CHAPTER 4 The Connection - So there are two types of connections I would like to share with you. The first type of connection is how you digitally connect the value we identified in chapter 3 with the person(s) we identified in chapter 2. And the second type of connection we will discuss is how to mentally connect your brand with the person(s).
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Let’s take it backwards a little bit. In the previous chapter, we talked about value. You learned how 85-90% of actions and acquisitions are initiated and triggered as emotional reactions; some justify with logic later.
We also reviewed a little about the motivation theories and how your competitors are probably selling products that have only 10% of the value you offer at 10 times of your prices. And they are selling them almost effortlessly to people that may not be able to afford it ordinarily.
We reminded ourselves of the six basic human needs, certainty, variety, significance, contribution, growth, and connection. And we discussed how you can use it to almost seem like you are creating value out of thin air.
When your message or “the value” covers just three of these six needs, it will simply come off as stupid for your person(s) to pass on your offer.
Every website, webpage, video, image, blogpost on your hubs need to be exchanging value with the users. A part of value is the user experience. How they feel as they travel that journey from discovery to conversion is your responsibility precisely because it’s ultimately valuable to you and the business you are building.
What you are offering may be the best in the market but we may never find out if whatever that is doesn’t translate to what is valuable to your users. It’s not just the product; it’s everything, even at the most micro-levels, that they will encounter in the process of interacting with your business; the experience.
So we now have to expand a little bit on value creation to create and establish strong connections digitally and mentally with your person(s). How do you show up in their dreams at night and stress the sh*t out of their sleep if they don’t buy?
1995-1996… Owo. Ondo State, Nigeria, West Africa. I was a 15 or 16 years old teenager. I would go visit my father in the office during the day where he was serving as a General Manager at his Uncle’s company.
I had been going to the office for a few years during holidays but I did it more after graduating high school. I didn’t go to University right away because we had opted for me to come back to the United States after 12 of my developing years in Nigeria.
I was at home for two years filling the gap of time; just waiting to secure accommodation in the States. My father had wanted me to study Architecture; that was his dream.
But one day during another visit to his office, I found out becoming an architect wasn’t my dream. It was the first time a website was opened in front of me on a 3 piece-suite equipment; a personal computer. The secretary at the office was testing it out and he would try numerous times to connect to the internet.
Thinking about it now, it was a painful process.. But not really because the frame of reference did not involve a broadband connection as we know it today.
It was exciting that he literally pulled up Toyota’s website that never could load a full Toyota logo; the connection was too slow. There was a blue placeholder but it was fascinating enough at the time. I’ve never left computing since then.
During that short break between high school and coming back to continue schooling and life in the States, I went over to the next biggest city, Akure, where I spent three months and became certified in Database Management.
I shared this story with you to establish a connection between you and the fact that the internet has grown from about 40 millions users in 1995 to more than 5 billion users at press time. If there are internet users increasing at that pace, that means that there are producers consistently connecting them to value increasingly and making stupid amount of money doing it.
Most websites back in 1995 were designed to provide information and not initiate transactions. But it's a different story today. You can now buy a whole car on the internet and have it delivered to your home.
Therefore it’s no longer enough to show a logo, and the company’s mission statement. Many businesses still have websites that can’t exchange money for product and services. A lot of them felt the heat and disadvantage of that in 2020 when covid hit our world.
My business doubled in that particular year because I was positioned to serve that market right from home. Sadly, many established businesses went under for not paying attention in all these years.
You have created the right offer. And you have done the market research, identified the right audience, the gurus and the brands they are presently following.
In fact, you are already paying time and money to attract them as visitors to your website. But the traffic is not converting to sales quickly enough for you. And you figured, it’s probably because you are just not getting enough traffic to the website.
So you have to come up with more funds to buy marketing and advertising in the hopes that enough prospects will convert to customers. Soon enough, you discovered that you are just multiplying your problems with money you don’t have and garnering more debt.
It’s not working. You quit and ran back to giving away free money to the agencies that still want to sell you newspaper and yellow book ads. Do yellow books still exist?
It is important to pre-design and pre-determine how you want to connect your value (the offer) to the person(s) based on what type of pre-framing the person(s) (the prospect) had been exposed to.
When your prospects know, like and trust you, they will buy without too much effort from you. Forget about that; when they feel like they know, like and trust you, they will buy even more from you. All of that is emotionally and mentally triggered if you know what you are doing.
I call it the KLT factor. Does the prospect feel like he or she knows, likes and trusts you? If you can’t answer that question, you are probably going to struggle with converting prospects to customers, clients and deals.
We use a formula called the “I.L.S.D.T.R.R” to build your KLT factor (a.k.a brand equity) in the digital space. The acronym stands for invest, learn, share, do, teach, refine and repeat. Let’s break it down.
The idea is to build digital agents and leave thousands of your footprints everywhere in the digital space without burning your resources up while doing it. If you follow me on social media, you can see us practicing what we preach with literally thousands of videos and articles everywhere.
This is it. I want you to INVEST time and possibly money in LEARNING, then SHARING what you are learning as often as possible via online videos, blogposts, infographic and more. After that, you actually want to DO (execute on) what you are learning in order to create experience or tacit knowledge.
If your business module permits it, you can build your business even faster by taking the sharing to the next level which is actually TEACHING from your knowledge and experience for a fee or more KLT factor and brand equity.
Then I want you to refine and repeat that process over and over again in order to create a massive web of nodes that link back to your hub. When you do this, you will build a massive brand equity that makes it super simple to connect your value to your person(s).
All these digital agents that you are creating will work for you forever. You couldn’t erase them off the internet if you try to after a while. And that is a good thing.
This is what I meant earlier when I mentioned pre-framing the prospects ahead of actually presenting them with an offer. The connection doesn’t start at the sales presentation. It starts before they even discover there is something to buy from you.
How cool would it be if your prospects are already asking you where to sign up before knowing if you have anything to sell or not. That’s the outcome of orchestrating a strong connection of value with your audience upfront.
By positioning yourself and your brand to help your audience by actually helping them, their minds are pre-framed to recognize your brand and business as their problem solver.
Sure, a properly scripted sales presentation is still necessary because some of them may have skipped to that part in your customer journey. But most of your time, energy and resource is best spent steering new prospects through a discovery point where you are actually helping them first before asking them to pay for something.
They usually start off with a question to answer or a problem to solve. Most people appreciate some useful information first before attempting to sell them on buying stuff.
In fact, there is a sector of your market that price point is really not a determining factor in their decision making process to buy.
It boils down to the KLT factor and brand equity. They need to feel like they know, like and trust you. And then they will pull out a credit card if anything remotely looks like their problem is solved.
The return on investment in learning, sharing, doing, teaching, refining and repeating is literally infinite especially if you add consistency to it.
In the world of digital marketing, we call this content creation. The idea is to come up with topic ideas that will appeal directly to your ideal customers’ needs. So I want to share four idea sources that will help you generate more than enough ideas to invest time and possibly money in learning more about so you can share.
Idea Source Number 1 - Write down 10 commonly or frequently asked questions that your ideal customers tend to ask. If this is a business that you are qualified to serve in, it should be pretty simple.
Let me give you a quick secret. You could be learning the business at the same time, in real time and using these same content creation skills to attract a significant size of the market. When you teach, you literally learn twice.
Most people in any business end up complacent and never learning anything new for years. But when you use this method to create thousands of connections and digital agents for prospects before getting to see your offer, you will remain at the top of your game.
Idea Source Number 2 - For this one, come up with and write down 10 questions you would advise an ideal prospect to ask your competitors. Of course, you want to make sure these are questions and problems that your content and products have answered and solved.
Idea Source Number 3 - Identify 10 common problems that your ideal prospect faces. It doesn’t have to directly be linked to the problems that your product solves.
But I want you to do it because the information you will provide in the content will actually serve an audience. But in addition to that, you may end up creating a tangible and usable solution if the piece of content is attracting a big enough audience.
Last but not least…
Idea Source Number 4 - Invest time to learn about 10 common mistakes that an ideal prospect would or could make and share each one as a piece of content. In addition to that, share tips on how to avoid the mistakes.
I’ve used this same method of connection to build my business and the good thing about it; you can verify. At press time, about 840 myEmpirePRO web pages are resulting and indexed on the Google Search Engine Results Page. (THE SERP).
And on another web property that I am building with my wife, LOLAandOLA.com, about 1,370 web pages of content are resulting and indexed. I am not even talking about other search engines such as Yahoo, Bing and many others that thrive off of picking up your content and connecting them with potential prospects all around the world for free.
65.78% of our audience at myEmpirePRO in the last 28 days from presstime are coming from the United States. 13.46% are coming from China. 3.77% are coming from Canada. The audience or traffic were connected from 48 different countries.
The beauty about digital marketing is the fact that you are also collecting tons of data with the various default activities of setting up and running these campaigns. That’s why I am able to share these results with you. In fact, you can check it yourself.
All you have to do is place this string ‘site:’ before any site with no spaces between them and search. For example, a simple search of ‘site:myempirepro.com’ will show the top of the SERP (search engine results page) and it will show you how many pages have been indexed from the site.
What about YouTube? We’ve published 1,304 videos and they are all working in our favor to connect more prospects to our hub. All these digital agents are not built overnight and they don’t need to be built overnight.
In fact, all it takes is one good piece of content to create a $10,000 day. But that also depends on what you are selling and your business model. You just never know what answered-question would resonate with someone’s deep pain. The more you put out there, the better.
In order to execute a massive connection, KLT and brand equity campaign, you have to create a main online hub where everyone comes to from all these different sources you will be putting out there. The main hub is a content management system and I recommend good ol’ Wordpress.
On the internet today, we have websites designed to simply display information like the Toyota website from 1995 in that story I shared with you earlier. But we also have websites designed to manage databases of content, users, and users’ information. We call them a content management system (CMS).
You have two options. You can build and code your CMS with all the bells and whistles that makes it a robust system to create millions of dollars in online transactions from scratch. The second option is what I recommend which involves leveraging existing tools and systems that allow you to customize with add-ons to perform even better than systems that are built from scratch.
Which option do you think you should go with? Okay. That wasn’t a trick question. It’s a simple question and it has a simple answer which is to leverage tools and systems so that you can get to making money as soon as possible.
At press time, Wordpress powers a little more than 40% of the websites online and their content management system. I recommend it because it works just like the iPhone and the Android phones. It’s an open source that allows vendors to continue to code additional features many of which you can leverage for free.
That’s why I recommend Wordpress in addition to the fact that I personally use it to manage my content marketing campaign. But there are also two different kinds of Wordpress websites.
Fully-hosted Wordpress website which is host at wordpress.com and Self-hosted Wordpress website which means you are in full control of the features you attach to it.You will understand fully later many reasons why it is better to go with option number 2 in addition to the fact that you are able to control how you are branded online.
Brand control is non-negotiable as we move into the future because competition is increasing. With a brand you create, you will eliminate a significant number of your competition because of brand loyalty; the same effect that Apple has on its customers. I recommend that you set up your self-hosted Wordpress hub with the company at this link for less than $10 per month. - myEmpirePRO.com/hosting
All of these you’ve learned thus far without setting them up as a system is just another job that will occupy your life with redundant activities and minimum wages. So in the next chapter, we will talk about changing these new insights into an automated system that takes your prospects on a journey from discovery to conversion and a happy customer.
By now, you are understanding slowly that setting up a website is just the bare minimum of digital marketing. Most websites on the internet are a ghost land. No one is visiting them much less initiating a transaction.
So there is a distinct difference between a digital marketer and a website designer or developer. The former is a minimum of a 6 figure career as a job and a 7-9 figure income when you use this skill as an entrepreneur. The latter is darn near a minimum wage job.
With systems, you can scale a campaign beyond what’s possible when all you’ve got are linear operations involving humans at every segment. You will learn about different segments in a customer’s life cycle and how systems can scale from 10 customers to 100 and to 1,000 customers being served simultaneously.
The last thing I want you to do is know all this cool stuff only to get stuck behind a laptop for 16 hours a day. While I definitely want you to understand the concepts that make this work, I will be sharing with you how to set, forget and collect on a regular basis leveraging the concept of systems..
