Chris Lema at YoastCon 2015

Key Takeaways

[Music] she was walking down the aisle with a shopping cart and realized that she couldn't use the shopping cart and at the same time carry the stroller and so she put the shopping cart to the side and she just took the stroller and started walking through the retail store with her toddler to go buy the toddler shoes if you're a mom you know that buying shoes for a toddler is kind of a ridiculous event in and of itself because they're not going to fit those same shoes in just a couple weeks but they were going to be taking family photos and so she knew that she had to get cute shoes so she got to the wall of shoes and as she was looking at the shoes she started grabbing different shoes and trying them on the feet of her baby she'd try one set and then another she'd asked the person to go get a different pair of shoes can you get this and this size and they went back and forth she had one that she thought was kind of cute so she put it on the top of the stroller cover you know the part that gives shade to a child if they were outdoors and she tried a couple more on and decided NOP none of them were great and so she took the stroller and kept walking through the store not realizing that she had flipped back that overhang that shade cover she'd flipped it back so she could watch her child and tucked in that space was a pair of shoes that she hadn't bought she walked through the rest of the store didn't notice the man that had started following her through the store watching her she picked up one or two things and went to the checkout stand and paid for it checked out all that stuff but still didn't know that there were shoes trapped in the stroller and she walked with the stroller all the way back into the parking lot to her car took the baby out put the baby in the car seat grabbed the bags underneath that had the supply she'd bought and then went to fold the stroller and put it in the trunk and that's when she realized she had shoes she hadn't paid for at that point she turned to go back into the store and there was the head of security who' been following her around who had her on film and who decided in that moment that she was a thief it was an innocent mistake she made and yet he took her and her infant child back into the store back to the back room and called the police cuz she had stolen $20 shoes in the United States where I come from we are all short you are all tall and that has absolutely nothing to do with this talk I just thought I'd let you know we're shorter than you and I can't understand how you're all so tall but regardless in the United States we are one of the two countries on the planet that make use of a trial by jury it's this notion of fairness this idea that you'll put a group of your peers however you define that sitting there to judge and evaluate your situation so that it's not just a magistrate it's not just a judge who's going to make the single determination but instead a group of people that could listen to this story a group of people that may have found themselves in this story and then can adjudicate the issue and yet this woman never got a trial by jury because as she started talking to the police as they started explaining exactly how bad this was she was terrified she'd never been in any situation with the law she had no idea what was going to happen and the more they started talking the more scared she got and because she was so scared when someone came in and said if you just plead guilty we can because this is your first offense we can do these kinds of things we can expunge it from your record you'll have to go through this class you'll have to do these things and so it was what's called a plea bargain it was all managed completely outside of the court systems to save the Court's money something that we started back in the days of World War II to just manage the number of cases that were going to the courts and in those days it was about 20% of the cases that would make it to court the rest would be managed through a plea bargain and you think okay that's okay it's probably still it's prob it probably still works it makes it fair and easy because it's just two parties negotiating the challenge for this woman was she had absolutely no idea what the real penal penalties were what the real likelihood was of being convicted she didn't really know what the sentencing rules were she had no information and so she was kind of at a loss she plad guilty simply so she could get through the system and out of the system thank goodness it was a misdemeanor but in the United States over 97% of the federal cases are managed through plea bargain system and at this point you're probably wondering if I'm speaking at the wrong conference because you're like what does this have to do with anything related to the web I get that but I'm going to tell you five stories this afternoon and the thing that is true about all these stories the thread that runs through these five stories is that there is information asymmetry that the two parties that are interacting whether you're a site owner or a site Builder as they approach the dynamic or whether you're a site owner or a site visitor that not everybody has the same amount of information and when there is a symmetry poor decisions get made it is not as Fair it is not as great and ultimately it's not as optimal or optimized as we would like now the title of this talk is how to save you 13732 217 but I decided when I did the math that the lessons we'll learn from these five stories will net over a million dollars worth of savings I can't guarantee that every single story will be applicable to your situation but by show of hands could you tell me how many of you have had a great time today so far I think that's everyone how many of you feel like you've gotten your money's worth that's everyone do you realize this means I could say absolutely nothing of value to you and you will have received everything you wanted already so I can't guarantee that all five will apply but I hope that at least one will now I know it's late in the day I know it's the afternoon and I know that you're probably tired or maybe you're just waiting to get to the part where we drink beer but whatever the case I want to make sure you stay awake I want to make sure you stay engaged and there's another Dynamic that runs throughout a thread that runs throughout all five of the stories I'm going to tell you and that is that the people who made the mistakes we're going to talk about these people relied on Hope and hope is a wonderful thing to have hope is something you should embrace hope is something you should have in your life but hope is not a strategy I would like you to repeat after me hope okay you guys need a little more coffee hope hope is not a strategy is not a strategy perfect when I point to you all you need to do is say I needed some sort of orchestrator to help you with that let's try that again strategy ah it's Perfection Eleanor Roosevelt once said it's critical it's important to learn from other people's mistakes because we may not live long enough to learn from our own what we're going to do is walk through five scenarios five actual websites five actual stories of people who made mistakes and learn from it so that we can learn from it and so that we don't rely on hope does that sound good all right let's get to it how many of you love popups show a hands what what's wrong with you I mean like you go on a first date how many of you have ever been on a date that's good okay so it's not like the normal Tech crowd I talk to so you go on a date and and it's the first date and you're sitting at the table and there you are hanging out maybe you've already ordered your food so you're waiting but there's some bread on the table maybe you've already gotten the wine poured and you're hanging out there and so what's the first question you ask of your first date you say something like well now that we're dating should we pick the names of our children right that's what the popup does when you get to the website you're like I've barely been here 4 seconds would you like to sign up for my mail list because I know you're going to love me and you're thinking dear God how do I make it go away but here's the thing because we hate popups most of the time we don't use them we hate them because for us it's a horrible experience or maybe as a developer we hate them just because it incense us that every client shows up saying I want sliders on my website and you know the next time they're going to start asking for a popup because they read an article that said it works and you're just like don't do that kind of stuff but pop-ups work they do not necessarily at the beginning when you first show up but they work towards the end when you're getting ready to leave so you should use exit intent that's the notion of getting ready to leave when someone moves the mouse off the main part of the website they're going up to the toolbar to type in another address they're already planning to leave at that point Point pop it up and say hey as you're going away I have something that you may find interesting one particular site in the UK increase their email signups that's not a typo 469 using a product called optin monster optin monster is awesome it's awesome mostly because you can make it not pop up at the beginning of any arrival you can delay it and most importantly you can make it only appear as they're leaving you go this is great 469 per. translated to about a increase in Revenue we're not just talking about signups for the sake of signups an increased Revenue by about $40,000 a month which Nets us to 480 ,000 in a given year now what you see behind me here is the actual value saved from this single tip and the running total which because this is the first tip they're the same that's how math works over time one of these numbers is going to get bigger we're going to watch for that see what was happening on the site was before this there was just a little box you know the kind that you put on the right hand side towards the top of your website and on every blog post on the right hand side towards the top maybe in a different color and you hope that someone's going to fill it in Hope is not a strategy hope is not a strategy and so if all you have is a little box and you just sit there going well I have it there how come they didn't do anything you're using hope and that's just silly and so what these guys did in the UK was they actually said well no as someone gets ready to leave let me offer them this ebook which put them into a queue which allowed them to do some automated marketing follow up warm up that lead to the point they started buying they started selling them simple products and then from there slightly more expensive ones and eventually netted a good amount of revenue from the right people the right segment of their users but it all started with exod intent and it all started with a popup which most of us would hate except it works let's talk about our next Story the notion here is that you may have a corporate site and then you decide you want to sell something so you go to a local vendor you go to someone you trust you say hey I have this website now I want to do this e-commerce thing I want to sell hats or t-shirts or books in this case it was digital imagery digital art but for financial consultants and so these financial consultants would meet with people to educate them and this was digital art they could put in their presentations to help make a point and it was fantastic stuff except that when the site owner went to their developer the developer said well you know what what we can do is we can just spin up a whole separate e-commerce it just a whole separate installation CU it's easier cuz I happen to know this other technology and so we'll spin it up over here and we'll put a link and that link will let you go like if you're reading the blog and then you're like oh I think I want to buy something then you click the shop button and it'll just take you to another site that looks the same because they put the logo and the navigation and then you know if everything goes right should be fine that's what we call using hope but it's not turns out 60% of the traffic that clicked on that button that was going to another site for e-commerce ended up falling out of the process because it took too long to load up the other site see they were work they were working in one site right they're clicking through they're reading the Articles they're learning this is all Financial stuff so they're reading through these articles getting educ K going this is great and every now and then they'd see an image and go that would be helpful I want that I need to buy this digital impr let me go buy click the buy button what the heck happened two seconds 3 seconds sometimes if that third party hosted shopping thing just didn't work the site would just die you just be done like here where would you like to go now and you're like like I don't know I think I'm going to go do something else see that doesn't make any sense they were losing 60% of the traffic they were still making off the 40% they were still making something like 16,000 $220,000 a month but you do the math on how much they were losing from the 60% that was Mo that was leaving the site and you realize net result was a loss the Delta was a loss of 3 $224,000 in a year that is a painful lesson to learn because the vendor that you went to said well I work great with big Commerce so since I do big Commerce how about I just spin up a big Commerce site and we'll put the thing over here and you will be set here was the other problem when you click the shop button and you actually went to the other site it had the navigation but its navigation was its own navigation for that site because duh the developer was like well let me put home what do you think home meant on the big Commerce website it meant the root of the big Commerce website do you know how exciting it feels to go from an article to the catalog page to a detail page to now want to go back to the article to see which was the specific art that you want to find over here click home and you're not home you're at the catalog page and you're like how do I get home I don't know how to do this home home ET oh sorry so you're like how do I get home and you just quit I'm done I'm tired of this sight when you're building a normal site when you're building a corporate site when you're building a Blog and suddenly you want to add Commerce to it you don't have to use woo Commerce you can use a PayPal button you can do there's a lot of things you can do but what you don't want to do is have your prospect or your reader go to a completely different site to start the process again because there's a good chance you may lose them in the process and you're not controlling the experience so pull it all together does that make sense all right all of us well how many of you have a website all of us have these sites right and someone's speaking in our ear and telling us you you should monetize that how are you going to monetize that what's the business small how you goingon to make money off that and you're like oh no it's just fine this is just my site or this is my corporate site we we don't you know we're not trying to do that but you know you keep hearing it you keep hear and finally you're like okay we should we should probably figure out how to do something it took yast a couple years but eventually they're like let's sell something right so they put a little premium plugin an add-on and then okay let's try again and then then the ebook right and you start doing this stuff and it's easy to fall into the Trap that the money you make or the money you're going to make has to come directly on the site when in fact right and if you don't know youro story you should come and sit down grab time with him to ask him about the off line revenue he makes right he won't give you the details but if you follow me and hang out with me we'll talk I'll tell you the story but anyway the point is right there's money to be made offline from the trust you're developing online as you develop trust as you develop Authority as you develop your voice online you can create the opportunities to generate Revenue offline without having to make it happen on the site so this one particular site guy that I worked with because I had done some stuff similarly and so he said hey I want your help doing this and so we walked through the model and we walked through how to do it and he started writing and then he started taking on clients and doing coaching and it became right off four or five hours a week generating a sixf figure income but it was all handled all the transactions all the revenue all the coaching it was all offline but it came from writing came from doing the work he was doing online it's so easy to think the only way I'm going to monetize this is the ebook or the or the Plugin or the theme or some product I have to create and the reality is there's money to be made offline and if that money to be made right some people don't do it via coaching some people do it via an event right you spin up an event and you say here this is the price of the ticket to come to this event if you're building an audience online and developing that Authority online you can still generate the revenue offline does that make sense the mistake the mistake is to put all your eggs into one basket right when you put all your eggs in one basket say this is the website this is where it's going to make all my money you're putting hope that every one of your customers wants to do an e-commerce transaction how many of you have mothers it's good I I figured that was the answer some moms don't want to do a transaction online right when you put all your hope into this notion that I have to monetize everything from the site you also start taking whole segments of audiences and literally excluding them because they're like this is all unsafe it doesn't matter how many times I've told my mom that it is safer to put your e your information on e-commerce website than it is to give her you guys don't have the situation here but in the US you go to a restaurant it might be a fairly inexpensive restaurant but when it comes time to pay the bill you normally take your credit card and you hand it to a 16 or 18-year-old who promises to go to the back where you can't see them where they're going to handle the transaction and they'll bring you your card back in most countries that doesn't happen in most countries the card stays in your hand the whole time they bring a machine to you and they do that but in the US We Trust 16 17 18- old so much we're like go ahead take it to the back charge what you like I'm sure that you won't duplicate it or run off or steal my you know online Persona I'm sure you won't buy I'm I'm probably getting into too many details but I'm telling you people lose their credit card information this way right and so I try and tell my mom Hey listen it's safer for you to buy online than it is right to hand your C to a waiter but she won't believe me she'll she'll do one of those things like if you have a website where it has a Callin you know you want to do this transaction but call in and we'll and and we'll process thing over the phone she'll call you every time part of that I think is because she just likes to talk to people but part of it she's just like no I don't trust the whole e-commerce thing right you don't want to put all your hope into the notion that everything has to transact on the website because you know what you're starting to pet her off do we need to practice it again I think you can do better email automation how many of you have ever heard of email automation awesome that is fantastic how many of you are using it pretty good it's not bad those of you that raised your hand that you knew about it and then you haven't done it shame on all of you yeah me too right I mean we hear it we're like oh yeah this sounds brilliant and then we're like yeah I'll do that I have haven't gotten to it but the reality is you don't have to write that same email over and over again saying thank you so much for expressing interest or thank you for downloading this or thank you for you can automate that you can write those beforehand put them in a system and let them be sent out you can even send them out via some sort of trigger right how many of you know Chris Brogan yeah some you he's fairly well known online he has a fairly large list an email list thousands of people that he sends emails to and as I was talking with Chris the other day we were you know he and I were working together on a a launch of of or a relaunch of his online cours maker and so we're talking about online cours maker which is this whole notion of building a course online right and he was helping people learn how to build your course right what to do and I had just created a course so we were talking about it and as we talked about it I said well how's it going how's the sales going he's like great it's especially good now because I no longer send a single email to offer my customers the webinar or a single email to offer them the product I'm like I don't understand what does that mean because if I have something I've done what do I do I send out an email saying hey I've done this right if I have something to sell I send an email it says hey I'm selling this and Chris like no we did some tests we discovered that if you send the email out four times right like if you if you say okay we're going to have a webinar and the webinar is on Friday if we send an email two weeks out we get some people to bite if we send an email one week out we get some people to to bite if we send an email 2 days before the event we get some people to bite if we send an email the day of and say this is it folks if you don't sign up now you're not in right and he actually charges for the webinar like if if we don't send that fourth one he's like the majority of our Revenue comes from the fourth email because you know why people are distracted and people are lazy this is not you I know you're totally on top of it but all of your customers they're busy they're distracted they get an email from you saying look I just released a new ebook and what do they they go oh this cool I should get this at some point and then they put it away because they get 14 other emails telling them to do other things so what happens you write a single email you send it out you say here's the offer and you're hoping that that single email will work you're hoping that people will transact in a single moment how many of you have created either a Facebook ad or a Twitter ad or some kind of ad that takes people to a landing page where you give people on the landing page the offer to sign up for something or buy something a good number of you there's a whole bunch of research coming out that suggests that we should stop sending people to the landing page because it's asking them for an immediate commitment instead we should send them to a Content page where they can read we can pixelate them and we can track the fact they've been there and then we can Circle back several times over through Facebook and other mediums so that eventually we make them an offer the research suggests right that most of us are not ready to make a transaction on the first interaction I got married 11 years ago and I can tell you that my wife was not ready to say yes I do on our first date we had to go through a whole bunch of phone calls and then a bunch of dates bunch of hanging out and interacting to finally get to the point of saying yeah let's get a little more serious and then okay let's get engaged and then okay let's get married when we send out that single email when we say here's the offer I want you to decide right now it's like you're putting the engagement ring out saying okay you've been to my website once let's do this and most people are like I'm not ready for that kind of commitment so instead we have to woo them slowly we have to interact with them several times and in the case of Chris only 22% of the revenue from a recent launch a launch it generated over $100,000 only 22% came from the first email pitch and the majority of the revenue came from the fourth email does that make sense this story is just crazy I don't know if you know this how many of you have used bitley before yeah I don't know if you know this but bitley has its own relationship with its own affiliate programs to places that you might normally send people did you know that cool one of you did turns out one of those relationships with Amazon right so let's say that you go to Amazon and you're looking at a book and you go this is a great book and you want to send people to the book and maybe through Twitter or or through your website or on Facebook so you grab the link sticking into bit.ly maybe you have a toolbar extension that lets you do it quickly and you get the new link and you share it with people what you don't know is when you take that little link and you give it to someone and someone clicks the link it's actually routing through bitly and when it R it routes through bitly bitley says oh cool I have a relationship with Amazon and so it changes the link and routes it over to Amazon with its affiliate link now maybe that's cool maybe you think they're evil but that's not really the issue because you were just putting a link to an Amazon link right well this particular person was building these little bitly links so that they could put it on Facebook they could put it on Twitter but they could also put it in their blog and they were doing it with the hope of just sharing this information not realizing that they could be using an affiliate program so when I started working their website I said hey you have a bunch of links to Amazon I'm not really sure why you're using a bitly link but have you thought about about creating a affiliate program right you can go create an affiliate relationship with them and here's the bit they didn't realize when you send someone right as an affiliate when you send someone to Amazon you don't just get a payout for the single link you send them if they get to Amazon and they start looking at other things and they put a couple other items in their shopping cart you get a benefit for all of that but now imagine that bitley is between you and Amazon and bitley gets all of that interaction well in this case with over 50,000 outbound clicks right they were losing money monthly because they didn't have an affiliate program and because bitley was making money bitley loved this guy right like thank you so much and the reality is the 50,000 is only direct revenue from the specific books he was sending people to not the upside potential and what you see here right is that we've crossed over a million five simple stories five simple truths of five simple mistakes little things that you don't think of upfront you don't think that oh if I spin up a shopping cart from another engine and I just put a that Will Hose me or if I use bitly as a shortcat instead of affiliate link that Will Hose me and the truth is none of these things will hurt you all individually but there is a dynamic that does hurt you the dynamic is that you're counting on hope you're counting on the expectation that everything's just going to work out you would not do this in any other realm if we were walking out of this building today and your friend fell over and was choking you wouldn't go wait a second I think I saw a YouTube video about this or maybe I read a blog post here somebody give me a knife and a straw I'm going to jab this into his neck and then stick the straw in and that should work none of you would do that and yet when it comes to our websites we read a single post we watch one video and we're like yeah I think I can probably handle this myself we use hope as a strategy and that's a problem because is not strategy oh I think you're getting my point here I think you are see the big takeaway is this your job is not to become an expert in affiliate links or e-commerce your job is not to become an expert in automated marketing that's not your job whether you're a developer or a site owner you have things you have to care about but your job is to educate yourself your job is to ask questions your job is to learn about the space that you're in you're already doing that you're here you've spent a day listening to people but my challenge to you is to keep talking to people to keep listening and to keep learning because when we don't use hope as a strategy when we educate ourselves when we ask questions when we learn when we put oursel in that learning posture we can avoid costly mistakes does that make sense my name is Chris LMA I'm the CTO of a company called crowd favorite that does predominantly large Enterprise work with the Fortune 500 in WordPress you can find me blogging over at chris.com and on Twitter at chrisma thank you very much so first let me close the notification for my daughter's dance lessons yeah it's all good um sorry about that one thank you Chris that was good um you can all see why I invited him to speak I guess um he's one of the most natural born storytellers I've ever seen um the question is how do you put all of this and everything we talked about today is it even possible to get that right on the first goal on the website no you would not build a skyscraper by walking out to your backyard and saying hey I have some land how about I build a skyscraper most of us don't know the first thing about building SC another scenario is you don't build an airplane right you can't think of building an airplane on your own because you're like I don't even know how to think about building an airplane most of us don't have a clue what it means to run a successful online business before we've ever done anything and so what you want to do is surround yourself with people like you have here right and ask people and constantly learn and you've done this I've done this all of us have done this the WordPress ecosystem is as we've talked about before very very young the trick is not to walk into it thinking you know everything the trick is to walk into it in a learning posture so that you can ask a lot of questions over and over what are you doing here what are you doing there in fact if you look at the most successful entrepreneurs what you'll discover is the thing that they all have in common is they're constantly learning they're constantly testing and trying things on that high note thank you thank you very [Applause] [Music] much