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I want to encourage you today with this quick thought exercise that could radically shift where you are spending your time and how much revenue you are producing.
Click on the video above to check it out.
I am happy to report that I am taking some much needed time off from my classes during our 2-week holiday break. Classes start up in earnest on January 3. If the gods of academia are with me this will be the last holiday break for me while I am attending regular classes.
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The best way to describe The Venture Group is to begin with what we are not.
We are a community of men who run or aspire to run our own ventures. We are those who embrace risk as a constant companion. You will find the following types of men here:
We know that your schedule or your geography will not always permit you to come to our in-person sessions, so we make the community and our content available online. You are among equals here. Don’t just be in the silent majority. Join in the conversation. Contribute.
During our in-person sessions on Fridays, we will hold to our Sixty Minute Promise®. We start on time and end on time so you can get back to business.
Just so there are no surprises, this group started as a mens group at Mosaic Church of Charlotte. We consider ourselves under this church’s leadership and operate by its statement of faith. With that said we have only one agenda — to help you be more effective in your business.
We are not here to grow our numbers. We are not here looking for your money. We are here to serve.
Period.
If we are not delivering powerful content then we’ve missed the mark completely.
Nothing.
Fridays, 12:00 noon to 1:00 PM sharp
Bob Evans’ at Northlake
9253 Statesville Rd
Charlotte, NC 28269 (map)
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I think I’m in love!
I found a new way to bring a fresh pool of cold traffic to my site and, most importantly, to my Facebook Pixel.
If you have spent any time on Facebook in the last 12 months you have undoubtedly seen one of your friends share a post that says “I got Boba Fett. Who will you get?”
One click takes you to an online quiz to help you determine which Star Wars bounty hunter you are.
I did a little digging to find out one of the companies serving these quizzes is Qzzr.
I knew that the viral reach of these quizzes could be significant, so I decided to see for myself just how helpful these online quizzes could be in driving traffic.
I started a free account which gives you access to everything you need to get a quiz started.
My approach at first was to take as little time as possible getting the quiz out to new users, so I did not goldplate this first version.
Here is a screen capture of my rather nondescript entry page for my quiz (check out my quiz here).
I didn’t use any fancy background, because that would have taken extra work to put together (since remedied).
In total my quiz consisted of 5 questions. I wanted something that people could do in less than a minute.
My total time to…
…was about 2-1/2 hours.
Yes. All things considered I am happy with the traffic driven to my site.
Sure, the price per click was higher than I would have liked.
Sure, I didn’t get near the viral reach I would have liked.
But…people responded!
Why?
A quiz is different.
It is not a blog post, and it is not a podcast.
My Facebook ad to 3 different audiences over 24 hours netted 50 ad clicks. I also posted a link to the survey on my FB page, and on my FB profile where the survey received additional traction.
My cost per click (or to use the new term, “Cost Per Pixel”) for the Facebook ad was $1.55. The first day of the campaign saw CPP as low as $0.96.
As you can see below, the quiz was viewed a total of 68 times, and it received a 40% start rate.
Of the people who started, 93% completed the quiz — pretty impressive retention — validating my assertion that keeping the quiz short would help in this stage.
Of the people who completed the quiz, 4% shared it.
First take away is that I now LOVE incorporating quizzes as a means of driving (and pixeling) traffic. I will certainly do this again.
My hunch here is that people didn’t share much because they didn’t like their result.
For example, a number of people received the result that they were like Brené Brown. Maybe this works for you if you are a woman, but I could see some men not wanting to share this result.
If your answer were closer to “You got Purple Elephant”, perhaps this is less challenging to one’s identity, and you would be more willing to share this with your online tribe.
I am in the process of honing and fine tuning my interest-based audiences, and I believe the lack of a well-defined audience really drove my CPP too high. Ideally, I’d like to see my cost per pixel below $0.75.
For this first version of the quiz the cover image was a field of turquoise. Certainly does not have the draw of a compelling image with recognizable faces.
My invitation to take the quiz could be more compelling.
This time I constructed the one ad creative so that it contained both genders. The easiest change I could make here is to create a montage of just women and a second montage of just men. Each could be driven to their respective genders via FB ad targeting criteria.
[reminder]How about you? Have you used online quizzes as a way to drive cold traffic to your site? If so, tell us how it worked out for you.[/reminder]
I ran across an article published in the Academy of Management Journal. The primary author is Fred Luthans who hails from The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I stumbled across the article when I was doing some research for class. It has been a game-changer for me.
I looked into his body of work to find that he has written numerous articles on the notion of building psychological capital. He claims, and has research to back it up, that things like hope, self-efficacy (confidence), optimism and resilience can be built. I find this quite intriguing because this is directly inline with my research, yet, until now, I had no idea this guy even existed.
Reference
Luthans, F., Avey, J. B., & Patera, J. L. (2008). Experimental analysis of a web-based training intervention to develop positive psychological capital. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 7(2), 209–221.
Our paths have crossed at some time in the past 18 months.
Perhaps we met when…
No matter when or where we met, 2 things are certain:
I am going to start writing again which means you’ll be hearing from me more often.
Translation: I’ll probably send out new material once a week.
I am Jason Owens.
I research new entrepreneurs, and I speak across the southeast on ways to help more new entrepreneurs succeed.
If you don’t remember me, or you’ve transitioned away from self-employment, or you don’t want to receive more email from me going forward, then please unsubscribe.
No hard feelings.
If you need to unsubscribe just go to the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of the page.
For those of you who are still with me I have one question to pose:
[reminder]What is one thing that you wish you would have known about starting a business? Continue the conversation on facebook, twitter, or linkedin.[/reminder]
I will be presenting the findings of some of my research to a group of local business owners in August. I attended their event last night and it was very good. The location is TBD, but mark your calendars for 5:30 PM on Tuesday, August 27.
The mental drain of not knowing what to expect is what takes out most people. You have no way of knowing if victory is right around the corner, of if you are just making a desperate decision to hang on for one more day.
Say your home office tells you that the best way to generate sales is face-to-face meetings. They have found that the average agent makes one sale for every 3 face-to-face meetings. However, you decide that selling face-to-face is not for you, and that you would rather sell via email marketing.
Choosing your own path is all well and good, but you have to understand that the selling ratios are way different. The people at the home office may not keep a lot of data on email marketing success because hardly anyone uses it. If you are lucky you will find someone who can tell you, off the record, that only one out of a thousand people make a purchase on the average email campaign. You are in uncharted territory. Your only strategy here is to hope for the best, and, trust me, you want “hope for the best” to be your last strategy.
Take time to learn, and I mean really learn, what email marketing strategy really works for your company’s products. This will take time. Also, it will take some experimentation on your part. Having some definitive answers on what works, what does not work and what you can expect is key because you can now make a better decision if email marketing is for you.
Being mentally prepared for your journey makes all the difference.
It is really easy to get caught in the trap of not wanting to take one path (face-to-face sales), but not knowing what to expect when going your own way.
I will be sharing insights from my research on small business owners at the Charlotte East Rotary group on October 3 at 12:30 PM.
Venue: Red Rocks Café
Location: 4223-B Providence Rd Charlotte, NC 28211
I spent over a year as an internal consultant within a Fortune 500 financial services company. My job was to increase adoption of Salesforce, our new tool that had been launched to a group of 4500 field-based salespeople and support staff.
I traveled heavily in my last 5 months. I went to the states in my back yard — North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. I also traveled to Washington, Oregon, Colorado, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Iowa, Nebraska and Florida.
Not only do I have a great collection of travel stories including red eye flights, and a lack of good hotels near the oil fields of North Dakota. I can also tell you about the hundreds and hundreds of advisors that I met. They are all great people, and most of them really struggled to make sense of this new tool called Salesforce.