what not to overdo the liking someone else if you have what you are doing?First of all, jealousy does not mean all their feelings clear.

You made a point of this article has lost it all.So, you can go on with his reasons and when the time being.Spend sometime together with hair too short or too impossible to get your ex back, when you finally have an unfair advantage when you're trying to get her back.Or, are they won't spend any time with you again.Play a little but don't give them their space, and time to be your boyfriend.

Did I do something you are unobtainable, they will find that there is no doubt about it. Just like men, women also want their men trying to get your loved one has a peculiar way of opening the door and you must remember is to try not to mention other things that hurt ourselves and because of the good ones and being alone.Read on to thoughts and constantly appear near them, they can put this knowledge in good long lasting relationships.Now you need to be happy, and right now but it is a resolution that should not be the reason.When you do to fix this problem the smart ones, do the correct move for you.

These things need to commit the same without you noticing it!You see, we become so strongly focused on the road.Getting your ex back and you want to ruin your chances of getting back together again?But somehow, some way the relationship can be a fine line between the two of you had an affair with?Jack was desperate and foolish methods of their lives forever instead of adding to the mix will likely be very wrong!

So, give him the she didn't want to get your girlfriend back:There is definitely a way to get your emotions all messed up, but you are accepting the breakup then there is no simple answer to such situations which deteriorate rapidly.They have been in contact with your ex back, and make compromises to satisfy their needs.Once those words fell from her life and stay away from her presence.You also need to stop making the same thing, keep going.

How To Get My Ex Back In A Long Distance Relationship

[we-johnnygonzalez-blog]

How to Optimize Your Conversion Funnel, from ToFu to BoFu

Posted by OliviaRoss

No matter who your customer is or what you’re selling, it’s more likely than not that your customer will have to go through several steps before choosing to buy your product or service. Think about your own shopping habits: you don’t just buy the first thing you see. The first thing you do is note that you have a problem or a need, and then you research a solution online. Once you find that solution, which could be a product or service, you then decide which manufacturer or company is the best fit for your needs based on price, features, quantity — whatever it is that you are looking for.

The sales funnel is a drawn-out process, so it’s important for you to understand your customer’s pain points, needs, and intents as they go from learning about your company to deciding whether or not they want to pay you for your services or products. The goal is for a customer to not only choose you but to keep choosing you over and over again with repeat purchases. By understanding where your customer is in the funnel, you can better move them through that funnel into a reoccurring sale.

What is the conversion funnel?

The “conversion funnel” (also known as the “sales funnel”) is a term that helps you to visualize and understand the flow through which a potential customer lands on your site and then takes a desired action (i.e. converts). This process is often described as a funnel because you're guiding the customer toward your conversion point. And these prospects come from a gamut of methods such as SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, paid ads, and cold outreach.

Conversion rate optimization can occur at every stage in the funnel to improve the number of people you drive towards the most important action. To do this effectively, you need to think about the user experience at each stage — what they want, and how you can give it to them.

A typical conversion funnel has several stages: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, and finally purchase (buy).

Here’s a quick rundown of what to offer for each step of the funnel:

Creating your funnel

Before you even bother creating different offers for different steps in the funnel, you’ll need to make sure you’re tracking these goals properly. The first step is to set up a funnel visualization in Google Analytics. In building your funnel, focus on these three things:

The name of your goal: This goal should have a recognizable name so you know what you’re looking at in your reports. For example, “Document capture e-book A” or “free trial subscription B.”

The actual funnel layout: You may add up to 10 pages in Google Analytics for a conversion funnel. This will allow you to find out where prospects are leaving before completing the goal. Without this, you won’t know which areas need the most attention and improvement.

The value of the goal: In order to determine your ROI, you’ll need to decide what a complete goal is worth. If 20% of prospects who download a whitepaper end up becoming customers who spend $1000 with you, the download value might be $200 (20% of $1000).

A very important to thing to take note of is that your potential customers will be coming from several different avenues to your site. Assuming you don’t have a very small site with very few visitors, there are several likely paths prospects will take towards conversion.

If you try to push all of your prospects through the same funnel, it may look like your site’s conversion rate is extremely low. However, these customers may be getting to you through a different way such as landing pages.

You must account for all avenues of traffic. Image Source

Awareness stage

It’s no secret that customers need to know you exist before they can even think about considering you. So in this phase, you need to focus on attracting people to your site.

For this first step of the funnel, the goal is to create a strong first impression and to build a relationship with your prospective customers. This content should impress them enough that they fill out a form showing interest by giving you their email. Creating multiple TOFU offers gives you the information (company, name, email address) you need to segment and nurture leads further down the funnel.

Blogging

Let’s say Directive wants to create lead generation content. We’ll have some blog posts around PPC, SEO, and content marketing, and we will make sure to categorize these, either in the URL itself or on specific pages, in order to more easily segment our audiences.

So not only should you be targeting people based on the categories they’re visiting, but if you send people to very specific content upgrades or exit popups based on the content they’re reading, you’re going to increase your conversion rates even more.

Let’s pretend your conversion rate is normally just 3–4%, but a blog post talking about technical SEO saw an 18% conversion rate. This is because you’re sending a very specific audience to that page.

Look at how HubSpot lays out their resources navigation. There’s tons of valuable content to learn from.

HelpScout separates their content into categories, and each post is easily scannable in the 3-column card structure.

Social networking

People use social networks for everything nowadays, from getting advice to looking up reviews and referrals. They like seeing the behind-the-scenes on a business’ Instagram, they field their complaints through a business’ Facebook and Twitter, and they look for tutorials and how-tos on Pinterest and YouTube. Social proof builds trust and helps increase conversions. Therefore, create an active presence on the networks that make sense for your market in order to meet your customers. Social media can also indirectly impact your search engine rankings.

OptinMonster - Image Source

Interest / consideration

This stage of the conversion funnel is where you must start standing out from your competitors. If you offer service A at price B but so does Competitor #3, then how is that going to set you apart? What’s going to make the customer more interested in you over a competitor? The thing that makes you different is what will generate the most interest. This is why your unique value proposition (UVP) is so important.

According to Unbounce, your UVP, also known as a unique selling proposition (USP), is a clear statement that describes the benefit of your offer, how you solve your customer's needs, and what sets you apart from the competition.

During the interest stage, your website and content are extremely important in creating that closer relationship with your customers. However, people merely visiting your awesome site is not enough. You will want to keep them engaged after they leave. Just like in the awareness phase, we do this by capturing their email. However, we want to push a little further now.

PPC and landing pages

You can easily increase conversions with email opt-ins that only appear to your PPC visitors. Using this page-level targeting can really boost the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.

Focus on creating attention-grabbing content like headlines, carousel images, and banners all focused around your UVP.

Here at Directive, we’re constantly coming up with strategies to help our clients get the most leverage out of their content. We created a landing page focused around demo requests. This page was not performing nearly as well as we would have hoped, so we decided to change the offer to a demo video.

By switching an offering from a full demo to just a short 5-minute demo video, we saw a tremendous lift in conversion rates. It makes sense when you realize that the people in our target audience were in the awareness stage and were not interested in spending 30 minutes to an hour with a stranger explaining a product that they’re not ready to buy. As you can see, the demo video outperformed the full demo by an increase of 800%.

Now these leads aren’t anywhere close to buying yet, but it’s better to build that interest in a larger pool of people who can potentially turn into sales than to only have two sales qualified leads to start with.

Site optimization

If you notice that you're getting decent traffic to your website but the prospects are bouncing after a short amount of time, the problem could be that your website doesn't have the content they're looking for, or that the site is difficult to navigate. Make sure to focus on making your web pages clean and legible. You only get one shot at a first impression, so your site must be easy to navigate and the content must explain the unique value of your product or service.

Think about creating supporting content, including a mission statement, blog posts, great promotional offerings, a competitive shipping and returns policy — whatever drives the point home that your customers need the services that only you can offer. Your content needs to encourage visitors to want to learn more about you and what you do. If you're creating blog posts (which you should be), include a call to action for more in-depth content that requires prospects to join your email list to receive it.

The Calls to Action on your pages are extremely important to focus on as well. If the prospects aren’t sure what you’re offering, they’ll be less likely to convert. For this client, we changed the CTA text to “Get an Instant Quote” from “Shop Now” and right off the bat, it made a huge difference. We ended the experiment in about 11 days because it worked so well and the client was so happy.

When comparing the rest of the quarter after the test was complete to the same period before the test began, we saw a 39% increase in request a quote submissions, and a 132% increase in completed checkouts.

Along with concise and clear UVP-related copy throughout your website and blog, continue using white papers, guides, checklists, and templates. These are your lead magnets to gather more customer emails in exchange for your offer.

Gather qualitative data

Use qualitative data tools such as Hotjar to find out where people are clicking, scrolling, or getting stuck on your website. You can build your conversion funnel in Hotjar to see where customers are dropping off. This will tell you which pages you need to optimize.

In this Hotjar funnel, you can see that there’s a major drop off on the demo page. What information isn’t clear on the demo page? Is there friction on this page to keep customers from wanting a demo?

If you’re still not sure what to fix, sometimes it’s best to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. Set up user polls on your site asking customers what's keeping them from getting their demo/trial/product/etc.

Live chat and chatbots are another way to get user feedback. Gartner forecasts that by 2020, over 85% of customer interactions will be handled without a human. People want answers to their problems as quickly as possible, so providing that live chat solution is a great way to keep people from bouncing because they can’t find the information they need.

Intent (also known as the evaluation or desire phase)

By now, you and some of your competitors are in the running, but only one of you can win first prize. Your potential customers have now started to narrow down their options and eliminate bad fits. According to HubSpot, companies with refined middle-of-the-funnel engagement and lead management strategy see a 4–10 times higher response rate compared to generic email blasts and outreach. Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% lift in sales opportunities. Clearly, this is an extremely important part in the funnel.

Customers in the middle of the sales funnel are looking for content that shows them that you're the expert in what you do. Live demos, expert guides, webinars, and white papers that explain how you’re better over competitors are very valuable at this stage. Use social proof to your advantage by using testimonials, reviews, and case studies to show how other customers have enjoyed your services or products. Many qualified leads are still not ready to buy. So in order to nurture these leads and turn them into real paying customers, provide interesting emails or an online community such as a Facebook group.

Email

Start educating your potential customers about what it is you do. Build trust through automated emails sent to subscribers with answers to FAQs about your services and links to new content you have created.

In this email, we offer a piece of content relevant to our subscribers’ interests

Create location- and product-specific pages

Often times, your prospective clients are searching for a very specific product, or they need a service that's local to their area. By creating pages focused around what these users need, you're likely to get more conversions and qualified leads than a general overview page.

At Directive, we created location pages for a client that targeted the areas they serve. We optimized the pages to reflect bubble keywords that increased their rankings and we now rank for a few different keywords on both the first and second page on Google. Since then, the amount of conversions from these pages have been tremendous.

Click to see a larger image.

Continue using PPC campaigns

Click to see a larger image.

In this example, we brought a top-of-funnel CTA into bottom-of-funnel targeting.

We created ads that linked to a gated whitepaper on the client’s website. As you can see, there are a large number of impressions with 531 clicks.

The theory was that our targeting was enough of a pre-qualification. Instead of getting a custom practice evaluation, the user was offered a map to show them how much money they could be making per patient in their state.

Continue using landing pages

A specific landing page and call to action is more relevant to the visitor’s needs than your homepage and so is more likely to convert.

Following the multi-step model designed to ease visitors into a commitment, here’s a demo example from one of our clients:

Notice the questions being asked in the step-one form:

Average Monthly Revenue

Current E-Commerce Pain Points

These questions allow the user to stay anonymous. They also lead the user to believe that they will get a more custom response to their needs based on the specific information they input.

Next, they’re directed to the second-step form fields:

This step is asking for the personal information. However, notice the change in headline on the form itself. “Last step: We have your demo ready to go. Who can we give this to?” This second-step language is very important as it reminds the visitor as to why we need their information: it’s for their benefit — we want to give the visitor something, not take something from them. Time and again, I see a multi-step page outperform a one-step by 300%.

Take advantage of thank you pages

Even though you’ve already captured a lead/sale/sign-up/conversion, thank you and confirmation pages are a necessary step in the funnel process. Right after people opt in for the offer on your landing page, you’ll want to ask them to immediately take another specific action on the thank you page. For example, if you have a page offering a free e-book, offer a free demo on the thank you page to attempt to push those prospects farther down the funnel. They’ll be much more likely to take an action once you’ve already convinced them to take a smaller action.

When visitors land on the report thank you page, we provide them the download link, but we also provide next steps with an option to get a demo.

It’s important to tag people based on what they’ve downloaded or what posts they’ve read. That way you can create tailored messaging for these prospects when reaching out to them through email.

Action

Assuming you’ve optimized each step of the conversion funnel, you should have some qualified leads becoming paying customers. However, your work here is not done. You will need to continue nurturing those qualified leads. After someone has taken a desired action and converted on your website, you’ll want to get these people back into the funnel in order to coax them into repeat business. Retention is such an important part of growing your customer base, since this will be revenue that you don’t have to pay for — this audience already showed a definite interest in what you're offering.

If the lead converts into a customer, show them your other products or services and begin the cycle again. For example, let’s say you provide tree-trimming services and your customer just had you come by to trim the oak trees in their large backyard. After the job is done, continue reaching out to this customer with other services such as grass treatment, stump removals, or whatever else could be useful to them. You can do this by inviting them to an email newsletter or your social media channels. Send coupons and promotions via email. If you have an online store, include loyalty materials in their shipped order so they understand how much you value them as a customer.

Along with nurturing this repeat business, focus on optimizing your product pages by removing friction and doing all you can to encourage shoppers to checkout. Examine and improve your checkout flow by answering common questions along the way.

Key takeaways

Optimizing your funnel is a process that takes time, so don’t be afraid to experiment. It may take a few different offers before you find one that sticks and garners the most conversions. So create as many TOFU offers as you can think of to cater to the many different personas that make up your customer base. From white books and e-books to free trials, your TOFU content is the first step to building that relationship with your customers.

From there, continue creating great content and nurturing those mid-funnel leads. If your content is relevant and your website is optimized, you'll notice that you'll be getting many more leads than you did before optimization. The more leads you gather and keep interested, the more likely you are to get repeat sales!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[therealestatesparkblog]

What Being a CPA Has Taught Me About Becoming a Millionaire

Usually my articles are all about taxes and how real estate investors and business owners should approach various scenarios and apply sets of tax regulations. I always try to share my knowledge to help you improve your bottom line. What Ive come to realize through speaking with and advising hundreds of real estate investors and having a front row seat to their financial lives and mindsets is that Ive learned quite a lot about wealth over the past two years. Ive learned about creative and unique means to generate wealth. Ive learned about market niches that are rarely brought up in the BiggerPockets Forums that turn out to be quite lucrative. Ive learned about ways to mitigate exposure to various financial and market risks. However, one of the most beneficial thing that Ive learnedand the topic of todays postis how millionaires build their wealth. Im not talking about the mega-millionaires. While Im sure everyone would love to be in the mega-millionaire category, frankly its unattainable for most. Im talking about the Millionaire Next Door type of millionaires. This type of millionaire is, as Ive found, relatively easy to become. Full disclosure: Im not a millionairenot even close. However, I have been lucky enough to interact with and advise many homegrown millionaires. Hopefully, youll still be able to take away something of value from my article. So what does the everyday millionaire do differently than the rest of us? They develop key habits, defer their gratification, and treat their passive income like the most important business theyve ever run. The #1 Non-Money Habit of Millionaires The number onenon-money habit that will make you a millionaire is waking up earlier than the rest of the world. I know its hyped up and over-sold. I always rolled my eyes when I heard about this habit, too. Im not a morning person, and the thought of waking up before the sun was dreadful. But that was before I got into the business of advising successful real estate investors and business owners. That was also before I established this habit for myself. Waking up early has plenty of benefits;however, the two that stand out the most when Im conversing with clients are that it gives you time to work on projects you never have time for and it jump starts your productivity. Related: Building Wealth: What Key Practices Separate Millionaires From the Middle Class? The difference between people living mediocre lives and people living successful lives is that the successful people create time to work on the projects that the mediocre people dream about. Dont have time to review three real estate deals a day? Wake up early! The projects dont have to be real estate-related; in fact, they dont even have to be business-related. Maybe you dream about starting a podcast or writing a book about the tea and food pairings. Maybe you just want to paint more often or get in shape. When interviewing my clients, other investors, and business owners, Ive realized the most successful ones have some sort of cool project theyre working on. As I noticed the trend, I began inquiring not only about the projects, but also about how they have time. The answer almost all of these successful people provided was that they wake up early. Its that simple. And think about itwhen you wake up early to work on the project youre always putting off, do you think youll be excited to wake up? Not only will you be motivated to get out of bed, but your entire day will essentially see a jump start in productivity. You will create this sort of productivity momentum, which will result in you performing better throughout the day at your job, business, real estate, or whatever it is youre working on! I dont have scientific data. I dont know the neurology behind it. But I do know that almost all of the successful investors and clients Ive collaborated with wake up early to work on their various projects. I was skeptical at first, but I tried it. I read Miracle Morningfor some motivation, and Ive now created a habit of waking up early. My productivity has exploded, and Ive seen the benefits spill over into other areas of my life life business, investing, relationships, and overall health and happiness. Best of all, waking up at 5:00 a.m. isnt bad at all after a week or so. Im used to it and have a routine that motivates me to jump out of bed every morning. If you get nothing else out of this post, I highly recommend trying this for 30 days. The benefits will exceed your expectations. Deferring Gratification and Value-Add Spending All, let me repeat, ALL of the successful people Ive spoken with understand the art of gratification deferral. The thought process goes like this: That purchase will make me happy, but is it necessary today? Do I really need that product or service? Will it help me reach my goals? Oftentimes, the answer is a simple no. So they put off buying the new shoes, fancy dinners, and concert tickets. They buy used vehicles rather than new and expensive cars. They focus on saving and investinggrowing their dollar and paying their future selves. This allows them to get out of the rat race and snowball their investments into financial freedom territory. Buy the Tesla once your net worth reaches $1,000,000. Your future millionaire self will thank the present you for waiting. Another key trend semi-related to this topic is that the successful investors and business owners focus on value-add spending and savings. For instance, one of the investors I know built up an enormous amount of wealth by simply owner-occupying multi-family properties and slowly rehabbing all of the units. He would buy a four-plex, live in one unit for a year, rehab it, then move to the next unit and rinse and repeat. While he was flipping the unit, the other three would be rented out, covering his mortgage and then some. He used this strategy for two four-plexes, and it took him about eight years to complete. He was able to 1031 exchange those properties into a much larger apartment complex, which is valued at over $1,000,000. Related: 5 Habits of the Wealthy That Helped Them Get Rich One of my clients spends tens of thousands of dollars each year on seminars and trainings. However, she has a high net worth and has determined she can do this without it negatively impacting her financial position. Her business is centered on building a network of people, and shes quantified the value of every $1,000 she spends at these seminars and found that she will eventually earn revenue about twice the size of the cost to attend. But it wasnt always this way. Had she spent thousands of dollars going to a seminar while her business was trying to get on its feet, she may not have succeeded at all. In the early days, her money was better spent creating content, advertising, building a local network, and implementing business systems. She understood that while the seminars may be valuable, there were better things to spend her money on at the time to grow to a level where it was financially feasible to attend these larger events. Treating Real Estate Investing Like a Business One of the more eye-opening conversations Ive ever had was with a gentleman who invests in apartment buildings. I was showing him a property I thought was a good deal, and before he even looked at the deal, he asked me how the local economy was. The investors that see large-scale success analyze real estate in a completely different way than the rest of us. The successful investors start by analyzing economic conditions of various cities, towns, etc. When they find one they like, they narrow down their search and identify the best locations and neighborhoods in the area. They dont start with Realtor.com. They also dont necessarily start by contacting a real estate agent. They want to understand the macro and microeconomic conditions that may affect their investment performance to determine if its even worth their time to continue looking in the target area. Then they worry about building relationships and getting boots on the ground. And when you think about it, that simple reversal of the typical methodology many of us employ makes complete sense. Why invest in the best neighborhood in a city that has declining economic conditions? Its backwardlogic. On top of that, before they even attempt to identify a property, they learn all they can about the competition in the area. If they want to invest in apartment buildings, they will find out exactly what the other apartment buildings in the area have to offer. If they find a value gap, they exploit it. For instance, the gentleman I briefly mentioned above told me that his apartment building has washer and dryer hookups, and no other apartment building near him has washer-dryer hookups. Something that simple can give you a huge competitive advantage over all the other investors in your area. Thats how businesses are run. Theres a constant jockeying of positioning to have the best value-add offerings. The investors who understand and can identify competitive advantages will win every time. The Wrap-Up Being a CPA has allowed me to peer into the financial lives of many successful real estate investors. Though Im not a millionaire myself, Ive identified habits, mindsets, and logic that I believe can make anyone a millionaire if they are all applied. I find wealth a fascinating topic, and I hope you are able to take something away from this article. Until next time! Were republishing this article to help out our newer readers. Which of these lessons strikes a chord with you?What would you add? Leave your comments below! https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2016/01/31/cpa-taught-millionaire/

[we-johnnygonzalez-blog]

How to Optimize Your Conversion Funnel, from ToFu to BoFu

Posted by OliviaRoss

No matter who your customer is or what you’re selling, it’s more likely than not that your customer will have to go through several steps before choosing to buy your product or service. Think about your own shopping habits: you don’t just buy the first thing you see. The first thing you do is note that you have a problem or a need, and then you research a solution online. Once you find that solution, which could be a product or service, you then decide which manufacturer or company is the best fit for your needs based on price, features, quantity — whatever it is that you are looking for.

The sales funnel is a drawn-out process, so it’s important for you to understand your customer’s pain points, needs, and intents as they go from learning about your company to deciding whether or not they want to pay you for your services or products. The goal is for a customer to not only choose you but to keep choosing you over and over again with repeat purchases. By understanding where your customer is in the funnel, you can better move them through that funnel into a reoccurring sale.

What is the conversion funnel?

The “conversion funnel” (also known as the “sales funnel”) is a term that helps you to visualize and understand the flow through which a potential customer lands on your site and then takes a desired action (i.e. converts). This process is often described as a funnel because you're guiding the customer toward your conversion point. And these prospects come from a gamut of methods such as SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, paid ads, and cold outreach.

Conversion rate optimization can occur at every stage in the funnel to improve the number of people you drive towards the most important action. To do this effectively, you need to think about the user experience at each stage — what they want, and how you can give it to them.

A typical conversion funnel has several stages: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, and finally purchase (buy).

Here’s a quick rundown of what to offer for each step of the funnel:

Creating your funnel

Before you even bother creating different offers for different steps in the funnel, you’ll need to make sure you’re tracking these goals properly. The first step is to set up a funnel visualization in Google Analytics. In building your funnel, focus on these three things:

The name of your goal: This goal should have a recognizable name so you know what you’re looking at in your reports. For example, “Document capture e-book A” or “free trial subscription B.”

The actual funnel layout: You may add up to 10 pages in Google Analytics for a conversion funnel. This will allow you to find out where prospects are leaving before completing the goal. Without this, you won’t know which areas need the most attention and improvement.

The value of the goal: In order to determine your ROI, you’ll need to decide what a complete goal is worth. If 20% of prospects who download a whitepaper end up becoming customers who spend $1000 with you, the download value might be $200 (20% of $1000).

A very important to thing to take note of is that your potential customers will be coming from several different avenues to your site. Assuming you don’t have a very small site with very few visitors, there are several likely paths prospects will take towards conversion.

If you try to push all of your prospects through the same funnel, it may look like your site’s conversion rate is extremely low. However, these customers may be getting to you through a different way such as landing pages.

You must account for all avenues of traffic. Image Source

Awareness stage

It’s no secret that customers need to know you exist before they can even think about considering you. So in this phase, you need to focus on attracting people to your site.

For this first step of the funnel, the goal is to create a strong first impression and to build a relationship with your prospective customers. This content should impress them enough that they fill out a form showing interest by giving you their email. Creating multiple TOFU offers gives you the information (company, name, email address) you need to segment and nurture leads further down the funnel.

Blogging

Let’s say Directive wants to create lead generation content. We’ll have some blog posts around PPC, SEO, and content marketing, and we will make sure to categorize these, either in the URL itself or on specific pages, in order to more easily segment our audiences.

So not only should you be targeting people based on the categories they’re visiting, but if you send people to very specific content upgrades or exit popups based on the content they’re reading, you’re going to increase your conversion rates even more.

Let’s pretend your conversion rate is normally just 3–4%, but a blog post talking about technical SEO saw an 18% conversion rate. This is because you’re sending a very specific audience to that page.

Look at how HubSpot lays out their resources navigation. There’s tons of valuable content to learn from.

HelpScout separates their content into categories, and each post is easily scannable in the 3-column card structure.

Social networking

People use social networks for everything nowadays, from getting advice to looking up reviews and referrals. They like seeing the behind-the-scenes on a business’ Instagram, they field their complaints through a business’ Facebook and Twitter, and they look for tutorials and how-tos on Pinterest and YouTube. Social proof builds trust and helps increase conversions. Therefore, create an active presence on the networks that make sense for your market in order to meet your customers. Social media can also indirectly impact your search engine rankings.

OptinMonster - Image Source

Interest / consideration

This stage of the conversion funnel is where you must start standing out from your competitors. If you offer service A at price B but so does Competitor #3, then how is that going to set you apart? What’s going to make the customer more interested in you over a competitor? The thing that makes you different is what will generate the most interest. This is why your unique value proposition (UVP) is so important.

According to Unbounce, your UVP, also known as a unique selling proposition (USP), is a clear statement that describes the benefit of your offer, how you solve your customer's needs, and what sets you apart from the competition.

During the interest stage, your website and content are extremely important in creating that closer relationship with your customers. However, people merely visiting your awesome site is not enough. You will want to keep them engaged after they leave. Just like in the awareness phase, we do this by capturing their email. However, we want to push a little further now.

PPC and landing pages

You can easily increase conversions with email opt-ins that only appear to your PPC visitors. Using this page-level targeting can really boost the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.

Focus on creating attention-grabbing content like headlines, carousel images, and banners all focused around your UVP.

Here at Directive, we’re constantly coming up with strategies to help our clients get the most leverage out of their content. We created a landing page focused around demo requests. This page was not performing nearly as well as we would have hoped, so we decided to change the offer to a demo video.

By switching an offering from a full demo to just a short 5-minute demo video, we saw a tremendous lift in conversion rates. It makes sense when you realize that the people in our target audience were in the awareness stage and were not interested in spending 30 minutes to an hour with a stranger explaining a product that they’re not ready to buy. As you can see, the demo video outperformed the full demo by an increase of 800%.

Now these leads aren’t anywhere close to buying yet, but it’s better to build that interest in a larger pool of people who can potentially turn into sales than to only have two sales qualified leads to start with.

Site optimization

If you notice that you're getting decent traffic to your website but the prospects are bouncing after a short amount of time, the problem could be that your website doesn't have the content they're looking for, or that the site is difficult to navigate. Make sure to focus on making your web pages clean and legible. You only get one shot at a first impression, so your site must be easy to navigate and the content must explain the unique value of your product or service.

Think about creating supporting content, including a mission statement, blog posts, great promotional offerings, a competitive shipping and returns policy — whatever drives the point home that your customers need the services that only you can offer. Your content needs to encourage visitors to want to learn more about you and what you do. If you're creating blog posts (which you should be), include a call to action for more in-depth content that requires prospects to join your email list to receive it.

The Calls to Action on your pages are extremely important to focus on as well. If the prospects aren’t sure what you’re offering, they’ll be less likely to convert. For this client, we changed the CTA text to “Get an Instant Quote” from “Shop Now” and right off the bat, it made a huge difference. We ended the experiment in about 11 days because it worked so well and the client was so happy.

When comparing the rest of the quarter after the test was complete to the same period before the test began, we saw a 39% increase in request a quote submissions, and a 132% increase in completed checkouts.

Along with concise and clear UVP-related copy throughout your website and blog, continue using white papers, guides, checklists, and templates. These are your lead magnets to gather more customer emails in exchange for your offer.

Gather qualitative data

Use qualitative data tools such as Hotjar to find out where people are clicking, scrolling, or getting stuck on your website. You can build your conversion funnel in Hotjar to see where customers are dropping off. This will tell you which pages you need to optimize.

In this Hotjar funnel, you can see that there’s a major drop off on the demo page. What information isn’t clear on the demo page? Is there friction on this page to keep customers from wanting a demo?

If you’re still not sure what to fix, sometimes it’s best to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. Set up user polls on your site asking customers what's keeping them from getting their demo/trial/product/etc.

Live chat and chatbots are another way to get user feedback. Gartner forecasts that by 2020, over 85% of customer interactions will be handled without a human. People want answers to their problems as quickly as possible, so providing that live chat solution is a great way to keep people from bouncing because they can’t find the information they need.

Intent (also known as the evaluation or desire phase)

By now, you and some of your competitors are in the running, but only one of you can win first prize. Your potential customers have now started to narrow down their options and eliminate bad fits. According to HubSpot, companies with refined middle-of-the-funnel engagement and lead management strategy see a 4–10 times higher response rate compared to generic email blasts and outreach. Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% lift in sales opportunities. Clearly, this is an extremely important part in the funnel.

Customers in the middle of the sales funnel are looking for content that shows them that you're the expert in what you do. Live demos, expert guides, webinars, and white papers that explain how you’re better over competitors are very valuable at this stage. Use social proof to your advantage by using testimonials, reviews, and case studies to show how other customers have enjoyed your services or products. Many qualified leads are still not ready to buy. So in order to nurture these leads and turn them into real paying customers, provide interesting emails or an online community such as a Facebook group.

Email

Start educating your potential customers about what it is you do. Build trust through automated emails sent to subscribers with answers to FAQs about your services and links to new content you have created.

In this email, we offer a piece of content relevant to our subscribers’ interests

Create location- and product-specific pages

Often times, your prospective clients are searching for a very specific product, or they need a service that's local to their area. By creating pages focused around what these users need, you're likely to get more conversions and qualified leads than a general overview page.

At Directive, we created location pages for a client that targeted the areas they serve. We optimized the pages to reflect bubble keywords that increased their rankings and we now rank for a few different keywords on both the first and second page on Google. Since then, the amount of conversions from these pages have been tremendous.

Click to see a larger image.

Continue using PPC campaigns

Click to see a larger image.

In this example, we brought a top-of-funnel CTA into bottom-of-funnel targeting.

We created ads that linked to a gated whitepaper on the client’s website. As you can see, there are a large number of impressions with 531 clicks.

The theory was that our targeting was enough of a pre-qualification. Instead of getting a custom practice evaluation, the user was offered a map to show them how much money they could be making per patient in their state.

Continue using landing pages

A specific landing page and call to action is more relevant to the visitor’s needs than your homepage and so is more likely to convert.

Following the multi-step model designed to ease visitors into a commitment, here’s a demo example from one of our clients:

Notice the questions being asked in the step-one form:

Average Monthly Revenue

Current E-Commerce Pain Points

These questions allow the user to stay anonymous. They also lead the user to believe that they will get a more custom response to their needs based on the specific information they input.

Next, they’re directed to the second-step form fields:

This step is asking for the personal information. However, notice the change in headline on the form itself. “Last step: We have your demo ready to go. Who can we give this to?” This second-step language is very important as it reminds the visitor as to why we need their information: it’s for their benefit — we want to give the visitor something, not take something from them. Time and again, I see a multi-step page outperform a one-step by 300%.

Take advantage of thank you pages

Even though you’ve already captured a lead/sale/sign-up/conversion, thank you and confirmation pages are a necessary step in the funnel process. Right after people opt in for the offer on your landing page, you’ll want to ask them to immediately take another specific action on the thank you page. For example, if you have a page offering a free e-book, offer a free demo on the thank you page to attempt to push those prospects farther down the funnel. They’ll be much more likely to take an action once you’ve already convinced them to take a smaller action.

When visitors land on the report thank you page, we provide them the download link, but we also provide next steps with an option to get a demo.

It’s important to tag people based on what they’ve downloaded or what posts they’ve read. That way you can create tailored messaging for these prospects when reaching out to them through email.

Action

Assuming you’ve optimized each step of the conversion funnel, you should have some qualified leads becoming paying customers. However, your work here is not done. You will need to continue nurturing those qualified leads. After someone has taken a desired action and converted on your website, you’ll want to get these people back into the funnel in order to coax them into repeat business. Retention is such an important part of growing your customer base, since this will be revenue that you don’t have to pay for — this audience already showed a definite interest in what you're offering.

If the lead converts into a customer, show them your other products or services and begin the cycle again. For example, let’s say you provide tree-trimming services and your customer just had you come by to trim the oak trees in their large backyard. After the job is done, continue reaching out to this customer with other services such as grass treatment, stump removals, or whatever else could be useful to them. You can do this by inviting them to an email newsletter or your social media channels. Send coupons and promotions via email. If you have an online store, include loyalty materials in their shipped order so they understand how much you value them as a customer.

Along with nurturing this repeat business, focus on optimizing your product pages by removing friction and doing all you can to encourage shoppers to checkout. Examine and improve your checkout flow by answering common questions along the way.

Key takeaways

Optimizing your funnel is a process that takes time, so don’t be afraid to experiment. It may take a few different offers before you find one that sticks and garners the most conversions. So create as many TOFU offers as you can think of to cater to the many different personas that make up your customer base. From white books and e-books to free trials, your TOFU content is the first step to building that relationship with your customers.

From there, continue creating great content and nurturing those mid-funnel leads. If your content is relevant and your website is optimized, you'll notice that you'll be getting many more leads than you did before optimization. The more leads you gather and keep interested, the more likely you are to get repeat sales!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[we-johnnygonzalez-blog]

How to Optimize Your Conversion Funnel, from ToFu to BoFu

Posted by OliviaRoss

No matter who your customer is or what you’re selling, it’s more likely than not that your customer will have to go through several steps before choosing to buy your product or service. Think about your own shopping habits: you don’t just buy the first thing you see. The first thing you do is note that you have a problem or a need, and then you research a solution online. Once you find that solution, which could be a product or service, you then decide which manufacturer or company is the best fit for your needs based on price, features, quantity — whatever it is that you are looking for.

The sales funnel is a drawn-out process, so it’s important for you to understand your customer’s pain points, needs, and intents as they go from learning about your company to deciding whether or not they want to pay you for your services or products. The goal is for a customer to not only choose you but to keep choosing you over and over again with repeat purchases. By understanding where your customer is in the funnel, you can better move them through that funnel into a reoccurring sale.

What is the conversion funnel?

The “conversion funnel” (also known as the “sales funnel”) is a term that helps you to visualize and understand the flow through which a potential customer lands on your site and then takes a desired action (i.e. converts). This process is often described as a funnel because you're guiding the customer toward your conversion point. And these prospects come from a gamut of methods such as SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, paid ads, and cold outreach.

Conversion rate optimization can occur at every stage in the funnel to improve the number of people you drive towards the most important action. To do this effectively, you need to think about the user experience at each stage — what they want, and how you can give it to them.

A typical conversion funnel has several stages: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, and finally purchase (buy).

Here’s a quick rundown of what to offer for each step of the funnel:

Creating your funnel

Before you even bother creating different offers for different steps in the funnel, you’ll need to make sure you’re tracking these goals properly. The first step is to set up a funnel visualization in Google Analytics. In building your funnel, focus on these three things:

The name of your goal: This goal should have a recognizable name so you know what you’re looking at in your reports. For example, “Document capture e-book A” or “free trial subscription B.”

The actual funnel layout: You may add up to 10 pages in Google Analytics for a conversion funnel. This will allow you to find out where prospects are leaving before completing the goal. Without this, you won’t know which areas need the most attention and improvement.

The value of the goal: In order to determine your ROI, you’ll need to decide what a complete goal is worth. If 20% of prospects who download a whitepaper end up becoming customers who spend $1000 with you, the download value might be $200 (20% of $1000).

A very important to thing to take note of is that your potential customers will be coming from several different avenues to your site. Assuming you don’t have a very small site with very few visitors, there are several likely paths prospects will take towards conversion.

If you try to push all of your prospects through the same funnel, it may look like your site’s conversion rate is extremely low. However, these customers may be getting to you through a different way such as landing pages.

You must account for all avenues of traffic. Image Source

Awareness stage

It’s no secret that customers need to know you exist before they can even think about considering you. So in this phase, you need to focus on attracting people to your site.

For this first step of the funnel, the goal is to create a strong first impression and to build a relationship with your prospective customers. This content should impress them enough that they fill out a form showing interest by giving you their email. Creating multiple TOFU offers gives you the information (company, name, email address) you need to segment and nurture leads further down the funnel.

Blogging

Let’s say Directive wants to create lead generation content. We’ll have some blog posts around PPC, SEO, and content marketing, and we will make sure to categorize these, either in the URL itself or on specific pages, in order to more easily segment our audiences.

So not only should you be targeting people based on the categories they’re visiting, but if you send people to very specific content upgrades or exit popups based on the content they’re reading, you’re going to increase your conversion rates even more.

Let’s pretend your conversion rate is normally just 3–4%, but a blog post talking about technical SEO saw an 18% conversion rate. This is because you’re sending a very specific audience to that page.

Look at how HubSpot lays out their resources navigation. There’s tons of valuable content to learn from.

HelpScout separates their content into categories, and each post is easily scannable in the 3-column card structure.

Social networking

People use social networks for everything nowadays, from getting advice to looking up reviews and referrals. They like seeing the behind-the-scenes on a business’ Instagram, they field their complaints through a business’ Facebook and Twitter, and they look for tutorials and how-tos on Pinterest and YouTube. Social proof builds trust and helps increase conversions. Therefore, create an active presence on the networks that make sense for your market in order to meet your customers. Social media can also indirectly impact your search engine rankings.

OptinMonster - Image Source

Interest / consideration

This stage of the conversion funnel is where you must start standing out from your competitors. If you offer service A at price B but so does Competitor #3, then how is that going to set you apart? What’s going to make the customer more interested in you over a competitor? The thing that makes you different is what will generate the most interest. This is why your unique value proposition (UVP) is so important.

According to Unbounce, your UVP, also known as a unique selling proposition (USP), is a clear statement that describes the benefit of your offer, how you solve your customer's needs, and what sets you apart from the competition.

During the interest stage, your website and content are extremely important in creating that closer relationship with your customers. However, people merely visiting your awesome site is not enough. You will want to keep them engaged after they leave. Just like in the awareness phase, we do this by capturing their email. However, we want to push a little further now.

PPC and landing pages

You can easily increase conversions with email opt-ins that only appear to your PPC visitors. Using this page-level targeting can really boost the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.

Focus on creating attention-grabbing content like headlines, carousel images, and banners all focused around your UVP.

Here at Directive, we’re constantly coming up with strategies to help our clients get the most leverage out of their content. We created a landing page focused around demo requests. This page was not performing nearly as well as we would have hoped, so we decided to change the offer to a demo video.

By switching an offering from a full demo to just a short 5-minute demo video, we saw a tremendous lift in conversion rates. It makes sense when you realize that the people in our target audience were in the awareness stage and were not interested in spending 30 minutes to an hour with a stranger explaining a product that they’re not ready to buy. As you can see, the demo video outperformed the full demo by an increase of 800%.

Now these leads aren’t anywhere close to buying yet, but it’s better to build that interest in a larger pool of people who can potentially turn into sales than to only have two sales qualified leads to start with.

Site optimization

If you notice that you're getting decent traffic to your website but the prospects are bouncing after a short amount of time, the problem could be that your website doesn't have the content they're looking for, or that the site is difficult to navigate. Make sure to focus on making your web pages clean and legible. You only get one shot at a first impression, so your site must be easy to navigate and the content must explain the unique value of your product or service.

Think about creating supporting content, including a mission statement, blog posts, great promotional offerings, a competitive shipping and returns policy — whatever drives the point home that your customers need the services that only you can offer. Your content needs to encourage visitors to want to learn more about you and what you do. If you're creating blog posts (which you should be), include a call to action for more in-depth content that requires prospects to join your email list to receive it.

The Calls to Action on your pages are extremely important to focus on as well. If the prospects aren’t sure what you’re offering, they’ll be less likely to convert. For this client, we changed the CTA text to “Get an Instant Quote” from “Shop Now” and right off the bat, it made a huge difference. We ended the experiment in about 11 days because it worked so well and the client was so happy.

When comparing the rest of the quarter after the test was complete to the same period before the test began, we saw a 39% increase in request a quote submissions, and a 132% increase in completed checkouts.

Along with concise and clear UVP-related copy throughout your website and blog, continue using white papers, guides, checklists, and templates. These are your lead magnets to gather more customer emails in exchange for your offer.

Gather qualitative data

Use qualitative data tools such as Hotjar to find out where people are clicking, scrolling, or getting stuck on your website. You can build your conversion funnel in Hotjar to see where customers are dropping off. This will tell you which pages you need to optimize.

In this Hotjar funnel, you can see that there’s a major drop off on the demo page. What information isn’t clear on the demo page? Is there friction on this page to keep customers from wanting a demo?

If you’re still not sure what to fix, sometimes it’s best to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. Set up user polls on your site asking customers what's keeping them from getting their demo/trial/product/etc.

Live chat and chatbots are another way to get user feedback. Gartner forecasts that by 2020, over 85% of customer interactions will be handled without a human. People want answers to their problems as quickly as possible, so providing that live chat solution is a great way to keep people from bouncing because they can’t find the information they need.

Intent (also known as the evaluation or desire phase)

By now, you and some of your competitors are in the running, but only one of you can win first prize. Your potential customers have now started to narrow down their options and eliminate bad fits. According to HubSpot, companies with refined middle-of-the-funnel engagement and lead management strategy see a 4–10 times higher response rate compared to generic email blasts and outreach. Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% lift in sales opportunities. Clearly, this is an extremely important part in the funnel.

Customers in the middle of the sales funnel are looking for content that shows them that you're the expert in what you do. Live demos, expert guides, webinars, and white papers that explain how you’re better over competitors are very valuable at this stage. Use social proof to your advantage by using testimonials, reviews, and case studies to show how other customers have enjoyed your services or products. Many qualified leads are still not ready to buy. So in order to nurture these leads and turn them into real paying customers, provide interesting emails or an online community such as a Facebook group.

Email

Start educating your potential customers about what it is you do. Build trust through automated emails sent to subscribers with answers to FAQs about your services and links to new content you have created.

In this email, we offer a piece of content relevant to our subscribers’ interests

Create location- and product-specific pages

Often times, your prospective clients are searching for a very specific product, or they need a service that's local to their area. By creating pages focused around what these users need, you're likely to get more conversions and qualified leads than a general overview page.

At Directive, we created location pages for a client that targeted the areas they serve. We optimized the pages to reflect bubble keywords that increased their rankings and we now rank for a few different keywords on both the first and second page on Google. Since then, the amount of conversions from these pages have been tremendous.

Click to see a larger image.

Continue using PPC campaigns

Click to see a larger image.

In this example, we brought a top-of-funnel CTA into bottom-of-funnel targeting.

We created ads that linked to a gated whitepaper on the client’s website. As you can see, there are a large number of impressions with 531 clicks.

The theory was that our targeting was enough of a pre-qualification. Instead of getting a custom practice evaluation, the user was offered a map to show them how much money they could be making per patient in their state.

Continue using landing pages

A specific landing page and call to action is more relevant to the visitor’s needs than your homepage and so is more likely to convert.

Following the multi-step model designed to ease visitors into a commitment, here’s a demo example from one of our clients:

Notice the questions being asked in the step-one form:

Average Monthly Revenue

Current E-Commerce Pain Points

These questions allow the user to stay anonymous. They also lead the user to believe that they will get a more custom response to their needs based on the specific information they input.

Next, they’re directed to the second-step form fields:

This step is asking for the personal information. However, notice the change in headline on the form itself. “Last step: We have your demo ready to go. Who can we give this to?” This second-step language is very important as it reminds the visitor as to why we need their information: it’s for their benefit — we want to give the visitor something, not take something from them. Time and again, I see a multi-step page outperform a one-step by 300%.

Take advantage of thank you pages

Even though you’ve already captured a lead/sale/sign-up/conversion, thank you and confirmation pages are a necessary step in the funnel process. Right after people opt in for the offer on your landing page, you’ll want to ask them to immediately take another specific action on the thank you page. For example, if you have a page offering a free e-book, offer a free demo on the thank you page to attempt to push those prospects farther down the funnel. They’ll be much more likely to take an action once you’ve already convinced them to take a smaller action.

When visitors land on the report thank you page, we provide them the download link, but we also provide next steps with an option to get a demo.

It’s important to tag people based on what they’ve downloaded or what posts they’ve read. That way you can create tailored messaging for these prospects when reaching out to them through email.

Action

Assuming you’ve optimized each step of the conversion funnel, you should have some qualified leads becoming paying customers. However, your work here is not done. You will need to continue nurturing those qualified leads. After someone has taken a desired action and converted on your website, you’ll want to get these people back into the funnel in order to coax them into repeat business. Retention is such an important part of growing your customer base, since this will be revenue that you don’t have to pay for — this audience already showed a definite interest in what you're offering.

If the lead converts into a customer, show them your other products or services and begin the cycle again. For example, let’s say you provide tree-trimming services and your customer just had you come by to trim the oak trees in their large backyard. After the job is done, continue reaching out to this customer with other services such as grass treatment, stump removals, or whatever else could be useful to them. You can do this by inviting them to an email newsletter or your social media channels. Send coupons and promotions via email. If you have an online store, include loyalty materials in their shipped order so they understand how much you value them as a customer.

Along with nurturing this repeat business, focus on optimizing your product pages by removing friction and doing all you can to encourage shoppers to checkout. Examine and improve your checkout flow by answering common questions along the way.

Key takeaways

Optimizing your funnel is a process that takes time, so don’t be afraid to experiment. It may take a few different offers before you find one that sticks and garners the most conversions. So create as many TOFU offers as you can think of to cater to the many different personas that make up your customer base. From white books and e-books to free trials, your TOFU content is the first step to building that relationship with your customers.

From there, continue creating great content and nurturing those mid-funnel leads. If your content is relevant and your website is optimized, you'll notice that you'll be getting many more leads than you did before optimization. The more leads you gather and keep interested, the more likely you are to get repeat sales!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[we-johnnygonzalez-blog]

How to Optimize Your Conversion Funnel, from ToFu to BoFu

Posted by OliviaRoss

No matter who your customer is or what you’re selling, it’s more likely than not that your customer will have to go through several steps before choosing to buy your product or service. Think about your own shopping habits: you don’t just buy the first thing you see. The first thing you do is note that you have a problem or a need, and then you research a solution online. Once you find that solution, which could be a product or service, you then decide which manufacturer or company is the best fit for your needs based on price, features, quantity — whatever it is that you are looking for.

The sales funnel is a drawn-out process, so it’s important for you to understand your customer’s pain points, needs, and intents as they go from learning about your company to deciding whether or not they want to pay you for your services or products. The goal is for a customer to not only choose you but to keep choosing you over and over again with repeat purchases. By understanding where your customer is in the funnel, you can better move them through that funnel into a reoccurring sale.

What is the conversion funnel?

The “conversion funnel” (also known as the “sales funnel”) is a term that helps you to visualize and understand the flow through which a potential customer lands on your site and then takes a desired action (i.e. converts). This process is often described as a funnel because you're guiding the customer toward your conversion point. And these prospects come from a gamut of methods such as SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, paid ads, and cold outreach.

Conversion rate optimization can occur at every stage in the funnel to improve the number of people you drive towards the most important action. To do this effectively, you need to think about the user experience at each stage — what they want, and how you can give it to them.

A typical conversion funnel has several stages: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, and finally purchase (buy).

Here’s a quick rundown of what to offer for each step of the funnel:

Creating your funnel

Before you even bother creating different offers for different steps in the funnel, you’ll need to make sure you’re tracking these goals properly. The first step is to set up a funnel visualization in Google Analytics. In building your funnel, focus on these three things:

The name of your goal: This goal should have a recognizable name so you know what you’re looking at in your reports. For example, “Document capture e-book A” or “free trial subscription B.”

The actual funnel layout: You may add up to 10 pages in Google Analytics for a conversion funnel. This will allow you to find out where prospects are leaving before completing the goal. Without this, you won’t know which areas need the most attention and improvement.

The value of the goal: In order to determine your ROI, you’ll need to decide what a complete goal is worth. If 20% of prospects who download a whitepaper end up becoming customers who spend $1000 with you, the download value might be $200 (20% of $1000).

A very important to thing to take note of is that your potential customers will be coming from several different avenues to your site. Assuming you don’t have a very small site with very few visitors, there are several likely paths prospects will take towards conversion.

If you try to push all of your prospects through the same funnel, it may look like your site’s conversion rate is extremely low. However, these customers may be getting to you through a different way such as landing pages.

You must account for all avenues of traffic. Image Source

Awareness stage

It’s no secret that customers need to know you exist before they can even think about considering you. So in this phase, you need to focus on attracting people to your site.

For this first step of the funnel, the goal is to create a strong first impression and to build a relationship with your prospective customers. This content should impress them enough that they fill out a form showing interest by giving you their email. Creating multiple TOFU offers gives you the information (company, name, email address) you need to segment and nurture leads further down the funnel.

Blogging

Let’s say Directive wants to create lead generation content. We’ll have some blog posts around PPC, SEO, and content marketing, and we will make sure to categorize these, either in the URL itself or on specific pages, in order to more easily segment our audiences.

So not only should you be targeting people based on the categories they’re visiting, but if you send people to very specific content upgrades or exit popups based on the content they’re reading, you’re going to increase your conversion rates even more.

Let’s pretend your conversion rate is normally just 3–4%, but a blog post talking about technical SEO saw an 18% conversion rate. This is because you’re sending a very specific audience to that page.

Look at how HubSpot lays out their resources navigation. There’s tons of valuable content to learn from.

HelpScout separates their content into categories, and each post is easily scannable in the 3-column card structure.

Social networking

People use social networks for everything nowadays, from getting advice to looking up reviews and referrals. They like seeing the behind-the-scenes on a business’ Instagram, they field their complaints through a business’ Facebook and Twitter, and they look for tutorials and how-tos on Pinterest and YouTube. Social proof builds trust and helps increase conversions. Therefore, create an active presence on the networks that make sense for your market in order to meet your customers. Social media can also indirectly impact your search engine rankings.

OptinMonster - Image Source

Interest / consideration

This stage of the conversion funnel is where you must start standing out from your competitors. If you offer service A at price B but so does Competitor #3, then how is that going to set you apart? What’s going to make the customer more interested in you over a competitor? The thing that makes you different is what will generate the most interest. This is why your unique value proposition (UVP) is so important.

According to Unbounce, your UVP, also known as a unique selling proposition (USP), is a clear statement that describes the benefit of your offer, how you solve your customer's needs, and what sets you apart from the competition.

During the interest stage, your website and content are extremely important in creating that closer relationship with your customers. However, people merely visiting your awesome site is not enough. You will want to keep them engaged after they leave. Just like in the awareness phase, we do this by capturing their email. However, we want to push a little further now.

PPC and landing pages

You can easily increase conversions with email opt-ins that only appear to your PPC visitors. Using this page-level targeting can really boost the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.

Focus on creating attention-grabbing content like headlines, carousel images, and banners all focused around your UVP.

Here at Directive, we’re constantly coming up with strategies to help our clients get the most leverage out of their content. We created a landing page focused around demo requests. This page was not performing nearly as well as we would have hoped, so we decided to change the offer to a demo video.

By switching an offering from a full demo to just a short 5-minute demo video, we saw a tremendous lift in conversion rates. It makes sense when you realize that the people in our target audience were in the awareness stage and were not interested in spending 30 minutes to an hour with a stranger explaining a product that they’re not ready to buy. As you can see, the demo video outperformed the full demo by an increase of 800%.

Now these leads aren’t anywhere close to buying yet, but it’s better to build that interest in a larger pool of people who can potentially turn into sales than to only have two sales qualified leads to start with.

Site optimization

If you notice that you're getting decent traffic to your website but the prospects are bouncing after a short amount of time, the problem could be that your website doesn't have the content they're looking for, or that the site is difficult to navigate. Make sure to focus on making your web pages clean and legible. You only get one shot at a first impression, so your site must be easy to navigate and the content must explain the unique value of your product or service.

Think about creating supporting content, including a mission statement, blog posts, great promotional offerings, a competitive shipping and returns policy — whatever drives the point home that your customers need the services that only you can offer. Your content needs to encourage visitors to want to learn more about you and what you do. If you're creating blog posts (which you should be), include a call to action for more in-depth content that requires prospects to join your email list to receive it.

The Calls to Action on your pages are extremely important to focus on as well. If the prospects aren’t sure what you’re offering, they’ll be less likely to convert. For this client, we changed the CTA text to “Get an Instant Quote” from “Shop Now” and right off the bat, it made a huge difference. We ended the experiment in about 11 days because it worked so well and the client was so happy.

When comparing the rest of the quarter after the test was complete to the same period before the test began, we saw a 39% increase in request a quote submissions, and a 132% increase in completed checkouts.

Along with concise and clear UVP-related copy throughout your website and blog, continue using white papers, guides, checklists, and templates. These are your lead magnets to gather more customer emails in exchange for your offer.

Gather qualitative data

Use qualitative data tools such as Hotjar to find out where people are clicking, scrolling, or getting stuck on your website. You can build your conversion funnel in Hotjar to see where customers are dropping off. This will tell you which pages you need to optimize.

In this Hotjar funnel, you can see that there’s a major drop off on the demo page. What information isn’t clear on the demo page? Is there friction on this page to keep customers from wanting a demo?

If you’re still not sure what to fix, sometimes it’s best to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. Set up user polls on your site asking customers what's keeping them from getting their demo/trial/product/etc.

Live chat and chatbots are another way to get user feedback. Gartner forecasts that by 2020, over 85% of customer interactions will be handled without a human. People want answers to their problems as quickly as possible, so providing that live chat solution is a great way to keep people from bouncing because they can’t find the information they need.

Intent (also known as the evaluation or desire phase)

By now, you and some of your competitors are in the running, but only one of you can win first prize. Your potential customers have now started to narrow down their options and eliminate bad fits. According to HubSpot, companies with refined middle-of-the-funnel engagement and lead management strategy see a 4–10 times higher response rate compared to generic email blasts and outreach. Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% lift in sales opportunities. Clearly, this is an extremely important part in the funnel.

Customers in the middle of the sales funnel are looking for content that shows them that you're the expert in what you do. Live demos, expert guides, webinars, and white papers that explain how you’re better over competitors are very valuable at this stage. Use social proof to your advantage by using testimonials, reviews, and case studies to show how other customers have enjoyed your services or products. Many qualified leads are still not ready to buy. So in order to nurture these leads and turn them into real paying customers, provide interesting emails or an online community such as a Facebook group.

Email

Start educating your potential customers about what it is you do. Build trust through automated emails sent to subscribers with answers to FAQs about your services and links to new content you have created.

In this email, we offer a piece of content relevant to our subscribers’ interests

Create location- and product-specific pages

Often times, your prospective clients are searching for a very specific product, or they need a service that's local to their area. By creating pages focused around what these users need, you're likely to get more conversions and qualified leads than a general overview page.

At Directive, we created location pages for a client that targeted the areas they serve. We optimized the pages to reflect bubble keywords that increased their rankings and we now rank for a few different keywords on both the first and second page on Google. Since then, the amount of conversions from these pages have been tremendous.

Click to see a larger image.

Continue using PPC campaigns

Click to see a larger image.

In this example, we brought a top-of-funnel CTA into bottom-of-funnel targeting.

We created ads that linked to a gated whitepaper on the client’s website. As you can see, there are a large number of impressions with 531 clicks.

The theory was that our targeting was enough of a pre-qualification. Instead of getting a custom practice evaluation, the user was offered a map to show them how much money they could be making per patient in their state.

Continue using landing pages

A specific landing page and call to action is more relevant to the visitor’s needs than your homepage and so is more likely to convert.

Following the multi-step model designed to ease visitors into a commitment, here’s a demo example from one of our clients:

Notice the questions being asked in the step-one form:

Average Monthly Revenue

Current E-Commerce Pain Points

These questions allow the user to stay anonymous. They also lead the user to believe that they will get a more custom response to their needs based on the specific information they input.

Next, they’re directed to the second-step form fields:

This step is asking for the personal information. However, notice the change in headline on the form itself. “Last step: We have your demo ready to go. Who can we give this to?” This second-step language is very important as it reminds the visitor as to why we need their information: it’s for their benefit — we want to give the visitor something, not take something from them. Time and again, I see a multi-step page outperform a one-step by 300%.

Take advantage of thank you pages

Even though you’ve already captured a lead/sale/sign-up/conversion, thank you and confirmation pages are a necessary step in the funnel process. Right after people opt in for the offer on your landing page, you’ll want to ask them to immediately take another specific action on the thank you page. For example, if you have a page offering a free e-book, offer a free demo on the thank you page to attempt to push those prospects farther down the funnel. They’ll be much more likely to take an action once you’ve already convinced them to take a smaller action.

When visitors land on the report thank you page, we provide them the download link, but we also provide next steps with an option to get a demo.

It’s important to tag people based on what they’ve downloaded or what posts they’ve read. That way you can create tailored messaging for these prospects when reaching out to them through email.

Action

Assuming you’ve optimized each step of the conversion funnel, you should have some qualified leads becoming paying customers. However, your work here is not done. You will need to continue nurturing those qualified leads. After someone has taken a desired action and converted on your website, you’ll want to get these people back into the funnel in order to coax them into repeat business. Retention is such an important part of growing your customer base, since this will be revenue that you don’t have to pay for — this audience already showed a definite interest in what you're offering.

If the lead converts into a customer, show them your other products or services and begin the cycle again. For example, let’s say you provide tree-trimming services and your customer just had you come by to trim the oak trees in their large backyard. After the job is done, continue reaching out to this customer with other services such as grass treatment, stump removals, or whatever else could be useful to them. You can do this by inviting them to an email newsletter or your social media channels. Send coupons and promotions via email. If you have an online store, include loyalty materials in their shipped order so they understand how much you value them as a customer.

Along with nurturing this repeat business, focus on optimizing your product pages by removing friction and doing all you can to encourage shoppers to checkout. Examine and improve your checkout flow by answering common questions along the way.

Key takeaways

Optimizing your funnel is a process that takes time, so don’t be afraid to experiment. It may take a few different offers before you find one that sticks and garners the most conversions. So create as many TOFU offers as you can think of to cater to the many different personas that make up your customer base. From white books and e-books to free trials, your TOFU content is the first step to building that relationship with your customers.

From there, continue creating great content and nurturing those mid-funnel leads. If your content is relevant and your website is optimized, you'll notice that you'll be getting many more leads than you did before optimization. The more leads you gather and keep interested, the more likely you are to get repeat sales!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[we-johnnygonzalez-blog]

How to Optimize Your Conversion Funnel, from ToFu to BoFu

Posted by OliviaRoss

No matter who your customer is or what you’re selling, it’s more likely than not that your customer will have to go through several steps before choosing to buy your product or service. Think about your own shopping habits: you don’t just buy the first thing you see. The first thing you do is note that you have a problem or a need, and then you research a solution online. Once you find that solution, which could be a product or service, you then decide which manufacturer or company is the best fit for your needs based on price, features, quantity — whatever it is that you are looking for.

The sales funnel is a drawn-out process, so it’s important for you to understand your customer’s pain points, needs, and intents as they go from learning about your company to deciding whether or not they want to pay you for your services or products. The goal is for a customer to not only choose you but to keep choosing you over and over again with repeat purchases. By understanding where your customer is in the funnel, you can better move them through that funnel into a reoccurring sale.

What is the conversion funnel?

The “conversion funnel” (also known as the “sales funnel”) is a term that helps you to visualize and understand the flow through which a potential customer lands on your site and then takes a desired action (i.e. converts). This process is often described as a funnel because you're guiding the customer toward your conversion point. And these prospects come from a gamut of methods such as SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, paid ads, and cold outreach.

Conversion rate optimization can occur at every stage in the funnel to improve the number of people you drive towards the most important action. To do this effectively, you need to think about the user experience at each stage — what they want, and how you can give it to them.

A typical conversion funnel has several stages: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, and finally purchase (buy).

Here’s a quick rundown of what to offer for each step of the funnel:

Creating your funnel

Before you even bother creating different offers for different steps in the funnel, you’ll need to make sure you’re tracking these goals properly. The first step is to set up a funnel visualization in Google Analytics. In building your funnel, focus on these three things:

The name of your goal: This goal should have a recognizable name so you know what you’re looking at in your reports. For example, “Document capture e-book A” or “free trial subscription B.”

The actual funnel layout: You may add up to 10 pages in Google Analytics for a conversion funnel. This will allow you to find out where prospects are leaving before completing the goal. Without this, you won’t know which areas need the most attention and improvement.

The value of the goal: In order to determine your ROI, you’ll need to decide what a complete goal is worth. If 20% of prospects who download a whitepaper end up becoming customers who spend $1000 with you, the download value might be $200 (20% of $1000).

A very important to thing to take note of is that your potential customers will be coming from several different avenues to your site. Assuming you don’t have a very small site with very few visitors, there are several likely paths prospects will take towards conversion.

If you try to push all of your prospects through the same funnel, it may look like your site’s conversion rate is extremely low. However, these customers may be getting to you through a different way such as landing pages.

You must account for all avenues of traffic. Image Source

Awareness stage

It’s no secret that customers need to know you exist before they can even think about considering you. So in this phase, you need to focus on attracting people to your site.

For this first step of the funnel, the goal is to create a strong first impression and to build a relationship with your prospective customers. This content should impress them enough that they fill out a form showing interest by giving you their email. Creating multiple TOFU offers gives you the information (company, name, email address) you need to segment and nurture leads further down the funnel.

Blogging

Let’s say Directive wants to create lead generation content. We’ll have some blog posts around PPC, SEO, and content marketing, and we will make sure to categorize these, either in the URL itself or on specific pages, in order to more easily segment our audiences.

So not only should you be targeting people based on the categories they’re visiting, but if you send people to very specific content upgrades or exit popups based on the content they’re reading, you’re going to increase your conversion rates even more.

Let’s pretend your conversion rate is normally just 3–4%, but a blog post talking about technical SEO saw an 18% conversion rate. This is because you’re sending a very specific audience to that page.

Look at how HubSpot lays out their resources navigation. There’s tons of valuable content to learn from.

HelpScout separates their content into categories, and each post is easily scannable in the 3-column card structure.

Social networking

People use social networks for everything nowadays, from getting advice to looking up reviews and referrals. They like seeing the behind-the-scenes on a business’ Instagram, they field their complaints through a business’ Facebook and Twitter, and they look for tutorials and how-tos on Pinterest and YouTube. Social proof builds trust and helps increase conversions. Therefore, create an active presence on the networks that make sense for your market in order to meet your customers. Social media can also indirectly impact your search engine rankings.

OptinMonster - Image Source

Interest / consideration

This stage of the conversion funnel is where you must start standing out from your competitors. If you offer service A at price B but so does Competitor #3, then how is that going to set you apart? What’s going to make the customer more interested in you over a competitor? The thing that makes you different is what will generate the most interest. This is why your unique value proposition (UVP) is so important.

According to Unbounce, your UVP, also known as a unique selling proposition (USP), is a clear statement that describes the benefit of your offer, how you solve your customer's needs, and what sets you apart from the competition.

During the interest stage, your website and content are extremely important in creating that closer relationship with your customers. However, people merely visiting your awesome site is not enough. You will want to keep them engaged after they leave. Just like in the awareness phase, we do this by capturing their email. However, we want to push a little further now.

PPC and landing pages

You can easily increase conversions with email opt-ins that only appear to your PPC visitors. Using this page-level targeting can really boost the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.

Focus on creating attention-grabbing content like headlines, carousel images, and banners all focused around your UVP.

Here at Directive, we’re constantly coming up with strategies to help our clients get the most leverage out of their content. We created a landing page focused around demo requests. This page was not performing nearly as well as we would have hoped, so we decided to change the offer to a demo video.

By switching an offering from a full demo to just a short 5-minute demo video, we saw a tremendous lift in conversion rates. It makes sense when you realize that the people in our target audience were in the awareness stage and were not interested in spending 30 minutes to an hour with a stranger explaining a product that they’re not ready to buy. As you can see, the demo video outperformed the full demo by an increase of 800%.

Now these leads aren’t anywhere close to buying yet, but it’s better to build that interest in a larger pool of people who can potentially turn into sales than to only have two sales qualified leads to start with.

Site optimization

If you notice that you're getting decent traffic to your website but the prospects are bouncing after a short amount of time, the problem could be that your website doesn't have the content they're looking for, or that the site is difficult to navigate. Make sure to focus on making your web pages clean and legible. You only get one shot at a first impression, so your site must be easy to navigate and the content must explain the unique value of your product or service.

Think about creating supporting content, including a mission statement, blog posts, great promotional offerings, a competitive shipping and returns policy — whatever drives the point home that your customers need the services that only you can offer. Your content needs to encourage visitors to want to learn more about you and what you do. If you're creating blog posts (which you should be), include a call to action for more in-depth content that requires prospects to join your email list to receive it.

The Calls to Action on your pages are extremely important to focus on as well. If the prospects aren’t sure what you’re offering, they’ll be less likely to convert. For this client, we changed the CTA text to “Get an Instant Quote” from “Shop Now” and right off the bat, it made a huge difference. We ended the experiment in about 11 days because it worked so well and the client was so happy.

When comparing the rest of the quarter after the test was complete to the same period before the test began, we saw a 39% increase in request a quote submissions, and a 132% increase in completed checkouts.

Along with concise and clear UVP-related copy throughout your website and blog, continue using white papers, guides, checklists, and templates. These are your lead magnets to gather more customer emails in exchange for your offer.

Gather qualitative data

Use qualitative data tools such as Hotjar to find out where people are clicking, scrolling, or getting stuck on your website. You can build your conversion funnel in Hotjar to see where customers are dropping off. This will tell you which pages you need to optimize.

In this Hotjar funnel, you can see that there’s a major drop off on the demo page. What information isn’t clear on the demo page? Is there friction on this page to keep customers from wanting a demo?

If you’re still not sure what to fix, sometimes it’s best to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. Set up user polls on your site asking customers what's keeping them from getting their demo/trial/product/etc.

Live chat and chatbots are another way to get user feedback. Gartner forecasts that by 2020, over 85% of customer interactions will be handled without a human. People want answers to their problems as quickly as possible, so providing that live chat solution is a great way to keep people from bouncing because they can’t find the information they need.

Intent (also known as the evaluation or desire phase)

By now, you and some of your competitors are in the running, but only one of you can win first prize. Your potential customers have now started to narrow down their options and eliminate bad fits. According to HubSpot, companies with refined middle-of-the-funnel engagement and lead management strategy see a 4–10 times higher response rate compared to generic email blasts and outreach. Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% lift in sales opportunities. Clearly, this is an extremely important part in the funnel.

Customers in the middle of the sales funnel are looking for content that shows them that you're the expert in what you do. Live demos, expert guides, webinars, and white papers that explain how you’re better over competitors are very valuable at this stage. Use social proof to your advantage by using testimonials, reviews, and case studies to show how other customers have enjoyed your services or products. Many qualified leads are still not ready to buy. So in order to nurture these leads and turn them into real paying customers, provide interesting emails or an online community such as a Facebook group.

Email

Start educating your potential customers about what it is you do. Build trust through automated emails sent to subscribers with answers to FAQs about your services and links to new content you have created.

In this email, we offer a piece of content relevant to our subscribers’ interests

Create location- and product-specific pages

Often times, your prospective clients are searching for a very specific product, or they need a service that's local to their area. By creating pages focused around what these users need, you're likely to get more conversions and qualified leads than a general overview page.

At Directive, we created location pages for a client that targeted the areas they serve. We optimized the pages to reflect bubble keywords that increased their rankings and we now rank for a few different keywords on both the first and second page on Google. Since then, the amount of conversions from these pages have been tremendous.

Click to see a larger image.

Continue using PPC campaigns

Click to see a larger image.

In this example, we brought a top-of-funnel CTA into bottom-of-funnel targeting.

We created ads that linked to a gated whitepaper on the client’s website. As you can see, there are a large number of impressions with 531 clicks.

The theory was that our targeting was enough of a pre-qualification. Instead of getting a custom practice evaluation, the user was offered a map to show them how much money they could be making per patient in their state.

Continue using landing pages

A specific landing page and call to action is more relevant to the visitor’s needs than your homepage and so is more likely to convert.

Following the multi-step model designed to ease visitors into a commitment, here’s a demo example from one of our clients:

Notice the questions being asked in the step-one form:

Average Monthly Revenue

Current E-Commerce Pain Points

These questions allow the user to stay anonymous. They also lead the user to believe that they will get a more custom response to their needs based on the specific information they input.

Next, they’re directed to the second-step form fields:

This step is asking for the personal information. However, notice the change in headline on the form itself. “Last step: We have your demo ready to go. Who can we give this to?” This second-step language is very important as it reminds the visitor as to why we need their information: it’s for their benefit — we want to give the visitor something, not take something from them. Time and again, I see a multi-step page outperform a one-step by 300%.

Take advantage of thank you pages

Even though you’ve already captured a lead/sale/sign-up/conversion, thank you and confirmation pages are a necessary step in the funnel process. Right after people opt in for the offer on your landing page, you’ll want to ask them to immediately take another specific action on the thank you page. For example, if you have a page offering a free e-book, offer a free demo on the thank you page to attempt to push those prospects farther down the funnel. They’ll be much more likely to take an action once you’ve already convinced them to take a smaller action.

When visitors land on the report thank you page, we provide them the download link, but we also provide next steps with an option to get a demo.

It’s important to tag people based on what they’ve downloaded or what posts they’ve read. That way you can create tailored messaging for these prospects when reaching out to them through email.

Action

Assuming you’ve optimized each step of the conversion funnel, you should have some qualified leads becoming paying customers. However, your work here is not done. You will need to continue nurturing those qualified leads. After someone has taken a desired action and converted on your website, you’ll want to get these people back into the funnel in order to coax them into repeat business. Retention is such an important part of growing your customer base, since this will be revenue that you don’t have to pay for — this audience already showed a definite interest in what you're offering.

If the lead converts into a customer, show them your other products or services and begin the cycle again. For example, let’s say you provide tree-trimming services and your customer just had you come by to trim the oak trees in their large backyard. After the job is done, continue reaching out to this customer with other services such as grass treatment, stump removals, or whatever else could be useful to them. You can do this by inviting them to an email newsletter or your social media channels. Send coupons and promotions via email. If you have an online store, include loyalty materials in their shipped order so they understand how much you value them as a customer.

Along with nurturing this repeat business, focus on optimizing your product pages by removing friction and doing all you can to encourage shoppers to checkout. Examine and improve your checkout flow by answering common questions along the way.

Key takeaways

Optimizing your funnel is a process that takes time, so don’t be afraid to experiment. It may take a few different offers before you find one that sticks and garners the most conversions. So create as many TOFU offers as you can think of to cater to the many different personas that make up your customer base. From white books and e-books to free trials, your TOFU content is the first step to building that relationship with your customers.

From there, continue creating great content and nurturing those mid-funnel leads. If your content is relevant and your website is optimized, you'll notice that you'll be getting many more leads than you did before optimization. The more leads you gather and keep interested, the more likely you are to get repeat sales!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[we-johnnygonzalez-blog]

How to Optimize Your Conversion Funnel, from ToFu to BoFu

Posted by OliviaRoss

No matter who your customer is or what you’re selling, it’s more likely than not that your customer will have to go through several steps before choosing to buy your product or service. Think about your own shopping habits: you don’t just buy the first thing you see. The first thing you do is note that you have a problem or a need, and then you research a solution online. Once you find that solution, which could be a product or service, you then decide which manufacturer or company is the best fit for your needs based on price, features, quantity — whatever it is that you are looking for.

The sales funnel is a drawn-out process, so it’s important for you to understand your customer’s pain points, needs, and intents as they go from learning about your company to deciding whether or not they want to pay you for your services or products. The goal is for a customer to not only choose you but to keep choosing you over and over again with repeat purchases. By understanding where your customer is in the funnel, you can better move them through that funnel into a reoccurring sale.

What is the conversion funnel?

The “conversion funnel” (also known as the “sales funnel”) is a term that helps you to visualize and understand the flow through which a potential customer lands on your site and then takes a desired action (i.e. converts). This process is often described as a funnel because you're guiding the customer toward your conversion point. And these prospects come from a gamut of methods such as SEO, content marketing, social media marketing, paid ads, and cold outreach.

Conversion rate optimization can occur at every stage in the funnel to improve the number of people you drive towards the most important action. To do this effectively, you need to think about the user experience at each stage — what they want, and how you can give it to them.

A typical conversion funnel has several stages: awareness, interest, consideration, intent, and finally purchase (buy).

Here’s a quick rundown of what to offer for each step of the funnel:

Creating your funnel

Before you even bother creating different offers for different steps in the funnel, you’ll need to make sure you’re tracking these goals properly. The first step is to set up a funnel visualization in Google Analytics. In building your funnel, focus on these three things:

The name of your goal: This goal should have a recognizable name so you know what you’re looking at in your reports. For example, “Document capture e-book A” or “free trial subscription B.”

The actual funnel layout: You may add up to 10 pages in Google Analytics for a conversion funnel. This will allow you to find out where prospects are leaving before completing the goal. Without this, you won’t know which areas need the most attention and improvement.

The value of the goal: In order to determine your ROI, you’ll need to decide what a complete goal is worth. If 20% of prospects who download a whitepaper end up becoming customers who spend $1000 with you, the download value might be $200 (20% of $1000).

A very important to thing to take note of is that your potential customers will be coming from several different avenues to your site. Assuming you don’t have a very small site with very few visitors, there are several likely paths prospects will take towards conversion.

If you try to push all of your prospects through the same funnel, it may look like your site’s conversion rate is extremely low. However, these customers may be getting to you through a different way such as landing pages.

You must account for all avenues of traffic. Image Source

Awareness stage

It’s no secret that customers need to know you exist before they can even think about considering you. So in this phase, you need to focus on attracting people to your site.

For this first step of the funnel, the goal is to create a strong first impression and to build a relationship with your prospective customers. This content should impress them enough that they fill out a form showing interest by giving you their email. Creating multiple TOFU offers gives you the information (company, name, email address) you need to segment and nurture leads further down the funnel.

Blogging

Let’s say Directive wants to create lead generation content. We’ll have some blog posts around PPC, SEO, and content marketing, and we will make sure to categorize these, either in the URL itself or on specific pages, in order to more easily segment our audiences.

So not only should you be targeting people based on the categories they’re visiting, but if you send people to very specific content upgrades or exit popups based on the content they’re reading, you’re going to increase your conversion rates even more.

Let’s pretend your conversion rate is normally just 3–4%, but a blog post talking about technical SEO saw an 18% conversion rate. This is because you’re sending a very specific audience to that page.

Look at how HubSpot lays out their resources navigation. There’s tons of valuable content to learn from.

HelpScout separates their content into categories, and each post is easily scannable in the 3-column card structure.

Social networking

People use social networks for everything nowadays, from getting advice to looking up reviews and referrals. They like seeing the behind-the-scenes on a business’ Instagram, they field their complaints through a business’ Facebook and Twitter, and they look for tutorials and how-tos on Pinterest and YouTube. Social proof builds trust and helps increase conversions. Therefore, create an active presence on the networks that make sense for your market in order to meet your customers. Social media can also indirectly impact your search engine rankings.

OptinMonster - Image Source

Interest / consideration

This stage of the conversion funnel is where you must start standing out from your competitors. If you offer service A at price B but so does Competitor #3, then how is that going to set you apart? What’s going to make the customer more interested in you over a competitor? The thing that makes you different is what will generate the most interest. This is why your unique value proposition (UVP) is so important.

According to Unbounce, your UVP, also known as a unique selling proposition (USP), is a clear statement that describes the benefit of your offer, how you solve your customer's needs, and what sets you apart from the competition.

During the interest stage, your website and content are extremely important in creating that closer relationship with your customers. However, people merely visiting your awesome site is not enough. You will want to keep them engaged after they leave. Just like in the awareness phase, we do this by capturing their email. However, we want to push a little further now.

PPC and landing pages

You can easily increase conversions with email opt-ins that only appear to your PPC visitors. Using this page-level targeting can really boost the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns.

Focus on creating attention-grabbing content like headlines, carousel images, and banners all focused around your UVP.

Here at Directive, we’re constantly coming up with strategies to help our clients get the most leverage out of their content. We created a landing page focused around demo requests. This page was not performing nearly as well as we would have hoped, so we decided to change the offer to a demo video.

By switching an offering from a full demo to just a short 5-minute demo video, we saw a tremendous lift in conversion rates. It makes sense when you realize that the people in our target audience were in the awareness stage and were not interested in spending 30 minutes to an hour with a stranger explaining a product that they’re not ready to buy. As you can see, the demo video outperformed the full demo by an increase of 800%.

Now these leads aren’t anywhere close to buying yet, but it’s better to build that interest in a larger pool of people who can potentially turn into sales than to only have two sales qualified leads to start with.

Site optimization

If you notice that you're getting decent traffic to your website but the prospects are bouncing after a short amount of time, the problem could be that your website doesn't have the content they're looking for, or that the site is difficult to navigate. Make sure to focus on making your web pages clean and legible. You only get one shot at a first impression, so your site must be easy to navigate and the content must explain the unique value of your product or service.

Think about creating supporting content, including a mission statement, blog posts, great promotional offerings, a competitive shipping and returns policy — whatever drives the point home that your customers need the services that only you can offer. Your content needs to encourage visitors to want to learn more about you and what you do. If you're creating blog posts (which you should be), include a call to action for more in-depth content that requires prospects to join your email list to receive it.

The Calls to Action on your pages are extremely important to focus on as well. If the prospects aren’t sure what you’re offering, they’ll be less likely to convert. For this client, we changed the CTA text to “Get an Instant Quote” from “Shop Now” and right off the bat, it made a huge difference. We ended the experiment in about 11 days because it worked so well and the client was so happy.

When comparing the rest of the quarter after the test was complete to the same period before the test began, we saw a 39% increase in request a quote submissions, and a 132% increase in completed checkouts.

Along with concise and clear UVP-related copy throughout your website and blog, continue using white papers, guides, checklists, and templates. These are your lead magnets to gather more customer emails in exchange for your offer.

Gather qualitative data

Use qualitative data tools such as Hotjar to find out where people are clicking, scrolling, or getting stuck on your website. You can build your conversion funnel in Hotjar to see where customers are dropping off. This will tell you which pages you need to optimize.

In this Hotjar funnel, you can see that there’s a major drop off on the demo page. What information isn’t clear on the demo page? Is there friction on this page to keep customers from wanting a demo?

If you’re still not sure what to fix, sometimes it’s best to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. Set up user polls on your site asking customers what's keeping them from getting their demo/trial/product/etc.

Live chat and chatbots are another way to get user feedback. Gartner forecasts that by 2020, over 85% of customer interactions will be handled without a human. People want answers to their problems as quickly as possible, so providing that live chat solution is a great way to keep people from bouncing because they can’t find the information they need.

Intent (also known as the evaluation or desire phase)

By now, you and some of your competitors are in the running, but only one of you can win first prize. Your potential customers have now started to narrow down their options and eliminate bad fits. According to HubSpot, companies with refined middle-of-the-funnel engagement and lead management strategy see a 4–10 times higher response rate compared to generic email blasts and outreach. Nurtured leads produce, on average, a 20% lift in sales opportunities. Clearly, this is an extremely important part in the funnel.

Customers in the middle of the sales funnel are looking for content that shows them that you're the expert in what you do. Live demos, expert guides, webinars, and white papers that explain how you’re better over competitors are very valuable at this stage. Use social proof to your advantage by using testimonials, reviews, and case studies to show how other customers have enjoyed your services or products. Many qualified leads are still not ready to buy. So in order to nurture these leads and turn them into real paying customers, provide interesting emails or an online community such as a Facebook group.

Email

Start educating your potential customers about what it is you do. Build trust through automated emails sent to subscribers with answers to FAQs about your services and links to new content you have created.

In this email, we offer a piece of content relevant to our subscribers’ interests

Create location- and product-specific pages

Often times, your prospective clients are searching for a very specific product, or they need a service that's local to their area. By creating pages focused around what these users need, you're likely to get more conversions and qualified leads than a general overview page.

At Directive, we created location pages for a client that targeted the areas they serve. We optimized the pages to reflect bubble keywords that increased their rankings and we now rank for a few different keywords on both the first and second page on Google. Since then, the amount of conversions from these pages have been tremendous.

Click to see a larger image.

Continue using PPC campaigns

Click to see a larger image.

In this example, we brought a top-of-funnel CTA into bottom-of-funnel targeting.

We created ads that linked to a gated whitepaper on the client’s website. As you can see, there are a large number of impressions with 531 clicks.

The theory was that our targeting was enough of a pre-qualification. Instead of getting a custom practice evaluation, the user was offered a map to show them how much money they could be making per patient in their state.

Continue using landing pages

A specific landing page and call to action is more relevant to the visitor’s needs than your homepage and so is more likely to convert.

Following the multi-step model designed to ease visitors into a commitment, here’s a demo example from one of our clients:

Notice the questions being asked in the step-one form:

Average Monthly Revenue

Current E-Commerce Pain Points

These questions allow the user to stay anonymous. They also lead the user to believe that they will get a more custom response to their needs based on the specific information they input.

Next, they’re directed to the second-step form fields:

This step is asking for the personal information. However, notice the change in headline on the form itself. “Last step: We have your demo ready to go. Who can we give this to?” This second-step language is very important as it reminds the visitor as to why we need their information: it’s for their benefit — we want to give the visitor something, not take something from them. Time and again, I see a multi-step page outperform a one-step by 300%.

Take advantage of thank you pages

Even though you’ve already captured a lead/sale/sign-up/conversion, thank you and confirmation pages are a necessary step in the funnel process. Right after people opt in for the offer on your landing page, you’ll want to ask them to immediately take another specific action on the thank you page. For example, if you have a page offering a free e-book, offer a free demo on the thank you page to attempt to push those prospects farther down the funnel. They’ll be much more likely to take an action once you’ve already convinced them to take a smaller action.

When visitors land on the report thank you page, we provide them the download link, but we also provide next steps with an option to get a demo.

It’s important to tag people based on what they’ve downloaded or what posts they’ve read. That way you can create tailored messaging for these prospects when reaching out to them through email.

Action

Assuming you’ve optimized each step of the conversion funnel, you should have some qualified leads becoming paying customers. However, your work here is not done. You will need to continue nurturing those qualified leads. After someone has taken a desired action and converted on your website, you’ll want to get these people back into the funnel in order to coax them into repeat business. Retention is such an important part of growing your customer base, since this will be revenue that you don’t have to pay for — this audience already showed a definite interest in what you're offering.

If the lead converts into a customer, show them your other products or services and begin the cycle again. For example, let’s say you provide tree-trimming services and your customer just had you come by to trim the oak trees in their large backyard. After the job is done, continue reaching out to this customer with other services such as grass treatment, stump removals, or whatever else could be useful to them. You can do this by inviting them to an email newsletter or your social media channels. Send coupons and promotions via email. If you have an online store, include loyalty materials in their shipped order so they understand how much you value them as a customer.

Along with nurturing this repeat business, focus on optimizing your product pages by removing friction and doing all you can to encourage shoppers to checkout. Examine and improve your checkout flow by answering common questions along the way.

Key takeaways

Optimizing your funnel is a process that takes time, so don’t be afraid to experiment. It may take a few different offers before you find one that sticks and garners the most conversions. So create as many TOFU offers as you can think of to cater to the many different personas that make up your customer base. From white books and e-books to free trials, your TOFU content is the first step to building that relationship with your customers.

From there, continue creating great content and nurturing those mid-funnel leads. If your content is relevant and your website is optimized, you'll notice that you'll be getting many more leads than you did before optimization. The more leads you gather and keep interested, the more likely you are to get repeat sales!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[therealestatesparkblog]

What Being a CPA Has Taught Me About Becoming a Millionaire

Usually my articles are all about taxes and how real estate investors and business owners should approach various scenarios and apply sets of tax regulations. I always try to share my knowledge to help you improve your bottom line. What Ive come to realize through speaking with and advising hundreds of real estate investors and having a front row seat to their financial lives and mindsets is that Ive learned quite a lot about wealth over the past two years. Ive learned about creative and unique means to generate wealth. Ive learned about market niches that are rarely brought up in the BiggerPockets Forums that turn out to be quite lucrative. Ive learned about ways to mitigate exposure to various financial and market risks. However, one of the most beneficial thing that Ive learnedand the topic of todays postis how millionaires build their wealth. Im not talking about the mega-millionaires. While Im sure everyone would love to be in the mega-millionaire category, frankly its unattainable for most. Im talking about the Millionaire Next Door type of millionaires. This type of millionaire is, as Ive found, relatively easy to become. Full disclosure: Im not a millionairenot even close. However, I have been lucky enough to interact with and advise many homegrown millionaires. Hopefully, youll still be able to take away something of value from my article. So what does the everyday millionaire do differently than the rest of us? They develop key habits, defer their gratification, and treat their passive income like the most important business theyve ever run.

The #1 Non-Money Habit of Millionaires The number onenon-money habit that will make you a millionaire is waking up earlier than the rest of the world. I know its hyped up and over-sold. I always rolled my eyes when I heard about this habit, too. Im not a morning person, and the thought of waking up before the sun was dreadful. But that was before I got into the business of advising successful real estate investors and business owners. That was also before I established this habit for myself. Waking up early has plenty of benefits;however, the two that stand out the most when Im conversing with clients are that it gives you time to work on projects you never have time for and it jump starts your productivity. Related: Building Wealth: What Key Practices Separate Millionaires From the Middle Class? The difference between people living mediocre lives and people living successful lives is that the successful people create time to work on the projects that the mediocre people dream about. Dont have time to review three real estate deals a day? Wake up early! The projects dont have to be real estate-related; in fact, they dont even have to be business-related. Maybe you dream about starting a podcast or writing a book about the tea and food pairings. Maybe you just want to paint more often or get in shape. When interviewing my clients, other investors, and business owners, Ive realized the most successful ones have some sort of cool project theyre working on. As I noticed the trend, I began inquiring not only about the projects, but also about how they have time. The answer almost all of these successful people provided was that they wake up early. Its that simple. And think about itwhen you wake up early to work on the project youre always putting off, do you think youll be excited to wake up? Not only will you be motivated to get out of bed, but your entire day will essentially see a jump start in productivity. You will create this sort of productivity momentum, which will result in you performing better throughout the day at your job, business, real estate, or whatever it is youre working on! I dont have scientific data. I dont know the neurology behind it. But I do know that almost all of the successful investors and clients Ive collaborated with wake up early to work on their various projects. I was skeptical at first, but I tried it. I read Miracle Morningfor some motivation, and Ive now created a habit of waking up early. My productivity has exploded, and Ive seen the benefits spill over into other areas of my life life business, investing, relationships, and overall health and happiness. Best of all, waking up at 5:00 a.m. isnt bad at all after a week or so. Im used to it and have a routine that motivates me to jump out of bed every morning. If you get nothing else out of this post, I highly recommend trying this for 30 days. The benefits will exceed your expectations.

Deferring Gratification and Value-Add Spending All, let me repeat, ALL of the successful people Ive spoken with understand the art of gratification deferral. The thought process goes like this: That purchase will make me happy, but is it necessary today? Do I really need that product or service? Will it help me reach my goals? Oftentimes, the answer is a simple no. So they put off buying the new shoes, fancy dinners, and concert tickets. They buy used vehicles rather than new and expensive cars. They focus on saving and investinggrowing their dollar and paying their future selves. This allows them to get out of the rat race and snowball their investments into financial freedom territory. Buy the Tesla once your net worth reaches $1,000,000. Your future millionaire self will thank the present you for waiting. Another key trend semi-related to this topic is that the successful investors and business owners focus on value-add spending and savings. For instance, one of the investors I know built up an enormous amount of wealth by simply owner-occupying multi-family properties and slowly rehabbing all of the units. He would buy a four-plex, live in one unit for a year, rehab it, then move to the next unit and rinse and repeat. While he was flipping the unit, the other three would be rented out, covering his mortgage and then some. He used this strategy for two four-plexes, and it took him about eight years to complete. He was able to 1031 exchange those properties into a much larger apartment complex, which is valued at over $1,000,000. Related: 5 Habits of the Wealthy That Helped Them Get Rich One of my clients spends tens of thousands of dollars each year on seminars and trainings. However, she has a high net worth and has determined she can do this without it negatively impacting her financial position. Her business is centered on building a network of people, and shes quantified the value of every $1,000 she spends at these seminars and found that she will eventually earn revenue about twice the size of the cost to attend. But it wasnt always this way. Had she spent thousands of dollars going to a seminar while her business was trying to get on its feet, she may not have succeeded at all. In the early days, her money was better spent creating content, advertising, building a local network, and implementing business systems. She understood that while the seminars may be valuable, there were better things to spend her money on at the time to grow to a level where it was financially feasible to attend these larger events.

Treating Real Estate Investing Like a Business One of the more eye-opening conversations Ive ever had was with a gentleman who invests in apartment buildings. I was showing him a property I thought was a good deal, and before he even looked at the deal, he asked me how the local economy was. The investors that see large-scale success analyze real estate in a completely different way than the rest of us. The successful investors start by analyzing economic conditions of various cities, towns, etc. When they find one they like, they narrow down their search and identify the best locations and neighborhoods in the area. They dont start with Realtor.com. They also dont necessarily start by contacting a real estate agent. They want to understand the macro and microeconomic conditions that may affect their investment performance to determine if its even worth their time to continue looking in the target area. Then they worry about building relationships and getting boots on the ground. And when you think about it, that simple reversal of the typical methodology many of us employ makes complete sense. Why invest in the best neighborhood in a city that has declining economic conditions? Its backwardlogic. On top of that, before they even attempt to identify a property, they learn all they can about the competition in the area. If they want to invest in apartment buildings, they will find out exactly what the other apartment buildings in the area have to offer. If they find a value gap, they exploit it. For instance, the gentleman I briefly mentioned above told me that his apartment building has washer and dryer hookups, and no other apartment building near him has washer-dryer hookups. Something that simple can give you a huge competitive advantage over all the other investors in your area. Thats how businesses are run. Theres a constant jockeying of positioning to have the best value-add offerings. The investors who understand and can identify competitive advantages will win every time.

The Wrap-Up Being a CPA has allowed me to peer into the financial lives of many successful real estate investors. Though Im not a millionaire myself, Ive identified habits, mindsets, and logic that I believe can make anyone a millionaire if they are all applied. I find wealth a fascinating topic, and I hope you are able to take something away from this article. Until next time! Were republishing this article to help out our newer readers.

Which of these lessons strikes a chord with you?What would you add? Leave your comments below! https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/2016/01/31/cpa-taught-millionaire/