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Thursday, August 3, 2017

Why we don't have to code ?

I still don't understand why people here want to learn to code! 

Spend that time learning to market and write sales copy. Spending 1000 hours to learn to code to spend 200 hours writing an app is STUPID. 
Spend the 1000 hours learning to market and write copy, and you can use that skill for the life of the app, plus the life of the next app, and other peoples apps AND it makes you money. Writing code just means you have something, but it won't sell itself.

Here is how it will work if you learn to code:
1000 hours learning to code.
200 hours writing an app.
wait for a sale, wait some more, wait some more.
Spend 1000 hours learning to market and write copy.
sell some of your app
spend 150 hours fixing bugs and responding to support issues because your app is crap because it takes 5000 hours to really learn how to code.
get frustrated and yank your app because of the PITA factor and all the bad reviews of your app.


Learn to market and write copy:
1000 hours learning to market and write code, while that 1000 hours is going on, pay someone that has 10,000 hours of training on apps to write your app.
Start marketing your app immediately.
Sell lots of your app.
Pass any support issues to the developer
Sell lots more of your app.
Create 3 more apps and market the hell out of them
Go to the bank often to deposit checks.

Do you SEE the difference????
However if you want to accelerate you'll need to pay for a mentor

"Scientific Advertising" Claude Hopkins

"Tested Advertising" Caples (4th edition or earlier only)

"How I Raised Myself from a Failure to Success in Selling" Betger

"How to Write a Good Advertisement" Schwab.

"How to Write Sales Letters That Sell" Drayton Bird

"The Robert Collier Letter Book" - by Robert Collier

"Tested Advertising Methods" -by John Caples

"The Lazy Man's Way to Riches" - by Joe Karbo

"Break-Through Advertising" - by Eugene M. Schwartz

"Advertising Secrets of The Written Word" by Joe Sugarman

"Making Ads Pay" by John Caples

Web Copy That Sells by Maria Veloso

The Architecture of Persuasion by Michael Masterson

Influence The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini

The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joe Sugarman 

"The Elements of Copywriting" by Gary Blake and Robert Bly

"The Ultimate Sales Letter" by Dan Kennedy

Cashvertising by Drew Eric Whitman

"Write to sell " it is written by Andy Maslen

"Influencing Human Behaviour" by H.A.

"Tested Sentences That Sell" by Elmer Wheeler 

"Unlimited Selling Power" by Moine and Lloyd.

Writing for Emotional Impact by Karl Iglesias 

Bob Bly's "The Copywriter's Handbook"

How To Make Your Advertising Make Money - John Caples

The Copywriters Handbook - Bob Bly

The Adweek Copywriting Handbook - Joseph Sugarman

Sales Letters That Sizzle - Herschell Gordon Lewis

Cash Copy - Jeffrey Lant

Magic Words That Bring You Riches - Ted Nicholas

Ogilvy On Advertising

Method Marketing by Denny Hatch.

My First 50 Years in Advertising by Maxwell Sackheim.

The Greatest Direct Mail Sales Letters of all Time " by Richard Hodgson.

How To Write Advertising That Sells by Clyde Bedell

Ads That Sell by Bob Bly

Advertising Headlines That Make You Rich-- David Garfinkle

Magic Words-- Ted Nicholas

Robert Collier Letter Book-- Robert Collier

My Life In Advertising -- Claude Hopkins

Bird - Commonsense

The First Hundred Million by E. Haldeman-Julius

David Ogilvy's "Blood, Brains and Beer"

"Confessions of an advertising man"

"Million Dollar Mailings" by Denison Hatch

"The Wizard of Ads" trilogy by Roy H. Williams

Making Ads Pay by John Caples

Method Marketing - Denison Hatch

"How to Write Sales Letters that Sell" by Drayton Bird. 

Hypnotic Writing -- Joe Vitale

"The Lazy Man's Way to Riches" - by Joe Karbo 

Denny Hatch's Million Dollar Mailings


The Biggest Benefit of AdWords

One of my friends is an electrician, and his work dried up when the economy tanked a few years ago.

He had to hand his van back, and had a wife, two kids and another baby on the way.

He would have known this was the beginning of the end for him.

I wanted to learn how to build websites, and I asked him if he’d be my guinea pig.

He bit my hand off down to my ankle.

We built a simple site and got him ranked top for “kildare electrician” (Kildare being the county we live in here in Ireland).

Nothing happened.

Then one day a €50 AdWords voucher fell out of a book.

I setup an account, and got a few ads running.

Within a few days he rang saying “Andy, I’ve had a call!”

I remember standing up and wandering around the office in a daze thinking “Wow, this actually works.”

We were really excited, and sat in his kitchen working out a bigger list of things to bid on.

We had new keywords such as “dublin electrician”, “wiring and rewiring”, and “fuse board replacement”.

He was really excited about “smoke detector installation” because of all the landlords in Dublin that would need smoke detectors installed in their properties.

We setup a “Services” page on his site and listed each of the services as bullet points.

We bid on each keyword and fired traffic at it.

He started getting calls and I remember him getting home late one Friday evening because he had been fixing a washing machine in a town nearby.

He asked me to add “washing machine repairs” to the services page, saying that a lot of the people looked for an electrician because they wanted appliances repaired.

We added that to his “Services” page, and created ads too.

After a month of the campaign running, we looked at his stats and and found that his ads had shown 10,000 times.

He’d had 300 clicks, and spent €75.

He was more than happy spending that €75, because he’d had enough work to cover the costs and get some money in.

Most people would use Google Analytics to find out what those 300 visitors did when they landed on the page, but I was more interested in the 9,700 people who had seen our ad and sailed past.

When I analysed the 10,000 times his ad had shown, I found that 2,000 were to do with people searching for electricians, especially in Dublin (the biggest city in Ireland).

We didn’t get much traffic though from these “electrician” searches, because every other electrician was also bidding on them and we were in a really low ad position.

We had hardly any clicks for wiring and rewiring, and no calls at all. I guessed our site wasn’t professional enough for people who were about to spend quite a bit of money and probably price shopping.

Our ads had shown only 12 times for “smoke detector installation”, so I told him that wasn’t going to work.

What I did find out though, was that half of all his impressions (that’s 5,000 impressions!) were down to either washing machine repairs, cooker repairs, or oven repairs.

He said he was absolutely swamped with all these appliance repairs calls.

Not only were there loads of people searching for appliance repairs, but there was much less competition in AdWords, so we were in a really high ad position and getting a lot of clicks.

Also, people looking to repair their washing machine or cooker are pretty desperate, and less likely to be price shopping because it’s a cheap job anyway.

So we threw away dublin-electrical.com.

And built a dublinwashingmachinerepairs site, a dublincookerrepairs site and a dublinovenrepairs site.

And then a kildarewashingmachinerepairs site, a kildarecookerrepairs site, and a kildareovenrepairs site.

We turned off all the other ads, and just sent traffic to the correct website depending on what people were searching for.

His click-through-rate went from 4% to 8% overnight because someone searching for “dublin washing machine repairs” saw an ad from dublinwashingmachinerepairs.com instead of dublin-electrical.com

When they landed on the site and it said “Dublin Washing Machine Repairs”, they didn’t wonder whether he fixed washing machines, or if he covered Dublin. They just wanted to find his number and ask him when he could come round.

So his conversion rate also went up.

Which meant we could afford to pay more per click.

And get into top ad position.

Which brought in even more traffic.


The happy ending to the story is that my brother-in-law ended up getting a new van.

And building a workshop in his back garden to fix all the washing machines.

I’d never heard his dad speak, but he quietly bought me a drink at a family gathering.

I also found out from the AdWords campaign that people were four times more likely to search for “electrician kildare”, than “kildare electrician”.

So I’d wasted a lot of time getting him ranked for the wrong keyword.

I should’ve ranked him for both, and for all the other ways people could type it in.

To me, the biggest benefit of AdWords is not that you can buy traffic, but that you can find out what people are searching for, so that you can sell it to them.

You can quickly test whether “cheap”, “reliable”, or “qualified” works better in an ad when someone is looking for an electrician.

You can add the winner into the copy on your landing page.

AdWords is the purest form of cold traffic.

There is an intent behind every search.

If you’re not using it to buy real time market intelligence, then you’re just buying traffic.

The biggest benefit of AdWords is that it can help you to build products your market actually wants, rather than what you think it wants.

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