Turning those well-earned clicks into cash
Okay so you’ve listened to all the episodes of the Recipe for SEO Success podcast, you’ve done my fabulous courses, and put in the hard SEO hours.
The Google beast finally understands who you are and the traffic is pouring in.
But how do you turn casual browsers into sales?
How do you move people from your page to a purchase?
Today we’re talking about how to turn SEO juice into sweet sales nectar.
How to turn cold chips into hot potatoes.
SEO got you this far, what next?
Tune in to learn:
- Three quick things to think about for your homepage once people have been lured over from the SERPS
- How to introduce your brand quickly and easily to people searching for what you do
- How to connect with people who know you from social platforms/your brand
- Top 3 tips to make those eCommerce sales
- Russell’s top tips for converting customers to your services-based business
- What is a SMART offer
- Sales calls – Have they been replaced by strong branding, really schmick marketing, funnels, and sales page, or is there still a place for them
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The host and expert guests offer insightful advice and information that is helpful to anyone that listens!”
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About Russell Pearson
His fun and engaging style has influenced thousands of business people around the world.
Russell is an award-winning founder of the Crimson Fox Creative Studios, FORGE Business Progam, and has a lifetime of experience in the world of sales and marketing.
Russell is also the Past National President of Professional Speakers Australia, host of the Marketing Report Podcast, and is a father of three feisty children that continue to challenge his passion to learn more every day.
Fun fact: Russell is also a blacksmith.
Connect with Russell Pearson
Useful Resources
Transcript
Kate Toon:
Okay. So you’ve listened to all the episodes of The Recipe for SEO Success Podcast, you’ve done my fabulous courses and put in the hard SEO hours, the Google beast finally understands who you are and the traffic is pouring in, but how do you turn casual browsers into sales? How do you move people from your page to a purchase? Today we’re talking about how to turn SEO juice into sweet sales nectar, how to turn cold chips into hot potatoes. SEO got you this far, what next? My name is Kate Toon and I’m the head chef at The Recipe for SEO Success, an online teaching hub for all things related to search engine optimization and digital marketing. And today I’m talking with Russell Pearson, hello Russell.
Russell Pearson:
Hello Kate.
Kate Toon:
Hello, how are you?
Russell Pearson:
Very good.
Kate Toon:
I’m glad to have you on the show. You need to check out the show notes for a picture of Russell in his fabulous studio, he’s got these cool shells with a little blue light, it’s very funky-
Russell Pearson:
It’s good stuff. I’ve even got-
Kate Toon:
… stuff. You’ve got a little funk.
Russell Pearson:
… stuffed animals up there as well.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, and lots of books which I bet you haven’t read. I’m joking. Look at my big pile of books behind me.
Russell Pearson:
Not a single one has been touched.
Kate Toon:
Not one, the spines are not broken. Anyway, let me explain who Russell is. Whether walking the big stage, going global from his private studio, or rocking a comedy club brand strategist Russell Pearson brings passion, humour, and insight to every engagement. His fun engaging style has influenced thousands of business people around the world. Russell is an award-winning and founder of Crimson Fox Creative Studios, FORGE Business Programme, and has a lifetime of experience in the worlds of sales and marketing. Russell is also the past national president of the Professional Speakers Association Australia, host of The Marketing Report Podcast and father of three feisty children that continue to challenge his passion to learn more each day. Fun fact, Russell is a blacksmith, now I knew this but I don’t think anyone else would suspect that, that is really cool.
Russell Pearson:
Yeah, it is cool. I’ve literally got the forge over there.
Kate Toon:
Oh, you were in forge, now, I expected you to be bearded and wearing a leather apron, but do you have all that?
Russell Pearson:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that was yesterday, I cleaned up for the show.
Kate Toon:
Okay, cool. I love that. I wish I was a blacksmith. It’s very cool.
Russell Pearson:
You can be.
Kate Toon:
All right.
Russell Pearson:
I wasn’t handy and I learned how to do it watching YouTube videos.
Kate Toon:
Well, this is the way, isn’t it? If you follow me on Instagram you’ll know that I’ve renovated my van, now, I am by no means a carpenter but I built walls and cabinets and all sorts just watching YouTube, it’s a good channel.
Russell Pearson:
Looks fantastic actually, I’ve been watching your stuff.
Kate Toon:
Oh, thank you very much. Well look, we’re not talking about vans or blacksmithery today, we’re talking about sales and SEO. Okay, let’s start right at the beginning. Say I’ve used my excellent SEO skills to lure people from the search engine results page to my homepage, my homepage loads faster than I whippet and is super mobile responsive and they’re ready, they’re ready to take the first step, what are three salesy things we should be thinking about on our homepage?
Russell Pearson:
Well, let me ask you a question to see if this is something they we’ll already have from listening to the podcast, right? So I call it the four ones. So they need to make sure that they’ve got one market, right? Yeah, one problem, one outcome, one offer. So the question is, do they have those, after listening to your stuff I’m sure that they do, the audience of ours, but making sure that when people land there that that’s what they discover is that we are talking to the right people and the right people have landed, yes?
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I would hope so. I wonder if you could expand on that a little bit. I mean, obviously the idea is that someone has gone to Google with a problem, they’ve typed that into Google, you have enough wherewithal to have the piece of content that ranks for that problem and so therefore they’ve come and if you’ve got it right then, yeah, you are speaking to that one audience. But I wouldn’t mind you expanding on that a little bit because it’s very cool, I love a little acronym.
Russell Pearson:
Yeah, absolutely. So the four ones, so it just means that you are not trying to be five things at once on that landing page and I tend to talk in landing pages. I’ve been in website design and building for over 20 years but one of the things that I’ve sort of seen is that the websites themselves are a bunch of links and so it’s the simplest way to distract someone by giving them more than one option. So understanding that the person who’s landing on that page whether it be the homepage or the specific page for the long tail that it is relevant, right? So there is a problem we are talking about, there is one outcome we’re taking them to there. Ideally if we can call out the audience if we can say that this is for accountants or whatever it might be then that’s going to be ideal. And then the one offer, so the one offer will be, and I’ll talk to this in the next step, hopefully one step, so the whole point of the four ones is not to distract everybody.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Keep it single minded. I love that. I often talk about the 3-30 rule, you’ve got three seconds to make people feel they’re in the right place that they click through and it’s relevant and 30 seconds to make them stay. There’s lots of these different rules but I love that, that’s a really great way of thinking about it. Now, say for example someone didn’t type a problem or a particular thing into Google, maybe they just heard about you, they’ve heard about this dude called Russell Pearson or this mad woman called Kate Toon and they’ve actually found you for your branded search, does that make it easier for people to convert? Yeah. I mean, clearly they already know a little bit about you, does that mean you have to position yourself in a slightly different way?
Russell Pearson:
Well, yes and no because it’s always yes and no, it depends but the real point comes down to, who are you repelling? So you want to be able to be very clear about who you don’t want to work with because there’s plenty of people who have the problem that you solve but the question is, of those people who do you actually want to work with? Now, there’s multiple ways we can do this, e-commerce selling a product, you may think that now we want to sell the product to everybody but in some cases you don’t because maybe the promise that the product actually delivers is not right for everybody who has a perceived issue so knowing who you want to repel and who you want to attract is a big piece of that. So they’ve come through on brand, they know who you are, but then you want to make it very, very clear of who you want to work with or who should be buying this product.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. So it’s all very well and good they know who you are, you need to sort of identify who they are and whether they’re a good fit. So branded search is obviously really the first step in SEO, it’s much easier to be found for who you are than what you do because there’s not that many Russell Pearsons or Kate Toons thankfully. But on the flip side say if someone has found you by what you do, how much of a role in the sales process does introducing your brand make? If at this point I’m interested in buying this particular course and I can see the features and benefits and you’ve identified that, yes, it’s right for me, do I really care what brand is behind it? How is that going to influence me making a purchase decision?
Russell Pearson:
Yeah. So it may not, it may not influence them by making a purchasing decision but how you do what you do I think this is important is what you do, and I call it the braspberry effect. There’s a whole story I can go into if we’ve got a second but the-
Kate Toon:
I think we need to branch but I think we need to hear this. Yeah.
Russell Pearson:
Okay, cool. So many people who know who I am know I like chocolate ice cream but this is another food group which is berries, I like blackberries, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, all the different berries. Now, in Melbourne, Australia, where I live for some reason every second punnet of blueberries that I eat is sour, it’s weird. And so me and my partner we have these berry parties, let’s call it a berry party, we don’t call it a berry party, yes we call it a berry party, and we have all these berries. And I come across another punnet of these blueberries which is sour and I’m frustrated, I want to throw it away, and I’m like, you know what? I hate waste, I’m not going to do it this time. And instead of what I did is I picked up the blueberry and I put it inside a raspberry, genius, I know it’s genius, you look at it and you’re like yeah.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Okay. I’m staying with you on this story. Come on.
Russell Pearson:
Yeah. Okay. Cool. So I eat this thing and I’m like, this is a completely new flavour and I’m like, I shall call it the braspberry. And I’m thinking I’m genius, I’m all about trademarking, I go online to see if this thing doesn’t exist I’m going to trademark it. And I find it does exist, there are punnets of braspberries being sold across the planet and Justin Timberlake is the spokesperson for it.
Kate Toon:
Justin Timberlake?
Russell Pearson:
Yeah. Right.
Kate Toon:
What.
Russell Pearson:
Now every single thing in my life is an analogy for business and what I’ve discovered is that sometimes the thing that we’ve got, the thing that solves the problem is a little bit sour. Sometimes you don’t like doing your taxes, sometimes you don’t like going to the doctor, sometimes you don’t like speaking to the lawyer, but what we get to do is we get to put our yummy raspberry goodness, the personality, our experience, the things that we bring to the world around the thing that we do and we get to create these things called braspberries. And so it’s not just about knowing who you are it’s liking who you are so it’s a know, like, trust element. There are two full steps after discovering you which is to learn to go, all right, this is the person I want to help me and I’ll trust them to help me further.
Kate Toon:
Oh my goodness, I thought it was going to have something to do with bras-
Russell Pearson:
Everyone does. Yeah.
Kate Toon:
… yeah, so you kind of let us all down there a little bit but I like it and I like the introduction of Justin Timberlake so that’s good. I love that. So you put your sour slightly boring products inside a sweeter thing. And I mean, I think I am a braspberry because SEO is not the sexiest topic, it’s a little bit dry, but I think I’m rather juicy and sweet and lovely, I would like to think that. Don’t have to comment on that I’m no Justin Timberlake.
Kate Toon:
But yes, lots of other people have SEO courses, lots of other people teach this topic or write about it but I always say, it’s not about the what or the why it is about the how and very much about the who because if you can make something fun and engaging and you can relate to people. I could go and find out everything that’s on my course just by wading through Google Webmasters and the search console will help, it would be really boring and I would hate my life but I could. So what do you bring? What kind of sweetness do you bring? I love that. So therefore it is important to introduce your brand and your brand personality, yeah, so.
Russell Pearson:
Absolutely. Yeah. It’s no longer about what you know it’s what lens you’re looking through, how you’re bringing your experience to the thing that you know so you can actually share a bit of wisdom rather than just knowledge.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. So what do you do if you don’t have a personality, Russell? I mean, I know you don’t.
Russell Pearson:
Everybody has a personality. Just start with two very simple things, what do you love? What do you love in life? Write them down and it could be something weird, it could be something quirky like blacksmithing or ant colonies, I’m not saying that I have an ant colony but I do. And it could be the things that you love to hate in the world, there’s apathy, that’s the big thing I don’t like, but there’s also paper straws, right? Paper straws are a killer for me because you have to use four of them instead of just one straw when you’re at the cinemas. So you can bring these things into your life and not pretend to be this professional man with a mask or a woman, you can actually bring these things in and actually be yourself in the delivery of what you do.
Kate Toon:
I think that’s so important because, yes, people might start with what they think is their perceived problem but then they move to a stage where they’re like, well, who do I want to be the person to help me with this problem? I’ve got all this choice. And maybe I’m going to identify with Russell because he seems like a cool guy and he hates paper straws or maybe I’m going to choose Kate because I really like her dog Pomplemoose or the fact that she’s obsessed with avocados, I don’t know, it’s funny.
Russell Pearson:
I’ll give you an example, I spoke to a colleague of mine, we were basically doing exactly the same thing the other day, and the difference between the two of us is I am like the little dude from the Disney movie Inside Out who’s bursting into flames and-
Kate Toon:
Oh yeah, you also look like him.
Russell Pearson:
… frustrated at the top of the head-
Kate Toon:
You look like him.
Russell Pearson:
… I’m like, ah, right? But she is not and so she does very well with those people who need the nurturing and the love, I do very well with the people who need to kick up the pants and need to go into action. So it depends very much on how you do it as to what audience you should be attracting.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I agree. I think I’m a more kick up the pants person than woo woo although I am getting more woo in my old age. I love that. Okay. So braspberries were there. Let’s talk about e-commerce because obviously we’re talking about sales in general. E-commerce feels a little bit different and a lot of e-commerce brands the owner or the personality behind the business does hide behind a brand. It’s really hard sometimes to drag the business owner out and say, hey look, give me a reason not to buy it from Kmart, I can buy this product mass produced from China or I could buy it from you. What are some of your top three things that, doesn’t need to be three, could be 17 but let’s keep it short, what are some of the things that can help e-commerce businesses make the sale as opposed to it being bought from Target?
Russell Pearson:
Yeah. Okay. Two big ones as far as e-commerce success that I’ve seen. Number one is get people what they want rather than what they need. Now, I’ve got a client who went into this space in August, doesn’t have any marketing skills but saw that people wanted this thing and it was one of those massage guns, right? He was like, people are buying these massage guns, so he goes, can I get one of these? It worked out he could, he started selling it, by the time he got to November he was making $70,000 a month in profit and all he was doing was shipping stuff out that’s because he didn’t go and think about, oh, what are my expertise? And what do people need? And how am I going to change the world? He goes, what do people want? And he gave it to them, so that’s one simple one. Now, that doesn’t have longevity, that’s the thing with that one, it’s a short term solution and he understood that and that was absolutely fine.
Russell Pearson:
On the flip side there are so many experts out there telling people to productize their offering way before it’s time. If you speak to an audience, you connect with them, you qualify them, you have a chat, you understand their problems, you understand how they phrase their problems, you move them through a conversational sales process to get to, okay, what have I got to offer that’s going to solve this? That is so much more straightforward. On the productization you have to guess the exact offer that they’re going to have before even knowing their product, be able to verbalise that through copy and imagery, have them self select and self qualify in and find you in the first place. So while you could productize and work that way it is I think a lot easier to at least do it 100, 200 times through conversational and then once you know what the conversation is then bring all the expertise into your SEO, to your copywriting, and all the things that are going to be telling the story that’s already in their head.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I get that. I mean, that feels more service-based business because that’s where you’re kind of, you have an offering, you have a service-
Russell Pearson:
But you don’t have it, that’s the cool thing.
Kate Toon:
I was thinking more in this question about pure e-commerce.
Russell Pearson:
I’m talking about that. Yeah.
Kate Toon:
But how do you, if you’re selling jam it’s a product, it is a product already.
Russell Pearson:
Yeah. And if you haven’t gone to the market, if you haven’t gone to physical markets you haven’t sold it.
Kate Toon:
Oh, I see what you’re saying.
Russell Pearson:
If you haven’t sold it to people, how can you phrase the conversation that you’ve had with those people online? You’re literally going to be guessing. And so while you can do that and as we all know, e-commerce and all those other things is a numbers game and you can refine based off the feedback you’re getting from the market, a much faster way is to take the thing you’re thinking of, speak to 100 people and then take it online.
Kate Toon:
Okay, I get it so yes. Even if you are a pure e-commerce store selling products you have the conversation with your customers before you get really hard line on these products and say, these are the only ones I’m selling and this is how I’m describing it and that’s that and either you buy it or you don’t. But I think you talked about productizing services as well which I think is another thing and I think you’re so right. It’s a real buzzword at the moment especially I work with a lot of copywriters and they want to do this, they want to productize their day like, you can work with me for a day or you can buy my X package which includes X, Y, and Z, but they’ve only maybe had four customers.
Kate Toon:
And so this package that they’ve come up with isn’t selling and they’re like, I wonder why, and it’s like, because no one wanted it, you want to sell it. The classic is these day long sessions and it’s like, I really want to sell these because I get the money upfront, the client comes and then they go and it really works well for me, and I’m like, but as a consumer I would hate that, I would hate to feel the pressure that I have to have one day with you and if that wasn’t my good day I paid upfront. It’s brilliant for you but it might not be brilliant for your customer so I love that, thinking about it from that perspective.
Russell Pearson:
And the other side of it too is that you can bring people into your world even before they purchase a product by aligning with the problem that they may have, and I call that symptoms, so that, yeah, they’ll come in on the symptoms and then you help them discover the problem which is why you’ve got the solution.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, exactly. And I mean, when we talk about SEO we talk about intent, yeah? And one of the first intents is investigational. And investigational is I know about these two things but I’m trying to work out which one is right, informational is I’m not ready to buy, I’m still at the stage where I think I have a problem, I’m not quite sure what the solution is, and yet so many people jump straight to a product page with the solution and that’s right. So your good SEO does start with kind of leading people in through content marketing, blog posts that position you as a leader and position you as someone they can trust and then when they’re ready to buy, who are they going to remember? Who are they going to recall?
Russell Pearson:
That’s such a great point then too, if you don’t know your buying process you’ve got to discover that. So if you’re selling milk and it’s a quick consumable then you don’t want to bring someone into a strategy session, right? So that you can actually talk them through the process of buying milk, no, you want to make it easy for them to buy, so what are you selling? Who is the customer? What is the buying process that they want to step through?
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I love that. Now, you talked at the beginning about being very clear about what you’re selling, who you’re selling to, but you also talked about having one offer. And you like to talk about smart offers so when you talk about smart offers what is a smart offer?
Russell Pearson:
So I don’t like SMART goals, now, I don’t know whether you use them or not but there’s lots of people who love them, I don’t like them. Now, if anyone doesn’t know what a SMART goal is, it’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time based specific goals, right? There’s lots of reasons why I don’t like them but we’ll take it to the side obviously. But I’ve been able to find a way through a number of colleagues, I got this from James Kemp, he got it from someone else who was able to go, you can still use the model but just apply it to product.
Russell Pearson:
So you go, all right, what is the specificity about this product? What does it do? What is the measurable time that it does it within making it achievable? So it’s like, I’m going to give you this thing that in one day is going to give you a million dollars is not achievable. Is it relevant to the person who’s actually on the page? So again, does it call them out, does it talk specifically to their problems they’re experiencing now? And is it time based? Is there a period of time that it’s going to help them or how quickly they can get it or a number of different things. So it’s just structure, you can do this in a sentence, put these SMART elements in the same way you would make a SMART goal in a sentence.
Kate Toon:
Okay. Just run us through that, so S was? One more time, sorry.
Russell Pearson:
Specific. Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Specific. Measurable?
Russell Pearson:
Measurable. Yeah. Achievable.
Kate Toon:
Relevant.
Russell Pearson:
Relevant and time-based.
Kate Toon:
Okay. Cool. And I wonder if at the end we could have a dollar sign because the other thing that I find that people sometimes are very vague about pricing. So they’ll have this amazing, I’m going to give you this, it’s going to solve this problem in this time period, email me to find out more, and it’s like, or let’s get on a discovery call to find out more. Especially in our world where it’s masterminds and courses it’s kind of just reluctant to say, and this is how much it costs. Where, how, and when do you feel we introduce pricing? Are we upfront with it? Do we tease it? Do we do from or go back?
Russell Pearson:
It comes back to, yeah, that buying process again. So for instance if I do a fair strategic work there is no set price and so it’s a case of I can give you the price after we actually design what it is that you’re going to get and that happens a lot of the time. But if I’m selling like, I don’t know, an ebook or a book or something like that there is a price and you tell them when it’s there with the offer this is how much you get. So I like the idea of putting the dollar sign on it, that’s fantastic. In e-commerce in particular when it’s product based making it hard for people to buy is one of the big mistakes so if it is something transactional probably anything less than about $500 I think that you can actually do that with, put the price on it and allow them to buy now.
Kate Toon:
Yes, exactly. And maybe they won’t, maybe they’ll still want that call but it will stop the tyre-kickers. If it’s not $50 it’s not $50 and they need to find out sooner rather than later and rather than waste 15 minutes of your time talking them through for them to go, oh my gosh, that’s way more than I thought then you’re saving yourself time. But I do think, especially with service-based businesses, that pricing confidence comes with time.
Kate Toon:
And again, your idea of doing something 100 times and walking people through that process and having 100 people be okay with paying you your rate so that you’re not guessing anymore, you’re not measuring it against competitors, you actually know the value of what you’re offering. Now, I want to talk about funnels because it wouldn’t be a podcast if we didn’t talk about funnels. So can a strong brand with really schmick marketing, a great funnel, and a killer sales page completely replaced the need for sales calls? Because I’m going to say you strike me as someone who’s very confident with sales calls that a lot of people would literally rather stick a folk repeatedly in their leg than talk to somebody about their service.
Russell Pearson:
I used to be scared about picking up the phone, this is a-
Kate Toon:
You did? Oh, great.
Russell Pearson:
… learned skill.
Kate Toon:
Okay. Tell us how you did it.
Russell Pearson:
Well, number one, I couldn’t feed myself, at the start I was working for someone else and I’d be asked to pick up the phone and I just wouldn’t do it. They made it a KPI and I had to do it, that was how I got into that. But even when I started my own business I didn’t want to call people up out of the blue even existing customers and ask them how they’re going which is a great way of service businesses just getting more dollars from existing customers. And I think that very much like public speaking, because it fits very much in the same thing, it’s not about you, no one is thinking about you, they’re thinking about them.
Russell Pearson:
So during pandemic I suggested to people and I did it myself to make time to call people and don’t make it about you and don’t make it about making offers just call people and see how they’re going, that is a large part of bringing confidence to it. And I don’t know if it wasn’t necessarily the question, but being able to be confident on a call is making sure that you are focusing on them, ask them about how they’re going, about how their day is, don’t suggest anything unless there’s something to suggest.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, wait for them to bring up something that’s relevant. I love that. That’s such a simple tactic that you’re not making a sale call, you’re making a call, it’s a call, if a sale comes out of it, great, but if not… Because this whole idea of cold calling and sales calling that puts you off before you’ve even began but if you’re just ringing up someone to check in how they are especially if it’s a customer you’ve already had and you’re just checking in saying, hey, how you going? How did that thing work out? And there’s no big pitch then I think… And I think the thing is as well with content marketing these days it kind of slightly eradicates the coldness of the call because I for example do have fairly schmick marketing, it’s not great, I make a lot of typos.
Kate Toon:
I have a funnel and I have a great sales page and I sell this Recipe course which is about $2,000. And in the whole time I’ve had that course which is six years I’ve had 24 launches now, I’ve had two calls, two telephone calls where people have said I would actually like to talk to you about this before I buy it, and that was fine, so I do think you can create something that’s so comprehensive. But in reality I’ve been turning up for cold calls for years it’s just there’s no one on the other end of the line, I’m live on Facebook, I’m live on Instagram, just seeing me, hearing my voice, I’m asking them questions, so that can be a slight replacement maybe or am I-
Russell Pearson:
I completely agree with you, I think it can completely replace it, the question is, do you want to? And the reason I ask that question is because having your pulse on what’s going on with your people is a massive game changer in the way that you can make sure that you’re offering things that are relevant and actually speaking to the thing that’s on their mind at this time. So you might have a product that’s been the same product for five years but you might have 10 different ways of offering it because you’re talking about relevance to the market at any particular time.
Kate Toon:
So it has to be a two-way conversation at some point. I’m lucky that I have communities where I can say, hey, I’m thinking of doing this, this or this, which would you prefer? So I do get that two-way communication. And also I’m on a one to many model so it’s more, in fact, I can’t ring everybody basically. But I think for service-based businesses and even e-commerce stores especially ringing loyal customers or putting an offer and saying, we’d love to catch up with you and see what you think of our products and services, but that can be scary as well, can’t it Russell? Because then-
Russell Pearson:
Yeah, it can.
Kate Toon:
… people will tell you things you don’t want to hear.
Russell Pearson:
I’ve even helped people who have a one-to-many style model enable them to have a conversation with their customers by having discussion groups. You might have 30 people in a room having a chat about what’s going on and all you have to do is shut up and listen and it’s incredible the information that people tell you when you listen.
Kate Toon:
It really is. I heard a great quote the other day which is, “Support is not always agreement.” And I think often I see it a lot in my communities and I’m guilty of it too where we put something out ourself, come up with this thing and I’m going to call it this and it’s going to be this, what do you think? And everyone comes back and says, I think that’s a terrible idea, I don’t like the name, I don’t like it. And they’re like, well, thank you very much but I’m going to do it anyway. And it’s like, people are often putting ideas out there in the hope that they will get affirmation but often you don’t get affirmation and it’s actually quite useful to get that criticism, isn’t it?
Russell Pearson:
Yeah, it is. Because the other option is to put out the thing that you are resting all your hopes and dreams on which is your paid product and you’re going to get feedback one way or another, there are people who are going to buy or they’re not. And it’s funny because there’s plenty of people out there that are working in the service space digital marketing area where they’re going, right? Well, it’s going to take us three to six months to actually build up your campaign and get it running and all the rest of it. It’s funny because in three days I tend to know immediately whether the thing is working or whether it’s not, it might take them three months to actually get it right but yeah, you get immediate feedback from the market.
Kate Toon:
I think that’s it and I think people often will go into their burrow, create something, price it, put it out to market, and silence is the most painful feedback and you’ve invested all that time. So this kind of iterative approach of talking to your audience, testing the market, doing it face to face. And then, for example, I taught my SEO course face to face for five or six times and saw when people’s eyes just glazed over and when they were drooling and saw how exhausted they were and it made me realise, gosh, that bit is really not working. And now I’ve run the course so often I can tell that about week four people are like, oh my God, this is harder that I thought, and so I have a message, and that only comes from experience. We’re going off script a bit now Russell I hope that’s okay.
Russell Pearson:
It’s fine.
Kate Toon:
If I’m here listening to this and I’m like, I’ve got my site, I’ve done it all now, I’m not getting sales, I saw a post in a group the other day, it was an e-commerce person, I put my store up, I’ve had 10 sales in the last four months, what am I doing wrong? You said you just can work out in three days, what are the first things you look at when somebody comes to you with that scenario?
Russell Pearson:
Well, the numbers 100%, it’s the holy grail of working out what the hell is going on which is that, number one, do you have enough people coming? And I’m going to go to the worst-case scenario of 1 in 100, right? So do you have 100 people there? Did you get a sale? All right. Let’s work back from there. No, I couldn’t get, 100 people are not there. Okay. Well, let’s work on attraction first because whatever we’re working on out there is not quite working. So let’s not go and change our offer, let’s not go and fix up all the little pieces on the website until we get enough people coming to the website and then incrementally you can work it through.
Russell Pearson:
I like to think of it like a pipe and the pipe is blocked in all sorts of different areas. We don’t know where they’re going to be but it’s always going to have blockages and the water will start flowing through and then it’ll stop, it won’t come out the end. So we fix that piece and then it flows further and we fix that piece and it flows further, at the end of it we have consistent sales flowing out of it. So you’ve got to start at the top and you’ve got to work through the increments. If it was a service based business I would say connect, qualify, invite to whatever the next step is, in an e-commerce or any other business like that it’s still the same, they’ve got to connect with you though, they’ve got to qualify themselves and they’ve got to take another step.
Kate Toon:
You talked about 100 to 1 there, do you think that there are average conversion figures that we can think about? 3% is always thrown around as the standard. As an e-commerce store if I do get 100 people to my product how many sales should it be? I mean, you’re probably going to say as many as possible, but what is the average? What should I be aiming for? What’s realistic?
Russell Pearson:
So years ago I thought it was the 1 to 5% but then I started doing landing pages that were very focused on a specific thing that didn’t have navigation, more of a squeeze page, which means that people couldn’t go anywhere else, it was a binary yes or no. And then I’m never getting less than 25% on those pages, right? And I’ve had it up to 76% which is nearly the holy grail of 80 but it’s getting there, right? Now, that could be anything from an actual purchase right through to a lead magnet or whatever you like.
Russell Pearson:
But the 1% and less tends to be it’s not working. On a purchase or a quote-based website I think that if it’s five or above it is working, so if you’re going to benchmark you can go, okay, that is working. And I think the best I’ve had on a large multinational was about 22% conversion rate to quote. So it is different by industry but I think you can quite clearly say that on a website if you’re having above 5% you’re doing well, if you’re at three there’s area for improvement, if you’re at 1% or less that’s pretty much where everyone else is living.
Kate Toon:
I think that’s so helpful. And obviously when you’re talking about this I’m thinking about my own business and of the 100 people who hit my site, yes, it might be 1% but my job is to qualify those people and move them into wait lists and move them onto landing pages where I’m only talking to them. And then as you said, for most of my courses it’s 40 or 50%, if they’re on the wait list 40 to 50% will buy because I’m only talking to them to their specific problems. I’ve narrowed it right down so the specificity and the clarity and the offer is so clear and so for the right people that I’ve got rid of the extraneous, it’s exactly what you said about repelling. Of course 99% of people probably aren’t right for what I offer right now and I’ve got to get as specific as possible as quickly as possible to get that up to improve that sales rate, is that right? Yeah.
Russell Pearson:
Yeah, 100%. And the conversation is a little bit easier because I’ve had these three qualifiers, one is, is there a gap that I can actually help people with? Do they identify that they actually have a problem? Which means I’ve usually verbalised it, and is there a priority to make the change and make it work now? In an e-commerce sense you need to have them asking those questions in their own head and if you’re one of those people who gets auditory kinesthetic visual sort of stuff there’s one called auditory digital and auditory digital is a good one to look up because that’s the e-commerce discussion, how can you have them asking questions in their own head so they make decisions?
Kate Toon:
Oh, Russell, I could talk to you all day. I love all your kind of tactics and methodologies that you are using because they just make it all easier to understand. Sales can be intimidating and so the smart offers and it just all makes sense to me. I really appreciate this call, I’ve really enjoyed it. Thank you so much.
Russell Pearson:
Oh great, thank you Kate.
Kate Toon:
So where can we find out more about you? Where’s the best place to head to be squeezed on your squeeze page?
Russell Pearson:
Yeah. I won’t send you to a squeeze page I will send you to the real thing which is russellpearson.com, double S double L the way it should be spelled. And you can find out that I’ve got a podcast there, The Marketing Report, Kate has been on that and hopefully she’ll be on there again if she can book a date. And you’ll also get access to some of my other freebies and resources there as well and you can chat to me about your business so I want you to go.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, because Russell likes having phone calls so there you go.
Russell Pearson:
I do actually.
Kate Toon:
Well, this is it, you get so much out of him. I’ve included links to Russell’s pages, his LinkedIn and his Facebook as well, I highly recommend you follow him, he has some amazing free resources. You also have a cool Facebook group I believe, am I going crazy there?
Russell Pearson:
Yeah, it’s called the Future Proof Business Group. I’ve literally done a bit of the repelling this week which has reduced it from just any business people to actually be more about those specialist service providers, the advisors and the consultants, the people who have already been doing the work for a long period of time so I want to help them get clients and don’t lose them.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I love that. So I’ll include a link to that as well. I’m a member of that group and it’s one of the few groups where I actually pay attention. So thank you so much Russell for your time today.
Russell Pearson:
Thanks Kate. Thanks for having me on.
Kate Toon:
Wowsers, I love that. I felt that was one of the clearest explanation of particularly the conversion rate that I’ve actually ever heard so I hope that was useful for you. SEO gets people to your door but how do you drag them through? Some great tips there. That’s the end of this week’s show. If you want to learn more about this topic you can head to the I Love SEO group on Facebook. But since we’ve mentioned sales on this episode if looking to set one up sales pages but having the foggiest about where to start you should check out my Clever Copywriting Sales Page Course. For normal humans writing a sales page is pretty daunting and that’s why I created the course based on the success of my very own sales page. The Recipe for SEO Success sales page has delivered over three million dollars in revenue for me, I wrote it and I want to pass on my tips to you.
Kate Toon:
So head to the show notes for a link or visit clevercopywritingschool.com or Google Clever Copywriting Sales Page Course. Now, I like to end the show with a shout out to one of my lovely listeners, today it’s Malfoxley from the United States, he says or she says, I don’t know, Kate great show, Kate hosts The Recipe for SEO Success Podcast, highlights all aspects of SEO and more in this can’t miss podcast. The host and the expert guests offer insightful advice and information that is helpful to anyone that listens. Thank you very much Malfoxley and thanks to you for listening. If you’d like to leave a review I would be grateful, we’ll read it out on the show. As I said, you can head to the show notes for this episode to find links to all Russell’s bits and bobs and also to read a transcript of the show if our accents were a bit tricky and also find some useful links to tools and other bits and bobs, bits and bobs, I’ve said that three times. Anyway, until next time happy digital marketing, happy selling and happy SEOing.
