Stephen Pratley’s Blog

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 of fear, imposter syndrome, and resistance to the sheer simplicity of what I'm about to suggest. It goes in the face of all the guru wisdom out there. You know the stuff, with the funnel flowcharts that look like a labyrinth and need 200 emails, 8 videos and a 10,000 page sales letter before you can start selling. I know this isn't needed, because I've done it.…

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.…

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 customers mind, and there are three things you need to work on to get you both to the goal of them investing in your product. FocusAttentionStar Wars Episode 1 I'll get to the Star Wars bit, I promise. The first step is to get them to focus on your product.…

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 10,000 – the top 0.05% Why Twitter, why now? After writing Twitter off as a dying platform, riddled with bot traffic, a few things persuaded me to try it again in 2019. President Trump was definitely one of them.…

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.…

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 the result they need.…

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 year old.…

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 kings of conversions
On any kind of ad, email or landing page, the headline sums up the “what's in it for me” for the reader.…

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.…

The only 5 apps I left on my wifi-free Chromebook 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, published on my blog, and elsewhere, plus completed the first draft of a webinar training product that has been in the works for longer than I'm going to admit (months). This is my setup. 1) Stopwatch app For breaking work into 30 minute chunks to avoid fatigue – look up “Pomodoro technique” for more on this. 2) MP3 player I have a single mp3 track on the machine, a binaural beats track that also helps focus and keep me in the zone for up to an hour at a time. I threw away my iPhone earphones with the stupid lightning connector and I use a normal pair with an adapter on my phone to listen to audiobooks while I walk or commute. That means I can use the normal earphones on this Chromebook and put my phone out of sight, reducing the temptation to pull it out at any given time. 3) Markdown editor A super simple text editor that uses Markdown formatting.…