Jamie Rickman Productions

Did you know that some big influencers out there online can literally drive millions of dollars in sales, with a single post on social media, or mention on a big blog? In fact, there’s even billion-dollar businesses that have gotten their start from single big influencers mentioning their products. And, surprisingly enough, it’s easier to do than you might think. Sure, it might be far harder to do a multi-million dollar launch overnight from a big star mentioning you just to be nice, but there’s plenty of well-known influencers that can still drive a ton of sales your way (and you never know when you might get lucky by landing a bigger one). To increase your chances of this, you should take the time to reach out to these big influencers, blogs, news sites, etc., and offer them your products for free in the hopes that they’d be willing to review them. Sometimes you can even pay these influencers to mention your products. And although some of the biggest ...

Search engines remain one of the most common tools users are utilizing to find things online, Google of course being the most prominent among them. Search engine optimization is therefore key and making your site visible and getting your content on more eyes. You need traffic to build an audience, and an audience to build conversions. That starts with search engine optimization. There are different types of search engine optimization including off-page and on-page, and the rules vary a little by search engine. For the sake of this post we will focus on practical ways you can create your written content in a way that optimizes your on-page content for Google. Choosing Your Keyword The first step in optimizing any content you write is going to be choosing your “keyword” the keyword is the main word in your text, which you want to stick out to search engines. In other words you want to try and think of a keyword that users searching for what your page has to offer, would type i...

What is Lead Generation? Over the years, the techniques and strategies of the marketing of business have evolved a lot. Lead generation has become an essential phenomenon in marketing. It is the process of attracting potential customers to your products and services via social media platforms, email updates, and strong word-of-mouth. A lead is considered to be a qualified and hot lead when the consumer is not only attracted to your business but also has a need for your products or services. What is the Importance of Lead Generation? Initially, lead generation is vital in gathering information about the behavior of your potential customers. After compilation and detailed analysis of the collected data, you can devise effective strategies to market your business for the targeted customer base. It is crucial to attracting a large number of people to your websites, so the products and the services offered by your company are promoted among a vast amount of people. Lead ...

For many people, their businesses are their primary source of income and the way they provide for their families. In order for a business to continue generating a steady source of income, and to grow, a business needs to seek new clients. Anyone who's been in business for a day can tell you how competitive it is. Your customers have plenty of businesses to choose from so you have to go out and find them. It's hard to be found by new customers, but luckily in the age of the internet we have thousands of platforms and means to advertise and market ourselves. There are many ways to start with lead generation and it can be done through platforms like Google and social media. Many businesses also like to use a landing page along with other methods to generate leads. Using landing pages effectively can be a great way to gather leads, but first you have to get your leads to visit them. Whether your business is online or offline both avenues are great for getting the word out ab...

Business to marketing seems like a foreign language to many people who are trying it for the first time. The consumer markets seems so much plainer and easier, after all, we're dealing with every day people. With businesses we feel we are dealing with some mysterious entity or some divine VIP, a thing whose persona is foreign to everything we knew in the every day human consciousness. The reality that most people miss, and it's a well-kept secret, businesses are people. They are decision makers, executives, highly paid company officers, and even midgrade managers. At the end of the day though, they are people, selling to other businesses is no different than selling to people, except that you have to consider the kind of person you're selling to. Much of this involves trying to get into a person's head. What does a business owner or manager need and/or want? What things will improve their lives, and more importantly, the operations of their business? Answering these...

People often overlook this very simple, very easy way to increase their business’s profits: increase your prices. Most people tend to undercharge for their services, so try increasing your prices, as a test, and see what happens. Funnily enough, most people perceive something that is higher priced as being of higher quality, which can encourage people to buy your product or service. As you increase your prices, you’re also receiving more per sale, increasing your profit margin. Take this strategy a step further and target higher value clients. For example, if you run a business coaching company, and you currently charge $200 an hour for your time, increase your rates to $1000. With the perceived higher quality and value in your coaching, target businesses that make a lot of money vs. those that are barely getting by. In this example, one client would be worth 5 of your clients in the past. Not only have you raised your hourly rate, but you’ve decreased the amount of work you nee...

Anyone who owns a website and publishes original content on it wants to see the site ranked higher on Google and other search engines. While many may believe that writing a top-quality piece of content, publishing it, and promoting it is enough to make the website successful, it is certainly not. In this era of fierce competition when thousands of websites are competing for the same kind of audience. In such a competitive environment, SEO practices play an essential role in website ranking. According to Moz – a renowned SEO software – title tags are the second most crucial factor for ranking your website after the content. Title tags can be the make or break factor in the success of your website. Optimized title tags are essential in boosting the ranking of your website as well as increases its traffic. Many programs like Web Fire can also help websites in writing unique titles and content to enure the website is ranked higher. Sometimes, the ranking might be higher, but the click...

There is nothing more frustrating than going to run a Facebook ad and seeing it disapproved or banned completely. Even worse is when Facebook deactivates your ads account as a whole. People experience this with their business and personal accounts all the time. It can be devastating, especially if you can't get back online. Still, if your account has been banned from running ads, it may not be the end of the world. New or Reinstated The First step you will need to take is to figure out what's going on and with which account. If your Facebook business account has been disabled, you may simply be able to create a new one and try to be careful in the future. If your personal Facebook account has been disabled, however, there may be something going that is much more serious. Creating a new personal Facebook account for ads will probably not be possible since Facebook is usually very meticulous about tracing duplicates. First Things First, Visit The Ads Manager Before ...

Making huge gains in traffic on your website and social media accounts is excellent, but what matters the most is generating conversions. There is no use in spending a large amount of money on extensive marketing campaigns if no one is buying your product or services or signing up for your website. Many tweaks can drastically improve your sales. 5 of the most important ones are discussed below: 1. Make The Benefits Conspicuous. All of the benefits offered by your products and services should be prominent on your website. The landing page and homepage are important in making these advantages known to potential customers immediately. Some examples of benefits your customers will love and should see might include free delivery, customer support, discounted offers, and giveaways on certain purchases. All the unique selling points of your business should be emphasized to convince the customers about the importance of what you have to offer, front and center on your website. 2....

So you’re looking to build a list? This strategy is a great way to build a list of people that are interested in your niche. First, find relevant Facebook groups in your niche, join them, and take the time to see what people are complaining about. What are the common complaints that keep coming up again and again? What product or service could you come up with to provide a solution to these complaints? Once you’ve come up with a solution, sell it or give it away for free to build a list or following. For example, if you run a wedding planning business, join Facebook groups in that niche and see what the common complaints among brides-to-be are. Perhaps they find that it’s very overwhelming, trying to remember everything to organize and knowing when to do what. You could create a timeline checklist, of what to organize when in the countdown to the big day, and offer it free to build a list of potential clients. So join Facebook groups within your niche and see what the most common...

1: What is Schema? Schema is best described as a type of language and coding system. It helps organize the data and shows more relevant results in search engines for the end user. This system began in 2011 and has widely been supported and used by several search engines like Yandex, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google as an attempt to bring more pin-pointed results to their users. Schema is often referred to as a markup system that is used to optimized websites. Essentially, it paves the way for search engines to interpret information and show the most relevant results. Now, if you think that Schema doesn't apply perfectly to your website, you couldn't be more wrong. Schema can offer a variety of features that you perfectly image and optimize to your advantage. The most surprising thing about schema is that it collects and displays every meager detail about the data you have questions about. For example, if you search for a specific hotel in your area on the Google sea...

It’s often a lot easier to sell to your current customers than to get a new customer. They already like and trust you and know your product/service works. Tap into that opportunity by looking at what else you can sell to your customers that compliments what they bought previously. For example, if you have a resume writing service, you could go out to recent customers and also offer an additional service where you submit their resume to X amount of job ads and write a customized cover letter for each ad, and also submit their resume to several recruitment agencies. One of our followers once had a tech business where he sold server management services, and he was asking me how to increase sales. After pointing out how it’s often much easier to sell to existing customers than get new ones, I asked him what kind of stuff or things his current customers seem to want or ask him for. As I suspected, they were often asking for things like websites, ranking help, etc. amo...

An attractive and engaging Facebook ad is the result of a combination of effective strategies. No advertisement can be declared to be perfect as some ads work better than others due to various reasons. The competition in the Facebook ad market is becoming intense. More and more people are realizing the power of this social media giant and hope to utilize the platform to advertise their products and services. Laser-focused targeting and creativity in Facebook ad creation are some of the essential techniques in creating a great Facebook ad. However, here are some of the other important strategies from which can be adopted to create a better Facebook ad: Target a specific Audience The first step in the creation of an ad is to keep in mind the audience for which you are writing the ad. The audience varies from business to business and the primary purpose of your ad. A tempting thing to do is create a general ad and target millions of people through a single ad. However, thi...

It’s time to check out the competition!! In school it may have been called cheating, but in the business world it’s just good old-fashioned market research! Find out where your competitors are advertising, spy on their sales funnels, and see how you can replicate any of their good ideas that appear to be working well. There are many online tools to find out what ads and keywords your competitors are using. There’s also a couple of basic ways to see what your competitors are up to - follow them on social media and subscribe to their blogs and newsletters. If they have smaller priced items, you may choose to purchase one of their items to see what their purchase process is like, whether they offer upsells, what those are and what their follow up process is to a sale. See what they are doing really well and look for how you can replicate it or adapt it to your business. For example, if you sign up to a competitor’s newsletter, you can see how they nurture a lead and turn it onto a sa...

There’s only so much time in the day, and although it can be a great idea to add extra services that you sell and fulfill yourself, it’s not always practical. This is why it can be a great idea to look for other services or offers that you can sell yourself but easily outsource to others to do with little to no work on your part. For instance, you might be a web designer that often gets requests to create and add videos to your clients’ sites, but it might either be very time consuming or nearly impossible for you to create nice looking videos to sell as a service even if you could get hundreds to thousands of dollars per sale for them. Instead of just passing on that easy money, why not look for others online who already offer those services, reach out to them, markup their prices (or make them more “done for you” to increase the value and prices you can charge) and get permission to use their testimonials, social proof, examples, sales pages, etc. as your own (o...

Everybody loves a freebie! What do you currently sell, that is of value, that you could offer for free? And how can you monetize the back end of that? This works especially well if you can offer something that other businesses would normally charge for. For example, if you have a corporate cleaning business, you could offer your first clean free, and follow up with your customer to see if they were happy with your service and would like you to continue. This is a great way to get new clients to try your service, as you’re taking all the risk out of it for them and, if you do a great job, chances are they’ll want to keep you on. The principle of reciprocity comes into play here too - you’ve given something of value to them and chances are they’ll feel the urge to do the same back. A twist on this model is our “free plus shipping & handling” funnels, where we offer something for free on the front-end as long as the customer covers a small s&h fee (usually un...

You’ve probably bought electronics before and been offered the purchase an additional warranty. Or maybe you’ve purchased furniture before and been offered a white glove service to deliver and setup your new couch. These are all examples of premium support services that can have very large profit margins, so even if only a smaller percentage of customers take you up on them, they can add a lot to your bottom line. Some of these premium support services can be at little to no cost to you. For instance, one business we’ve seen had a warranty offer where you could get free replacement charger cables forever on your phone, if they ever fail, for a small one time extra fee as long as you just cover the small shipping and handling fee. However, these cables have such huge margins anyway that the small S&H fee literally covered the cost of the cables and the shipping. The “warranty” that was sold was essentially 100% pure profit, despite how it would appear to be an ...

An attractive and engaging Facebook ad is the result of a combination of effective strategies. No advertisement can be declared to be perfect as some ads work better than others due to various reasons. The competition in the Facebook ad market is becoming intense. More and more people are realizing the power of this social media giant and hope to utilize the platform to advertise their products and services. Laser-focused targeting and creativity in Facebook ad creation are some of the essential techniques in creating a great Facebook ad. However, here are some of the other important strategies from which can be adopted to create a better Facebook ad: Target a specific Audience The first step in the creation of an ad is to keep in mind the audience for which you are writing the ad. The audience varies from business to business and the primary purpose of your ad. A tempting thing to do is create a general ad and target millions of people through a single ad. However, thi...

There’s only so much time in the day, and although it can be a great idea to add extra services that you sell and fulfill yourself, it’s not always practical. This is why it can be a great idea to look for other services or offers that you can sell yourself but easily outsource to others to do with little to no work on your part. For instance, you might be a web designer that often gets requests to create and add videos to your clients’ sites, but it might either be very time consuming or nearly impossible for you to create nice looking videos to sell as a service even if you could get hundreds to thousands of dollars per sale for them. Instead of just passing on that easy money, why not look for others online who already offer those services, reach out to them, markup their prices (or make them more “done for you” to increase the value and prices you can charge) and get permission to use their testimonials, social proof, examples, sales pages, etc. as your own (o...

It’s often way more effort and expense to find new customers than to sell again to your current customers. So how can you persuade your current customers to continuously purchase from you? One way is to put in place a loyalty program that keeps them coming back for more. A loyalty program is a great way to encourage customers to keep purchasing from you, make them feel special and reward and thank them for their continued business. Most loyalty programs involve rewarding customers when they buy regularly from you or have purchased a certain amount from you, whether it’s in free products or discounted future purchases. For example, think of your local coffee place. Many local coffee shops have a simple punch-card loyalty program, where you purchase 5 coffees and receive your 6th coffee free. The reward, of the free 6th coffee, encourages people to keep coming back to the same coffee place to indulge in their caffeine kick. Think about how you can encour...

There is nothing more frustrating than going to run a Facebook ad and seeing it disapproved or banned completely. Even worse is when Facebook deactivates your ads account as a whole. People experience this with their business and personal accounts all the time. It can be devastating, especially if you can't get back online. Still, if your account has been banned from running ads, it may not be the end of the world. New or Reinstated The First step you will need to take is to figure out what's going on and with which account. If your Facebook business account has been disabled, you may simply be able to create a new one and try to be careful in the future. If your personal Facebook account has been disabled, however, there may be something going that is much more serious. Creating a new personal Facebook account for ads will probably not be possible since Facebook is usually very meticulous about tracing duplicates. First Things First, Visit The Ads Manager Before ...

Everybody loves a freebie! What do you currently sell, that is of value, that you could offer for free? And how can you monetize the back end of that? This works especially well if you can offer something that other businesses would normally charge for. For example, if you have a corporate cleaning business, you could offer your first clean free, and follow up with your customer to see if they were happy with your service and would like you to continue. This is a great way to get new clients to try your service, as you’re taking all the risk out of it for them and, if you do a great job, chances are they’ll want to keep you on. The principle of reciprocity comes into play here too - you’ve given something of value to them and chances are they’ll feel the urge to do the same back. A twist on this model is our “free plus shipping & handling” funnels, where we offer something for free on the front-end as long as the customer covers a small s&h fee (usually un...

A membership program is where your customers sign up, either for free or for a fee, to be part of a community or elite club. As an incentive to sign up they often receive special discounts, invites to product launches, early access and other rewards. The benefit to you is that by offering incentives and rewarding customers’ loyalty, you encourage them to keep coming back to you and buying from your business. You also have the benefit of beginning to build a list of clients that you can regularly market to and offer deals to. For example, if you have an online store and sell health food products, you could create a VIP membership program for customers, where one of the main benefits is free shipping. You could also offer special deals, such as a free gift (perhaps a sample of a new product you want to promote) with each purchase over $30. The free shipping encourages people to join your VIP Membership Program, now allowing you to continue to regularly market to them, and the free...

How can you price your product in a way that psychologically impacts your customer into believing they’re getting a great deal? When people see the difference, between your normal price and your sales price, it influences their decision to purchase. By having a “normal” price listed it creates the impression that the deal they are getting is awesome. They’re getting all this value at a price that is way less than “normal”. People love to believe they are getting a bargain and by listing both your normal and sale price side by side, it highlights the value they’re getting for their money. For example, when you list your pricing, write it as, "Normally $197 -- Only $97 Today!" You can also come up with reasons to have such discounts listed. These reasons can be mentioned next to the discounted price as well. These could be things like a holiday special, inventory closeout, end of year special pricing, manager’s special, etc.. Any reason works and makes it ...

Too many business owners and marketers will only create one version of an offer, sales page, opt-in page, ad, etc., and simply hope that it works. If it does, they’re happy. If it doesn’t, they think that the offer simply doesn’t work. That’s a horrible way to go about it. If your first attempt doesn’t work, you’ll want to create several different versions of all of those to see if maybe it’s something in your sales copy. And even if you get lucky and get a winning offer right off the bat, you’ll want to constantly test new things in the sales copy to see if you can increase clicks to your ads, lead conversions to your opt-in pages, sales to your sales page, and upsells to your upsell pages. It doesn’t have to be hard. Even just changing around headlines or little things here and there can often have drastic effects. For instance, you might find that changing a headline and shortening down the length of an opt-in page might boost your lead conversions from 20% to ...

Business owners often do more talking than listening. When it comes to making sales, often it’s best to do more listening than talking. Instead of overthinking and brainstorming what your prospects might want, why not just ask them? You’d probably be surprised at how easy it can be to sell them what they’re already telling you they most want/need. For example, if you’re selling a variety of online marketing or web services, instead of trying to force them to buy a particular SEO package to help rank their site, why not ask them what they think their biggest issues are right now with their business? You might find that they really don’t care much about their ranking but might instead be focused on their social media, e-mail list management, or some other service that you could easily do for them. Once someone tells you what their issues are, ask them what they think that would do for their business if those issues were solved, and then ask them how much more they t...

There’s many strategies to increase conversions, but have you tried this one? Try ending your prices with a 7, .95, 5 or .95. Instead of charging $10, for instance, consider charging $9.97. Even though it’s only a few cents less, people seem to think that it sounds cheaper. Even on high priced items the same tricks can work. For instance, you’ve probably never seen a car advertised for $30,000. Instead, you’ll see it advertised for something like $29,995. Amazingly enough, on that last example, some people will walk away thinking that the car is $29,000 in their head (even though they’re smart enough to know that it’s obviously $30,000). In the past many marketers have used 9 or .99 to end the numbers in, but it seems that there’s been a growing trend lately that 7, .97, 5, or .95 seem to stand out even more and appear even less expensive. Crazy stuff, but it can definitely work. And it’s doubtful that you’ll miss those few cents after increasing your conversions....

For many people, their businesses are their primary source of income and the way they provide for their families. In order for a business to continue generating a steady source of income, and to grow, a business needs to seek new clients. Anyone who's been in business for a day can tell you how competitive it is. Your customers have plenty of businesses to choose from so you have to go out and find them. It's hard to be found by new customers, but luckily in the age of the internet we have thousands of platforms and means to advertise and market ourselves. There are many ways to start with lead generation and it can be done through platforms like Google and social media. Many businesses also like to use a landing page along with other methods to generate leads. Using landing pages effectively can be a great way to gather leads, but first you have to get your leads to visit them. Whether your business is online or offline both avenues are great for getting the word out ab...