Stephen Pratley’s Blog

Imagine one of your best mates came to you for some advice. Imagine it’s in a realm that you genuinely know something about and have skills and experience to offer. Wouldn’t that be a great conversation to be able to share? I mean, it would be your best work, right? Not so much that you’d […]

We’ve all been there, staring at a blinking cursor on a blank screen. Advice like “the cure for writers block is to just write” is terrible in these situations, so it helps to have the tiniest of prompts to get you moving in the right direction. “Write about X” is a lot better prompt than […]

This week I ditched my previous posting tool (SmarterQueue) and have gone back in on Hypefury. I thought it would be useful to know the little detour I took, as it will enlighten much bigger decisions than a Twitter app. Let’s start there though. There are a bunch of Tweet scheduling tools out there and […]

In my Dropbox account, there’s a whole folder full of online courses I’ve created, that either failed, or never saw the light of day. They all fell foul of one of four reasons. The first reason was that I was doing it for the wrong reasons. Usually just for money. After 25 years in business, […]

I like writing emails, but I hate email editors. They suck. All of them. In fact the better the email platform is at managing your automated campaigns, the more they suck as a place to write. On the other hand, WordPress is getting better at being a half-decent tool to write in. The new editor […]

How to to use the “Amazon of courses” alongside a premium course strategy.

How fortunes change for two ad campaigns as we follow the leads on their journey to becoming customers

I write this on the brink of getting Twitter 1,000 followers – putting me in the top 2% of twitter accounts by size. This comes after a couple of months of consistent posting, following the strategies I’ve outlined below. My aim is to update this as I hit bigger markers, the next big one being […]

I’ve done a few of these and here are a few things we’ve found through testing… On a more tactical level, here are some other things that have consistently boosted response, particularly with colder traffic. 1) Put the form at the end. The curiosity about the results will carry them through. 2) Try putting the […]

I’ve got 2000 social followers and I’m constantly getting people in my DM’s asking for advice. I can’t sell them though because Ive not got a funnel in place. (paraphrased from a real trainer, 2019) I had to take a breath before responding to this. My first answer would probably have just created a load […]

A couple of years back, a course teacher approached me with a major problem. He had a best-selling product on the biggest course marketplace that he’d been making a solid $10k a month from, but the marketplace – Udemy – had just changed their pricing policies and screwed things up for him, big time. The […]

Let’s start this assuming you’re read my other posts and that we know our market, and the niche within it we’re trying to serve. We also know the pain we’re trying to solve for them and, I’m assuming, we have the expertise to help them, and a tried and tested formula to get them to […]

If anyone under the age of 50 says they can’t figure out how to run an email campaign, they’re just being idle. Here’s why. My first email campaign went out sometime in 1995. To put that in perspective, the JPEG image format that we use for nearly all photos on the web, that was a […]

There are a million and one things you can tweak and test in any funnel, but from over 2 decades of testing across everything from press ads, direct mail, emails, online ads, landing pages and even phone scripts, here are some universal truths that any business should be able to rely on… Headlines are the […]

A while back, I started working on a new project – Win The Day Back – which was meant to show, from the ground up, how a successful online course business can be grown. Truth be told it’s a little slow. That shouldn’t really be a surprise. It’s a side project, not my main sphere […]

Let’s leave aside all the tricks and tactics, the maze of funnel patterns and all the other grunt-level stuff the gurus will try to sell you. I want to share a pattern I’ve been working on for a few months that’s working really well for me. The path to making a sale is in your […]

In 2015, Prof Ron Friedman assembled dozens of productivity experts and quizzed them on their best tips for a Harvard Business Review article. This is a quick summary of the article to see how many of these 9 habits you practice already. 1. View busyness as a lack of focus. There’s a satisfying rush we […]

Warren Buffet has an excellent saying that explains his success at picking winners. “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.” Now, I can almost feel the anxiety coming back at me. You’re thinking about saying no to the next request from your boss, […]

Setting a morning routine is one of the biggest productivity boosters for the least effort that I know. Starting with a familiar pattern, one that is controlled by me and gets my head in the space where the day lead by my goals, not the whims of others, is immensely powerful. Even if the day […]

For years when I was working for other businesses, and for most of my first agency business, Sundays were a living hell. I’d be stresssed out at the thought of all the jobs I had to do on Monday, but wouldn’t get started on them or I’d have been up all night and exhausted before […]

Have you ever seen or completed a “to do,” that ran on forever? Writing a very long list can be compared to taking every thought in your brain and letting it flow onto paper. There is so much stuff that it looks impossible to ever complete and sadly that is what usually happens. This type […]

Disruption is a chronic problem. Endless construction on roads, subways, and buses that breakdown and bad drivers that make you swerve to avoid being hit. Working in an office or at home is very similar. You are always looking to find peace and quiet, but it is a tough search. Over 50% of workers state […]

You are stuck. Yes, you are…because you have 24 hours in a day, no more, no less. Talking about adding more hours to your day, means freeing up wasted time and adding that gained time into your workday. It’s not easy, however you are covered by reading the top ten tips right here. 1. Spending […]

The ancient wisdom of those who came before us, states in many different ways, that in order to be successful-you must wake up early. This is why almost 90% of the top performers and executives of companies, start their days before 6:00 a.m. Not all them start the day with a vigorous workout however. Each […]

Who wants to do drive themselves into the ground? It’s doubtful that you will get anyone to raise their hand for that idea. We all want to relax and chill, but the truth is, we need to work. To be happy and productive, work smart not harder. Here are 10 tips for mastering that idea. […]

Everyone has periods of time where they procrastinate. It becomes a problem when the time they take away from the item they are holding off on and spend that time doing virtually nothing. Putting off one task but moving to another one first, is better than being a zombie. Serious procrastination on most things in […]

There are many different ways that people waste time. Some are quite evident, while others are hidden and unthought of. We will look at 7 time wasters and how to bring them to a halt. 1. Let’s get one of the more bizarre time wasters out of the way. This might gross some people out, […]

This week I pulled the wifi card out of this Chromebook to help me stay focussed on writing tasks. It trashed the Bluetooth connection as well so away form home the only way to get content on or off it is with a USB memory stick. Since then I’ve averaged over 2000 words per day, […]

What is scorecard marketing? I’m guessing you’ve seen one of the hundreds of pseudo-personality-tests out there on Facebook? What Sex in the City character are you? What superhero would you be? What emotional intelligence score do you have? These are the most basic forms of scorecard marketing. We give a prospect a set of questions […]

Are you flexible? If you can do the splits that is great. However, in strategic thinking, we are talking about having a flexible mindset. An assumption about strategic thinkers, is that they are rigid and unbending when it comes to their thought process. That is not the case in being a successful strategic thinker, especially […]

You are probably by now, realize that you require a great overall mindset in order to set and achieve goals. You could create goals with poor self-esteem, however they would be very weak and without any substance. How you think and feel about yourself is extremely important. Let’s take a moment and look at a […]

What is the difference between making a decision and making a plan? Well for starters, plans always seem to change. You plan to get ten new sales this month and your plan, likely fails. However, when you make a decision to get ten new sales this month, you get ten new sales. Your focus is […]

Achieving clarity in all areas of your life is important. Some people assume that just sitting and starting on a list of goals will give them clarity on what they want. It ís not that simple. You have to first realize that you alone, are responsible for clarity in your life and your significant other, […]

Most people procrastinate from time to time. Some people excel at procrastinating and could win an Olympic medal for their abilities. If you fall into the category of an excellent procrastinator, then it is time to reverse it. Unless you learn not to put off tasks, you may even read tons of material on 90-day […]

You’re probably excited to get started writing and achieving your 90-days goals. Time to do a self check. Are you a go getter or does self-sabotage sometimes play a role in your life? It important that if you ever self-sabotage, you need to understand exactly what it is and get rid of that negative in […]

The idea of keeping a journal may be totally new to you. Perhaps you even have an unhealthy mindset about it. Journaling is different than keeping a diary and yes there is absolutely no reason why anyone couldn’t do a diary. Top military men, CEO’s, actors and yes if those dreaded politicians keep journals. When […]

Have you ever felt like you could have accomplished more in a day than you actually did? Or have you piled up your work for the next day unnecessarily just because you were too caught up with social media? Maybe you’re just too overwhelmed with the amount of work, and the increased stress is not […]

With the workload increasing, and the world running at a crazy pace, we are all looking for ways to achieve the optimal level of productivity. As the popular Daft Punk song says, “We want to work harder, better, faster and stronger.” But the question is: How? “It is not enough to be busy, so are […]

We are the generation of the “multiple windows open”, or as they call it: multi-taskers. With technology taking over our mind and focus, both our work and our distractions are clicks away from each other. And guess which one wins if we don’t take care? The distractions. “Multi-tasking is a lie” — Gary Keller, founder […]

“Failing to plan is planning to fail” Too many people start their day by checking their emails or social media feeds, sometimes before they’ve even got out of bed. The result is that they’re starting their day in re-active mode instead of active mode. Their entire day is taken up by responding to the requests […]

They laughed when I sat down at Hemingway App, but when they saw the edit…

If you think your membership site runs by the same rules as a SaaS business, you’re in for a shock.

Here’s why….

Just for fun, on Sunday I rode up a 9,000ft tall mountain. Now, I’m not built for this sort of cycling, but you’d be amazed what you can do when you put your mind to it, and what you learn along the way. The mechanics of moving a bike are really pretty simple. And they’re […]

I’m not even going to mention the “G” word today. It’s my least favourite 4-letter word at the moment.   This isn’t one of those Euro-begging letters that have flooded your inbox this week, clawing for your attention like some horny drunk at 3am in a nightclub.   Because, here’s a surprise. It’s all been […]

Have you ever had a funnel fail?   Have you ever spent days, weeks, even months getting together the moving parts?   You’ve got your landing pages, videos, copy and email follow-ups. You’ve spent weeks getting the whole process on point. You’ve followed one of your guru blueprints to the absolute letter, and then the […]

Only one re-engagement email? You could be missing a huge slice of your list.

So you didn’t “hit it out of the park” on your first attempt? Well surprise surprise. I’ve just seen a highly influential leader in another group telling their followers “press doesn’t work” . They tried 1 ad, one paper, one placement, on one day. Now they’re writing off an entire medium AND telling everyone else […]

So Grant Cardone has spent “millions” on growing an audience on Facebook, and he’s threatening to throw it all away and go to YouTube. He’s upset that Facebook is “throttling” how many people see his posts, they longer get the results they once did. Now, watching this 60 year old rant like some sort of […]

I seem to be answering questions about this on at least a weekly basis at the moment, so this is my current stack of software for running a successful course business. Who this is for It’s aimed at people wanting to reach a level where their course provides a reasonable full-time income so the focus […]

Ask a question in any digital marketing group and somewhere in the list of somewhat unhelpful answers you’ll get this one: “Test it” Now, for a long time I considered testing in marketing to be a fairly high level skill, and one that wasn’t worth troubling yourself with until you had some significant levels of […]

Offer List Creative Those three words, in that order, used to be drummed into every direct response marketer form the day they were allowed to even look at a campaign. This was in the days when DM was expensive. You needed stamps, printers, huge machines to process the data that cam in on tape reels […]

A while back I used to run a marketing course for a well known training organisation in the UK. Eager to make as much use of the content they’d paid for as they could, they created an online course on Email Marketing, but abandoned marketing it within a few months. When I spoke to the […]

What a trip to the firing range taught me about client profiling and two essential elements to your discovery calls.

Yesterday I talked about things that go wrong as you scale. Million to one shots that happen every month, for better or worse. Today I want to talk about things that are already wrong, and when to fix them. I just brought in an intern on a job after he pitched me with a big […]

One day a few days after I started a new job a rather irate man turned up at our office carrying the door off a large oven, demanding that he speak to a lady called Linda Carter who he swore had promised we would repair it. Which was a bit odd as we were a […]

A couple of days back I had one of those “can’t believe I’ve never seen this” moments when a friend introduced me to a concept in branding that was completely new to me. Now by and large I’m not a branding guy. My one job that involved any brand fluffery was running Hasbro’s Action Man […]

A lot of copywriters talk about “burning house problems”. The gist of it is that you want to be targeting people who have a problem that is as serious as a burning house, something they absolutely have to act on right now or they’re going to be in a world of pain. The reality is […]

One of my favourite podcasts is Kevin Roger’s The Truth about Marketing, and this has to be my favourite episode of all. In it, Mark Ford,  founder of Agora Publishing drops an absolute gold-crusted pearl of wisdom about the knowledge you should have about your market before staring on even creating a product, let alone […]

My mother was a teacher, and then a college principal. Her college was in the same small town where I went to school and most days I would walk up the road to meet her and get a lift home. Invariably, she’d get collared by someone as she was trying to leave and I’d be […]

No time for content? Daft sense of humour? You can still get leads with ease.

Are you actually ready to find someone to run your ads yet?

The greatest marketing stories don’t have your brand as the star.

I have a little routine on Mondays that helps me ease my way into the week. Sunday night I do a little brain dump of the things I’d like to get done by the end of the week. It’s usually way to long, so I sleep on it, then first thing Monday I plot the […]

The great David Ogilvy once wrote: “When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.” i.e. 80% of your effort in a sales letter should go into the headline. It’s like the subject line in an email. If you don’t capture your prospect’s interest there, you have no hope […]

Most online course marketers recommend using bonuses to push up the financial value of your product. But there’s a strategy behind using bonuses that can multiply your sales without needing to create any extra content.

Last week I witnessed the marketing equivalent of a zombie attack. A well-meaning chiropracter appeared in a free Facebook group asking about what text he should have on the button on his email signup form. Cue a couple of dozen undead marketing ghouls, woken from their slumber by the chance to show off their no-ledge, […]

If your’re a parent, or you’ve ever had a parent (I guess that’s most bases covered?) you’ll recognise this threat. Well I’m making it now. Frankly you’ve got obsessed with marketing tech over the last couple of years and it’s time to get your face out of that screen and learn to pick up a […]

If there are two big opportunities to sell that most businesses miss, one of them is after you’ve just got a result for them. We know that. Most businesses forget to close the loop and move customers back into the sales loop. Maybe they don’t have a follow-on product to solve whatever the next problem […]

The biggest reason for failure I see with people launching online courses is that they hit the wrong point on what economists call “supply & demand”. The ideal place to be is lots of demand, but little supply – making you the only viable option for your prospects. It’s a hard place to find, but […]

Discover demand, competition, and typical earnings for your video course – before you create it.

Way back in 1989 – a full year before the invention of the World Wide Web, a lanky 18 year-old walked into a bar and landed himself a job for the summer holidays. The bar was the busiest tourist pub in Oxford. A three storey, three bar building by the River Isis, within walking distance […]

See that receipt? That’s a £3.39 coffee. Trapped at a motorway service station with no option other than the bitter, scalding cups of tar served in McDonalds, these guys had jacked up the price by a whole £1 over what they usually charge. My reaction? A tut, a shake of the head, and hand over […]

If website traffic was cake, SEO would be like the cherry on the cake. Not the cake itself. The “cake” is traffic that you can control, that you can turn on and off at will, that you can get started quickly, and that you can keep testing until you have a process that at least […]

Way back in the early 2000’s I had one of the best initiations into learning about online conversion that there is, running a 7 figure business that relied entirely on affiliate commissions. I was building a 2 million-name email list, and profited from it only when I made a sale or a lead for one […]

Another question from one of my Foundation Funnel customers. “My funnel is in place, thanks to your help, and I have a product that is making a bit more than breakeven on my Facebook ads. What do I do now? Start testing and optimising, or scale up the traffic?” Now I know this guy really […]

How much should you charge for services, and when?

After the high of Wednesday night’s event I needed a bit of downtime last night, so I treated myself to a binge-watch of Billions. There’s a great scene in the first series where Chuck Rhoades, the District Attorney, has screwed up a case against Bobby Axelrod – a billionaire hedge fund manager accused of insider […]

Last night I gave a talk to about 40 up and coming digital marketers in London, all about increasing conversion rates when you’re selling online. I shared some foundation work I do with private clients before I even start mucking about with their ads, landing pages or emails. From the stage I could see a lot of wrinkled […]

On Wednesday night I’m giving a talk at ASOS, the UK-based online fashion retailer, which is fairly decent of them considering.. The chaos I caused the first time I worked with them (more on that in a moment). My total apathy towards fashion retail in general (more on that another day). Many years ago, around […]

The reason why the extra effort to run A/B tests is better, and safer than just making changes “on a hunch”.

On being proud of your mistakes…

This John Cleese video shows some real mastery of video on Facebook

How to find out if you have a viable paying market, a product with a point of difference, and where to scout for copy ideas that your target market will bond with

Before and after your product launch there’s one thing you should be focussing on.
And it’s not money…

Here’s how you can measure up to the leaders in your industry and start passing on your skills and knowledge to people who follow you.

Watch my live critique of this webinar sign-up landing page.

ActiveCampaign lifted the lid on it’s long-promised ecommerce integrations this week, and as a reseller of both Shopify and ActiveCampaign services I was invited on the the Beta trial. Here’s a few things we can look forward to.

Written from the point of view of promoting products as an advertiser, rather than as the merchant – this is worth a watch if you think you could add some additional revenue to your business by promoting other products.

My favourite business quotes tend to be of the arse kicking variety 🙂
This one by Deming distills the difference between marketers who know what is going in their business, and those who are just guessing.

Don’t want to promote your products because it feels like you’re being “manipulative”?
Stop being so British and read on…

Good morning my caffeinated friends, I’m close to putting up a new online course about building a simple, but scalable first funnel using WordPress, ActiveCampaign and a few basic tools. I’m looking for 5 testers to go through it and make sure it’s a proper 5 star job before I push it on an unsuspecting world. What […]

Leveraging product and market knowledge to expand your business

Track from first contact with your funnel, through to lifetime value.

An entertaining tactic to increase video engagement…

What is a marketing funnel? What are the components of a good marketing funnel? When do I need to use a long funnel? I answer all these questions in this video.

Selling online courses needs great email follow-up. These are 5 essential emails to send that will boost sales of your online courses.

Transcript: Hi, this is Stephen Pratley, and today I’m going to help you understand the difference between a website and a funnel. This was brought home to me just at the end of a recent project. We’ve just finished up building a new website for an agency that I do a lot of work for. […]

Four steps from an under-performing website to high-performing sales funnel.

The world of sport is plundered for analogies to help us in creating an automatic business

Mautic is a new, open source, marketing automation platform that offers both self-hosted and cloud hosted versions. We’re pretty excited to be trying it out, and creating a new course as we put it through its paces.

Selling online courses needs great email follow-up. These are 5 essential emails to send that will boost sales of your online courses.

I’ve heard, and tried to answer the same question more times than I’ve had haircuts: “What’s the best email marketing system for my business?” and in typical consultant’s fashion I answer: “It depends” Before I get the chance to explain what it depends on I get drowned out by a thousand helpful souls giving the […]

Testing your best headlines with Google Analytics Experiments

A follow on to our course at thefreefunnelformula.com
We teach you about webhooks and how to use them to push data form your landing page into ActiveCampaign

Want to know if your website is any good before you launch? Here’s how.

Alongside Dr Cialdini, BJ Fogg is probably the greatest thinker on persuasion of our era. And by greatest, I mean the one whose theories have most impact, because they are so simple. In fact they’re almost too simple. The biggest objection to them is that they aren’t “ambitious” enough. To find out how wrong they […]

Create ASK style surveys using a $39 Wordpress plugin

There seems to be a common narrative in a lot of online marketing at the moment. The “rags to riches, you can do it too” type story, but with a Dumb & Dumber plot twist. The gist of it is a lot of failure stories. Copywriters who failed English, people selling software who claim to […]

Most of what I wrote is emails giving tips, and usually showing the way to a product, workshop or service that will help solve the same problem in more depth. Every once in a while I need to add a new product into the mix and my emails take on a slightly different feel – […]

Book On Eventbrite. On 23rd February I’ll be leading a workshop with Kingston Chamber of Commerce on Email Marketing. Are you tired of wracking your brains every month for ideas for your company email newsletter? Are your prospects getting less and less responsive to emails under a tide of messages from competitors? Do you struggle to keep up with […]

Presented to Kingston University BA in Digital Marketing students, January 28th 2016

The creative process to produce daily emails that keep customers engaged, entertained and informed.

How even the best marketers can et wrapped up inside their own product.

Tim Ferris was talking to me today about a major catastrophe that almost scuppered his second book – The Four Hour Body. Tim’s first book – The Four Hour Work Week – had been such a success that Amazon offered him the opportunity to be the first author in their new publishing business, going head […]

Buck the trend of how to get feedback from your prospects in your email autoresponders

Speed up your workflow by using your existing content, and 5 other reasons not to use your email software for design.

What I learned about websites that convert, from a naughty SEO experiment

Video is a real must-have part of any information business’ arsenal these days. I know it can take some getting to grips with especially with a “face for radio” like mine, but it’s worth persevering with as a way of getting your message across and building your personal brand at the same time. I kicked off […]

An incredibly tightly packed presentation on an affiliate marketing funnel. Most of the theory of Todd’s MarketingFunnelAutomation.com courses are in here somewhere! (If the video fails, view it direct on Vimeo using this link: https://player.vimeo.com/video/135495503)

Watch me as I find the traffic sources for a big internet marketing website, uncover potential new niches, and show you how to identify potential traffic partners for your own website.

I’ve spent the morning at the Success Summit at Earl’s Court. Up on stage and one of the most popular speakers was funnel hacker extraordinaire Russell Brunson, the man behind Dotcom Secrets and Clickfunnels. So when I caught Russell hanging about in the lobby I grabbed the chance to as a couple of questions. The […]

A walk-through of the different options to build your inbound marketing funnel from all-in-one packages to combining best-of-breed components.

A walk-through of the different options to build your inbound marketing funnel from all-in-one packages to combining best-of-breed components.

Wasn’t this easier a few years back? Not so long ago you could easily throw up a landing page, do some rough and ready SEO, or point some cheap Adwords traffic at the page and you’d have as many leads as you could handle. If you’ve seen your advertising slide,  if you’ve seen costs go up […]

A powerful, 5 word sentence that can unlock what your prospect is looking for and get them to talk without thinking first.

Stephen Pratley goes through the strategies that brought the cost per lead on a recent campaign from over £20 to under £5

Using powerful narrative techniques to drive persuasion

A nice visual checklist by the folks at Eliv8

Google follows Facebook’s lead in allowing targeting based on existing customer data, and creation of lookalike audiences.

For anyone who doubts the worth of testing new designs on their website or emails, take a look at this test from “Which Test Won” I’m probably givingthe game away when I admit that: A) I got it wrong B) So did the majority of other people – most of whom are marketing “pro’s” like […]

A sad, and unfortunately common question in most major cities, but one that misses a principle that you as a marketer are probably making as well. If you’re trying to get leads from your website, what you ask for, how you ask for it and when you ask for it can all make a big […]

How a pro-active reviews strategy can help grow sales

Don’t confuse cold email approaches with spam. A well-researched contact with a good reason that the recipient should respond is a great door opener. More cost-effective than mail, less intrusive than a cold phone call, more impactful than a social media connection. If you are dealing with smaller numbers of high-value contracts, this should certainly […]

Cold emails are an absolute no-no in bulk email marketing, but in B2B sales they can be as much of a necessity as cold-calling, and when used correctly, are usually way more effective in opening doors. Yesware, a tool that shows when your personal emails are opened and responded to in the same way as […]

Microsoft have followed in Gmail’s footsteps by moving their users promotional emails into a separate folder, away from their day-to-day personal emails. Office 365 is mostly used for work purposes at businesses from one-man-bands to large corporates, so the impact is likely to be felt most by B2B marketers. This great post by Email on […]

This is a great post form Zapier on automating your lead generation processes: https://zapier.com/blog/automate-lead-generation-sales/ Zapier is a great service which we use throughout our own campaigns to link up forms, CRM tools, email marketing systems, payment solutions and more. What used to cost thousands in development time can now be accomplished in a few clicks. […]

This morning I got a rather naughty email campaign from Cordings – a respectable country clothing outfitter based in Picadilly. The campaign was sent to people who had previously unsubscribed from their emails – a legal and best practice no-no. Why companies get this wrong Now, I can see how this happens to companies, they […]

ActiveCampaign have just announced that you can now share automations between accounts, so what does that mean for your  business ? The idea is not a new one. Both InfusionSoft and ClickFunnels offer similar functionality but bringing it into a tool which has such a low entry point as ActiveCampaign makes a big difference to the […]

Search agencies have something of a reputation problem. It’s an industry that is frankly overrun with cowboys. People promising the earth, then making off with your money and leaving your site in a worse position than it was before. I worked in the sector for a while I used to get really frustrated at how […]

Wasn’t this easier a few years back? Not so long ago you could easily throw up a landing page, do some rough and ready SEO, or point some cheap Adwords traffic at the page and you’d have as many leads as you could handle. If you’ve seen your advertising slide,  if you’ve seen costs go up […]

This huge survey of over 1,000 marketing automation software users brings back some surprising insights into how marketing automation is really deployed in a variety of businesses. A must-read for anyone involved in selecting or implementing these systems. http://insight.venturebeat.com/report/venturebeat-marketing-automation-index  

(Originally published on the Shine Marketing website) Personas are a simple but powerful tool to aid better ecommerce website design. In this article we explain what a persona is, how it is used and how to create a useful set of personas for your ecommerce website project. What are personas? Successful ecommerce website design requires […]

Having just splashed out on a ‘professional’ site design for a new reviews blog, I’ve just spent the best part of half a day re-jigging it to allow me to easily pick up ads from a variety of ad and affiliate networks. I’m suffering a little from the Catch 22 of niche sites. Niches are […]

Blogs and their ability to syndicate out content are a double-edged sword. On the one hand it means your blog can be shown on other sites and get to a bigger audience. For example, excerpts from this blog and many others are also shown on Affiliates4U and some other sites, and I get plenty of […]

Using video online is an excellent way to capture the imagination of your readers and get your message across. I first used it on a Britsh Heart Foundation Fndraising campaign in 2002 and got some excellent results. However, including any sort of gizmos in emails is fraught with problems, and many email clients and coprporate […]

It might seem like we’re approaching the process of email marketing somewhat arse-about-face, but there is a method in it. Last week we identified the sectors we want to market to, and thought about how many offers there are available in that market, and we picked the system we are going to use to send […]

Lots of times at events I meet people who are obviously very knowledgeable about their subject and can speak well and enthusiastically. When I talk to them about blogging as a way for them to reach more people and show off their expertise, they say that what holds them up is that they don’t like […]

First off, thanks to Jason Dale for pointing this neat little tool out to me. Camtasia records video of what’s happening on your computer screen, and allows you to record voice-overs with it. Where it beats other screen capture tools is in its ability to zoom in on areas of the screen, making tiny Youtube […]

There have been plenty of instances this year of ill-advised merchants clearing out inactive affiliates from their programme, so I was pleased this morning to get the following email: Dear Affiliate, I hope you are well and not too busy planning your all your Christmas activity! The M&S team here at LBi have recently done a […]

An ongoing problem for owners of discount code websites and competition sites, is merchants who don’t set end dates properly, then decide to end them at short notice. Two plugins I found over the weekend at wonder-ful could help out with these. The first is Posts Expire. Does what it says on the tin. You […]

This isn’t just a pretty picture to get my blog readership up, this is part of the fashion show that Tights Please organised for last weekend’s Affiliate Future Performance Booster. It was by far the most professional, and effective way of showing off a merchant’s wares I’ve seen at an affiliate event so far, and […]

The growth of the cashback sector in UK affiliate marketing has caused a few ripples, and a lot of false assumptions about this method of marketing, so I thought I’d post a few notes to merchants from someone who has seen both sides of the fence and seen what works and what doesn’t – me! […]

A big thanks to Webgains for organising the affiliate golf day that went on yesterday. I’ve never done a ‘corporate’ golf day before and have always considered them to be a bit of a jolly. However, I picked up some good tips about new niches from Derek, one of the Webgains account managers, and traded […]

In the last few weeks Shine Marketing has begun working with Shoestring.co.uk – a long haul adventure holidays operator – on the launch of their UK Affiliate programme. The Programme has been extremely successful in the Netherlands with TradeTracker and will be the first UK programme in the new European version of the network. The […]

This is quite old, but so worth sharing… I just found this blog post about a guy who bought some pixels on the Million Dollar Homepage. Nothing special there, some would say that’s the opposite of genius. The clever bit is, that rather than putting up an ad, he put up a picture of Waldo, […]

Mal has given an interview to  Webmaster Radio which you can listen to online. The interview talks about Buy.at’s expansion in to the US market, and talks about some of his impressions of the US market following the Affiliate Summit. As usual, Mal is enormously enthusiastic, pulls no punches on what it takes for a […]

…and probably don’t care Kieron tagged me in an ongoing game that seems to be expanding, last time I saw it it was just 5 things, so I’ll have to put my thinking hat on. “Each person posts the rules before their list, then they list 8 things about themselves. At the end of the […]

At last week’s Affiliate Summit in Miami, David Hall – Communications Director of Affiliate Window – stood up in front of a room full of top performing affiliates and admitted that the UK affiliate market was “merchant centric” in comparison to the US, and that he’d be taking a lot back from the US experience. […]

Now I’ve had a chance to get over the jetlag, read through my notes and make some sense of it all I thought I’d jot down a few points that might help anyone planning on attending one of these events in the future. My Summit Objectives My main objectives, scribbled down on the plane on […]

Ok, this will be pretty short as it’s a pretty crammed day, and going to a be a crammed night also, it’s 6pm and there are 2 networking events and a domain auction to go still. I have to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the quality of what I’ve seen today. After comments from […]

I’ve just read through another post about network payment problems, this time by John Lammerton. It seems to be a particular problem with Directtrack driven networks, of which a large handful have cropped up in the UK in the last couple of years. For those affiliates who haven’t seen the network side of Directtrack, you […]

I’ve just a really great article by Kieron Donoghue about the evolution of PPC landing pages from single page gateways into fully fledged content sites to comply with Google’s Quality Score I thought I’d pull together some Of the components of the open source Content management system Joomla, that will help you build a site […]

I just saw a post on Kieron Donoghue’s affiliate marketing blog that he’s going through a redesign at the same time as moving from Blogger to WordPress. Kieron’s old design was the classic Blogger template, you can see it here at archive.org. I actually kind of liked it, nice and uncluttered and it let the […]

I’ve been looking at some new ways of building very niche, often local, sites that convert well in less competitive areas of SEO and PPC. The original research stared when I began work with a local commercial mortgage broker who turned white when I showed him what the top guys were paying for terms in […]

This is the monstrosity that has just been unveiled as the London 2012 logo, a fragmented bit of chaos with no discernible meaning to it. The BBC announcement of the new design has already been flooded with over 300 comments, none of them positive, and the downing street petition site has been hammered all morning […]

Google is reportedly looking at buying Feedburner for a reputed $100m dollar as an route to get in on the growing RSS feed advertising business. RSS is a way of pushing out the content from blogs and other news-driven websites onto other sites, or RSS readers, a little like email readers. This is a great […]

I’ve just launched a new online PR blog for immediate future, my first totally custom WordPress template. The template is loosely based on the functionality of the standard Kubrick template and matches their soon-to-launch new website design. Working with Katy Howell on the project has been fascinating as she really knows her stuff about getting […]

This has to be the most useless service Google have come up with yet. Google offers an ‘Optimized’ option for its PPC campaigns which claims to get the most clicks for your budget. There are no promises that the clicks will make yyou a profit, but I had a leads campaign running that was for […]

Thought I’d have a bit of a play with this plugin for selling ads off my blog. It’s just an experiment and if anyone signs up between now and end of june, all cash will go to the British Heart Foundation. I just realised I forgot all about the the London Brighton Ride, so this […]

Google Analytics has had an overhaul and it’s looking pretty smooth. First off, the trend of visits is a lot easier to read. I was a bit miffed that the calendar had disappeared from th left column, but Once I saw the power of the new date selections, and the ability to compare ranges I […]

Email marketing seems to be a much overlooked tool for affiliates in the UK compared to the US where affiliate marketers seem to have it somehow embedded in their DNA at birth. I always thought it was pretty simple, but after a few conversations recently I’ve come to realise that might be because I’ve been […]

2007 saw the art of blogging really hit the mainstream, to the extent that traditional and ‘respectable’ journalists started to sit up, take notice, whinge, and then head back to their boozy lunches to make up a few more half truths about Paris Hilton. The medium really started to evolve, and the widget-heavy personal blogs […]

Over the last few weeks I’ve been picking up a few domain names. Some to buy for my own projects, and a couple that I just chanced upon that I’m hoping to resell next year. For a project of my own I’ve just completed the purchase of casinos365.co.uk which I’m building a casinos review/strategy site […]

For a while now I’ve been using Google alerts to keep tabs on the PR generated about clients and competitors. Whilst there were a few flaky results, in general it’s been pretty good as a web-clipping service, especially considering its price. It’s free. Recently Google expanded the reach of the service to cover any mention […]

I was extremely sceptical a few weeks back when told about an articles site selling articles on an individual basis. I think that opinion has just been overturned. Whilst browsing the istockphoto site for some images for a new client site I came across a free article, “What’s the right typeface for text?“. Duly impressed […]

Article Marketing is becoming hot activity for promoting your site. Led as always by the affiliate community, this tactic can help you to: Get articles about your site published on many other sites Get inbound links from pages related to your site subject – helping your search rankings Provide content for your own site if […]

Last night I heard a great talk at an ecademy networking event. It was by Richard White a sales trainer who has developed some great techniques for people who really don’t like selling. He talked about five rules for getting more people to refer you, even if they haven’t done business with you before. After […]