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Big Ups To CopyBlogger, and How You Are Not Doing Well Enough.

I ruthlessly stole a screenshot of the GREAT CopyBlogger video.
I ruthlessly stole a screenshot of the GREAT CopyBlogger video.
I’m still ironing out some kinks in the design around here, but I thought I’d add a new blog post to the mix with a bit of an update from today.

I just joined My CopyBlogger and I’ve got to say, this is a pre-sifted goldmine. Just walk in and pick up nuggets.

But you’re still not going to use them.

Because digital strategy, actually having a big-picture plan, making the time to aim before firing in this crazy digital world is WORK. It’s hard work.

I’m not trying to get under your skin. I just know the numbers. It’s way more accurate when addressing the entire internet to say that you are not going to do the work. Most blogs are deserted. (I’ve got at least three that I’ve deserted.)

It’d be better to not even have a digital presence at all than to have one that hasn’t been updated in months.

If you need me, I’ll be reading another ebook from My CopyBlogger Marketing Library. You should be, too.

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Anybody Else Want to Beat the Averages? I Did.

google analytics graph of my pageviews this week
Are you measuring the engagement? Or do you just assume that people love you?
On Thursday I posted a link to my employment bio on a couple of social media profiles, with the specific goal of monitoring how it performed.

Let’s discuss.

I broke it into 5 parts, because otherwise it’s tough to see how far down the page readers go. Making them click on “read the rest by clicking here” might be mildly annoying, but it is the simplest way I could measure.

If you’ve not been around web analytics, it’s a cup of cold reality splashed in your face. Turns out that when nobody is watching, people really don’t care about your favorite new amazing content nearly as they would tell you if they were sitting in the same room.

Post a 10 minute video of your kid on your blog, and you’ll be lucky to average 2 minutes of time spent on that page. People simply do not care. They care about things when it’s about them. Make people click through 5 parts of a story, and you are lucky to get 3 or 4 percent of them to make it to the end.

A good copywriter writes in such a way as to make people keep reading. I am not under the impression that I have already arrived, but I am proud to say that almost half (45.94%) of the 441 people who clicked on that first page clicked all the way through to the last page of my bio.

I CRUSHED the industry average.

Now, considering the audience (upwards of 95% came via facebook, and presumably a majority of those are my acquaintances, not folks who don’t know me) and the content (a blow-by look at my last 10 years of life), it would make sense that this target audience is very interested. But very interested would be 10% in web-world. I got over 40%.

The business lessons? First, stories sell. Second, and more fundamental, there is no shortcut around high quality content presented with an eye toward engagement.

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START by Jon Acuff: a Review.

Mmmm, Tasty book cover image. Go on and puchase the thing, already.
Mmmm, Tasty book cover image. Go on and puchase the thing, already.

I was on the super-secret launch team for Jon Acuff’s new book START, which launched April 22nd 2013, and I think I just broke the first rule of launch team.

Here are my initial reactions to the book, having finished reading it last night. Full disclosure: I was given a free copy, but am under no obligation to give a positive review.

I’ll give you the one-word, one-sentence, and full-post versions. At whatever point I have convinced you, feel free to click on the “preorder now” link at the end of each segment. Those aren’t affiliate links, I don’t get anything for you buying the book.

One Word

Visionary

One Sentence

There have been few books so intensely practical, applicable, visionary, and encouraging; from beginning to end Jon gives you both rails to run on and hilarious introspection—lessons from his own “journey to awesome.”

The Long Version

I am what you might call “biased” because I went into this book expecting to love it. Mainly because I’ve read every book Acuff has ever written, and have loved them. But this one (and to a certain degree his previous, Quitter) is different. Acuff is coming into his own as a legitimate force in the already-crowded motivational/vocational non-fiction genre.

Where this book stands apart from what you might read elsewhere is that Jon Acuff comes across as a regular guy. So much so that I find it odd to write his full name hop over to this website. Even though we’ve never met, I feel like he’d say “don’t call me Acuff, call me Jon.”

Where most self-help gurus will tell you how amazing their life currently is (after they went through this simple 4 step process that you can get for only $199.95 + shipping), Jon is honest. His humor is self-deprecating, his tone is conversational, and his language treads the line between “I don’t have this all figured out” and “I have enough of it figured out to be a genuine help to you.”

START pairs nicely with Decisive by Chip and Dan Heath, which I am also currently reading. The two books taken simultaneously have been hugely helpful for me in my personal season of change. (ahem, those links at the top were made for clicking, and that’s just what they’ll do)

If you are already comfortably awesome, and living your dream, this book is not for you. If like me you find yourself longing for practical help getting from where you are to where you want to be, do yourself a favor and buy two copies of this book. One for you, and one for a friend to walk through it with you.

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Say It Where Somebody Can Hear It: Part 5 of My Employment Bio

(this is part 5. you should start the story here if you haven’t already)

If you’ve never been fired, I highly recommend it. Nothing to date has compared with the level of clarity and grounding that has taken place as a result of getting let go from a job I thought I took for the long haul.

Note: this is a 2015 re-do on this part of my story, with references to future posts. The original version was where I thought I wanted to produce content. I still like content creation, but my main business has pivoted to the code side of the web.

In 2013 I became rather abruptly self-employed, and started putting out feelers to folks asking to do something—anything—in the communication and web-entrepreneurship space.

My first client (who I literally offered via cold-email to “change the digital bed-pans” for) was Alexis Grant. You can read more about what I did for her by clicking her name, but the short version is that I had a crash course in digital business and enough financial margin to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up.

That led me (back) to WordPress.

During my work with Alexis, I began teaching myself a ton more about the web, in conjunction with my fire-hose of content marketing learning I was getting from managing her business.

When her business was acquired by Taylor Media in 2015, I was primed to launch my business as a full-fledged developer. I do hosting, backups, maintenance, as well as full site designs. I can also help with content.

Contact me using the form below.

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Call a Mechanic, We’ve Blown a Tire: Part 4 of My Employment Bio

(This is part 4. You should start the story here if you haven’t already.)

In November of 2012 I went “all in” on a cold-call sales job at a great little company named Wingswept in Garner, NC, which would give me more predictable hours and room for my side gig through the holiday season.

I was tasked with selling website solutions to auto mechanics, over the phone. Having never sold over the phone, I jumped in with both feet. Pro tip for southerners selling stuff to people in New Jersey: speak quickly.

Just 53 working days later, on February 18th of 2013, something unprecedented (and relatively unexpected) happened.

I was let go. Canned. Told to clean out my desk.

You can cue the red flags that I am not supposed to talk about, because they will hurt my chances for future employment, but the real story is that I was let go mercifully.

Telesales is a strange beast, and while I am very good at selling things when I am looking at the customer, I simply did not have what it took to get up to speed on hitting my sales numbers in the timeframe they were looking for.

Those who still might be looking for a red flag, hear what my supervisor said about me just days after letting me go:

He is an enthusiastic, intelligent, witty, tenacious, dependable, hard working individual with a great sense of humor and a high degree of integrity. If you would like more information, I will be happy to speak with you personally.

Seriously though, you can call and I’ll give you his cell phone number to hear more. And if you are a mechanic, you should probably consider their websites. I still think they are the best deal around.

Being let go from a sales job helped me to see something crucial: I like selling things (I like the persuasion, and correctly matching up a product with a customer’s needs). But liking something is not enough. I discovered that I love something else. Cleaning out a desk and choking back tears walking out of the building helped start me down the path toward pursuing that love.

And yeah, you can read about it (and perhaps even write yourself into the story) in the next chapter.

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