Dear Stomper,

Welcome to Volume 1, Issue 1 of the new Free Line Report!

For years, StomperNet has been well known for publishing some of the best “Free Line” content in the internet marketing industry.

Plain, simple, cutting-edge knowledge and insider tips that you can use in YOUR online marketing, right now – today!

That’s what we’re famous for. And now you’ll know EXACTLY where to find it.

In your email inbox, every Wednesday morning.

And our goal is ambitious. Call us crazy, but even with all the TONS of email gumming up your inbox . . .

We want StomperNet’s new Free Line Report to be YOUR Absolute #1 Favorite Weekly Newsletter – the one-you-absolutely-can’t-live-without – bar none!

Just like SEO – second place on Google doesn’t work for Stompers. And being your “second favorite” weekly email doesn’t work for us.

So welcome to your first official issue! You don’t have to do a thing – you’re already on the list . . . but you might want to buckle up!

World Class Faculty Direct to Your Inbox – Every Wednesday

The StomperNet Faculty includes more than 20 world class subject matter experts who teach the most cutting-edge information about every aspect of internet marketing and online business building.

We’re letting them out of their ivory towers. Or more likely, we’re calling them in from the front lines of their own day-to-day, high stakes online marketing, where their clients and students are making a killing right now.

But now I’m pulling them away, and they’re putting their own marketing on pause – for just one reason . . . to help YOU get even more online success – right now.

No one can touch the breadth and depth of StomperNet’s ongoing, cutting-edge webinars and video tutorials. (No one else even comes close.)

The fact is, there’s nothing like StomperNet anywhere else, at any price.

And so we’re giving EVEN MORE of it away – for free – but we don’t want to overwhelm you.

Because we’re here to INSPIRE YOU and ASSIST YOU, not intimidate or distract or overwhelm you. So . . . .

We Think You Can Handle 1 Email a Week

At one email per week, we think you absolutely can make use of the Tips and Tactics we’ll be sending – even with everything else you’re already doing. After all, we don’t want to scare you with ALL the things you could be doing to make more money online . . .

We’re Here to Help!

So I hope you enjoy the inaugural issue. It just might help you FOCUS on What Matters Most.

In fact, I’ll make you this Audacious Promise:

If you’ll take action on the ideas contained in this first issue, plus the next two (Hint: They’re EXACTLY the same things I’m implementing in StomperNet as we speak), and make a note on your calendar 6 months from now. I guarantee when you see that note in 6 months, you’ll think to yourself “Wow! My business is on a whole new level!”

So read on and enjoy. And remember, you’re not alone. We’re on YOUR team!

Until next time,

Keep on Stomping the Search Engines . . .
and your competition!

Brad Fallon
CEO, StomperNet

Want Better Results Fast? You Need World Class Execution

And here’s how to get it (Part 1 of 3).

The #1 Master Key to getting the Right Things Done, Faster, is this:

“Do first things first, and second things never.”

And here’s how YOU can do it, starting TODAY . . .

Find Your “Make or Break” and Execute on That.
And Nothing Else.

When you’re working for the man, your time is all taken up making him wealthy. Likewise, when you’re a STRUGGLING business owner, your time is all taken up trying to make payroll, and putting out fires.

As the saying goes, “If you work hard for someone else 40 hours a week, one day you can have your own business, and work hard 80 hours a week.”

When it comes to business, TIME is your most precious resource. Period.

And even though they might be doing well, financially, many business owners are Time Poor.

From Michael Gerber’s E-Myth axiom, “Spend more time working ON the business, and less time working IN it,” to one of Stephen Covey’s habits: “Spend less time chopping, and more time sharpening the saw,” the advice makes sense.

But we’re BUSY!! And we’re working hard, dammit. Buzz off – I’m running a business here.

Are you? Or is your business running you?

How would you feel if you KNEW that what you were doing was always the right thing – to grow your bottom line and create real wealth, not just churn money and keep yourself employed?

How would it feel if EVERY employee in your business absolutely knew exactly what your vision was, and they understood how they fit into the big picture? And they knew what they needed to do every day, to make that vision a reality?

How would it feel if you were focused, every day, and you knew that you were focused on the right thing? In fact, what if you could ignore distractions, and other “opportunities,” because you knew that you, and everyone in your business were ALL focused on the right thing, rowing in the same direction.

Would that be different?

It was for me.

World Class Execution Wins Every Time

No plan survives its first meeting with realty, intact. And the best strategy gets eaten for lunch by a mediocre planning executed with skill and precision.

And that all starts with leadership. Whether you run a company or department with hundreds, or a small business with one virtual assistant, Killer Execution comes down to your leadership. You need to drive the process of execution from the top. And here’s how you do it.

Step One: Write Out Your Vision and Determine Your “Make or Break.”

Your #1 job as CEO of your business is to “Articulate the Vision.” And of course, to do that, you need to have one. And it needs to be written down. And then you repeat it, over and over, every chance you get.

Think of it as your stump speech. It might get old to you, but it won’t to your people. If you have a good one – and everyone knows what it is because you repeat it at every opportunity – it’s what inspires your whole team.

So this week, write down your stump speech, and make sure it answers these four questions:

Where are we going?

Why are we going there?

Who’s going with us?

How are we going to get there?

Once you can articulate that, you’re off the mark. But in order to accomplish it, you’re ready for . . .

Step Two: Determine Your “Make or Break”

In the next two weeks, I’ll tell you how you and your team can practice world class execution. And it starts by determining the ONE THING that your organization needs to be GREAT at in order to deliver on your vision.

It doesn’t even have to be something you’re good at now. But it needs to be the One Thing that will make all this difference in executing on the Vision that you have for your company.

For G.E., from the time Jack Welch started, it was “Training and Development.” And Jack was personally involved in the development of the leadership curriculum at their Crotonville training center. For Vistage COO, Dan Barnett, the guy who originated this “Make or Break” system of execution and used it to build the largest CEO member organization in the world, it was “membership growth.” At Apple, it was design. And Steve Jobs watches the details.

If you want to lead an organization to great accomplishments, heed the axiom, “No vision to distant; no detail too small.”

So this week, write down your Vision AND your stump speech that describes it. Like any human that has written goals, a company with a leader who has a written Vision statement, and a repeatable stump speech that explains the what, why, who and how of getting there, has a big advantage over one that doesn’t.

But when you determine the ONE THING that you need to be great at in order to make that vision happen, it makes all the difference. For once, every employee can be pulling in the same direction. Everyone knows exactly why what he or she is doing matters, and how it fits into the big picture.

And next week, I’ll tell you how to create your business “dashboard” so that you can monitor your progress on the one thing that matters most in just a few minutes a week, and take correct corrective actions in time to keep your business on course.

Hint: It’s NOT the financial metrics that most top managers use. By the time you get your financial numbers, it may be months before you can fix a problem. You need to figure out how to monitor and manage the ACTIVITIES that cause what you want to happen – in a whole sequence of events, called a Value Chain. We’ll talk about that next week.

Until then, put yourself in the top tiny fraction of businesses that have a written vision statement – and among the even tinier percentage with one that’s not just a bunch of generic platitudes. Write down your inspirational vision of where you’re going, why you’re going there, who’s going with you, and how you’re going to get there. And repeat it publicly . . . often.

Then determine the one core thing you do, the one thing that if you did it well, would make all the difference. And in the next two issues, we’ll talk about how to make sure it does.

In the mean time, be sure to check out our blog – and leave a comment. Do you have a Vision Statement? What’s YOUR Make or Break?

Our good friend Eben Pagan has been releasing some amazing content on information marketing.

All you need to do is optin for the following free videos and resources:

• How to Turn Your Ideas into Amazing Information Products
• How to Target Profitable Niches Online Every Time
• 3rd Video Coming Soon….

"I subscribed to TNE, Mega Pack, & the Home Study DVDs in September 2008 and within 3 weeks of getting the material I made my first $1400.  Since then we have totally rebuilt our company on the EVERYTHING I learn every month.

I like the fact that I can tell my staff 'this idea came from StomperNet, so don't question it.'

I am surprised every day by what StomperNet has given me and how it has saved me from this recession, turned my life around and given me a real direction for the next 10 years. "

Matthew Perosi
Totowa, NJ

Tell Us What You Think!

 Copyright © 2010 StomperNet, LLC.

The New Year is just around the corner and with it comes all kinds of great advice about what you should be doing to achieve your goals. How about what you should not be doing? As the go-to person in this industry on productivity, profit explosion and business optimization, I’m here to say that some people just SHOULD NOT delegate.

Curious?

Here are four reasons why you should absolutely, positively NOT delegate or outsource to expand your business this year:

1. The idea of making more money is revolting.

Why allow other people to help you get more money making tasks done? That’s just silly! You love staying stuck exactly where you are because you must do everything yourself. I mean come on, money doesn’t grow on trees so why should you wisely invest it in capable, hard-working, efficient associates who help you achieve more in a week than you normally do in a year?

Even if you could see proof that learning how to hire “A” players to manage your social media, update your website, handle your organic SEO strategies would free you up to triple your income, why bother with stuff like that when you’ve got so much to do today, right?

2. Doing tasks that suck the life out of you is the highlight of your day.

When you wake up you are ecstatic knowing that you’ll get to update your bookkeeping records or spend 2 – 3 hours answering routine questions from tire-kickers who never plan to buy. But the highlight of your day – filing! Why, cause it’s an excellent use of your time. Who wouldn’t want to spend countless hours putting papers in folders when they could be putting together a launch strategy that could results in over $100k in revenue?

Then there are your personal favorites…the tasks that make you feel like a Mac truck ran over you. You know the ones ….you feel completely exhausted afterwards. As you dig into these tasks (if you ever get to them) you think how luck you are to be an entrepreneur with all this freedom. Why would you ever want to spend most of your time doing things that make boat-loads of money?

3. Perfection, not progress, is the only route for you.

You are committed to getting things done yourself — correctly. Can you really trust someone else to do things right (I mean really what does Bill Gates know about delegation…he’s the genius in the business.) As you release every product perfectly with great pride, you somehow overlook the consequence of this choice – it takes you 5 – 10 times longer to get things done.

Even though you are frustrated with your slow progress you fear handing things off to someone else. You witness your peers who have discovered the secrets to hiring “A” players soaring to new heights and wonder what must be wrong that you can’t get these same results.

The last option is to buy the content straight-out.  You can get a ghost-writer to produce it and still make a hefty little profit in the process.

Again, no matter what path you take, make sure you're producing content that people are actually willing to pay for.

4. Sleep and a social life are highly over-rated!

Who needs sleep, right? There is so much to do you can barely get a few winks at night let alone actually meet your friends for a nice evening out. Family? Who are they? Oh those people who walk up and down your hallway waiting for you to come out and have dinner together.

Don’t they understand that you have hundreds of tasks to accomplish in record time and you don’t have anyone to help you out? Not that you couldn’t – you just have your head in the weeds and you haven’t yet seen the brilliance in slowing down, hiring some capable people and multiplying your accomplishments in record time.

All silliness aside, why on earth should an entrepreneur delegate or outsource? Because it’s how you create a business that can grow into six figures and beyond, profitably, without losing your mind!

When you pay attention to the business owners who consistently generate high six and seven figures, you’ll notice the one thing they all have in common is: they don’t do it alone.

The key is not just delegating to the cheapest labor either. What works is learning how to hire people who will take tasks off your plate so you can focus on doing what you do best! And that requires a system of identify the right tasks to hand off, the right people who can do the job, and the right delegation techniques to ensure the tasks are done correctly the first time.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing with you some of my insider secrets to exponentially growing your revenue and results through delegation and outsourcing!

 

Copyright © 2006-2009 StomperNet, LLC. All rights reserved.

 

The key to more sales isn't always getting more traffic. Sometimes, just improving conversions on your existing traffic is enough to produce staggering results. In this article I am going to share some simple design tactics that will explode your business, just by turning more of the visitors you're already getting from browsers…into buyers! All you need to do is master some tried and true, old-school direct response design tricks. I am going to cover three of them right here in this article. So let's get right to it, shall we?

 

 

 

 

 

 

StomperNet Design Tactic #1: Understand F-Patterns

Several eye tracking studies have revealed that most website visitors don't read website pages the same way they read books or magazines. That is, top to bottom, left to right.

Instead, website users tend to read pages in an F-Pattern… That is, they read in horizontal “sections”, and read less and less of each line as they read down the left side.

Here are some examples:

Notice the pattern? Although it's more pronounced on some pages than others, it's still unmistakable.

So how do you apply this to Sales, Squeeze or Landing pages?

Here is an example of a page I designed recently for a launch:

PPC Classroom Sales Page, February 2009

 

Notice how much attention I paid to F-Patterns as I laid out the most important elements of the page? Starting at the top left, the first thing people see is the company logo (My clients were building a long-term brand with this business, so this was important to them. Then, as you “F-Pattern” the rest of the page – notice what sticks out…

“Discover the secrets”…

“Interactive eLearning system”…

“Claim your Free DVD”…

“Proof Positive”...

These four things (along with the logo) were the five most important items we wanted to communicate with the entire page. The platform (the eLearning system) was a huge selling point, and the Free DVD was integral to the offer…

And the entire offer hinged on the massive proof that we had from students who had previously taken the course. So of course “Proof Positive” is in the headline.

(By the way, this page converted well over 12%… And I bet my bottom dollar our close attention to F-Patterns was partly responsible for the massive conversions.)

Here is an example of the exact opposite:

(Some random site I found on the Internet… YIKES!)

 

It looks like an e-Book threw up on this page.

What happens when you F-Pattern this page? Nothing! You get the word “Congratulations!”

This page is simply too busy and too poorly designed to work well.

The bottom line here is that understanding F-Patterns can make a huge difference in your page conversions. Just keep the following in mind…users won't read your text word-by-word.

You need to make the first three-five words of each focal point really, really good.

The first two paragraphs should state the most important information. Make sure to start subheads, paragraphs, and bullets with enticing words that users will notice when scanning.

StomperNet Design Tactic #2: Give People What They Are Used To.

Famed Madison Avenue Advertising Legend David Ogilvy once said:

“The eye is trained from an early age. Move away from what the eye is used to, and you stop readership.”

I couldn't agree more, and all my testing and tweaking over the past three years has proven it time and time again. You have to meet people where they are and give them something they are familiar with.

And in many cases, this means building an “Internet Marketing” looking page… Even if it's NOT a sales letter. Build your blog posts, and content pages the same way, too. Create your product content in the same format.

People are trained to read bigger, bolder words… so make your headlines bigger and bolder. Make them red, too… so they stand out (More on the color Red in a minute) from the rest of your text.

Give your sub-headlines and paragraph titles a bit more emphasis than your regular body copy…

And use plenty of whitespace so your page doesn't look crowded.

Keep is simple and create a familiar hierarchy with your content.

When it comes to font use, I suggest you use Sans-Serif fonts for your headlines and sub-headlines, and Serif fonts for your regular in-line body copy.

Sans Serif fonts are fonts without those little doo-hickeys on the tops and bottoms of the letters. Serif fonts have the extra little “embellishments.

So for headlines and sub-headlines, use fonts like Impact, Tahoma Bold, and Helvetica Bold.

For your regular in-line body copy, use Serif fonts. Serif fonts have been used in print for years (Magazines, Newspapers, books) and have been proven to create higher readability. This includes fonts like Courier New, Georgia, and Times New Roman.

StomperNet Design Tactic #3: Use Colors!

Most marketers throw a couple outsourced “mini-site” graphics on their page and hope for the best.

But not you, my fellow readers.  Because you're about to understand the unlimited power of using the correct colors to market your products.

You see, colors create immediate subconscious reactions in people. Some colors set off warning bells, others trigger the libido, or even make you feel safe.

And just like with well-written copy, you can often use color theory to slide right in under the radar and get into your prospects minds to influence their buying habits.

I know, I know… You might be thinking “That sounds creepy” but I assure you it's not. You will simply have an edge because you understand how people tend to react.

Take Blue for example:

Blue is, obviously, the color of the ocean, and also the sky.

It should come as no surprise then that Blue is proven to work well when promoting air and sky products (airlines, air conditioning units, fans, air filters, etc. etc.) and also water and sea products (cruise vacations, water filters, boats, bottled water, etc. etc.)

Blue is often associated with depth and stability. It automatically evokes emotions of trust, security, intelligence, peace, and loyalty in people.

On the other hand, avoid blue when promoting food and cooking products. Blue suppresses the appetite.

Red is often associated with passion, desire, war, danger, strength, power, and love.

Are you surprised that Red works well in the dating and seduction niches? You shouldn't be. Red also works well with products like energy drinks, automobiles, and items related to sports and action.

Most traditional designers (Print designers, for example, working in design houses or advertising agencies) understand Color Theory…

But the average person who puts up a blog or website most likely doesn't know these things. They might put up a blue cooking blog and never understand why they aren't getting sales.

It's because of color.

Want some more examples?

Bright yellow is an attention getter, which is the reason taxis are painted this color. When overused, yellow can have a disturbing effect. Tests show that babies cry more in yellow rooms.

Yellow is seen before other colors when placed against black; which is why this combination is often used to issue warnings.

Men tend to see yellow as a lighthearted, 'childish' color, so it is not recommended to use yellow when selling prestigious, expensive products to men. This explains why you don't ever see Yellow in high-end watch advertisements, or advertisements for expensive cars.

I could go on and on about color use, but it's probably about time for me to wrap things up. Here is a short list of common emotions associated with other popular colors:

Black – Power, class, seriousness, drama, sophistication, and boldness. (Prestigious products) White – Purity, peace, cleanliness, freshness. (Great for medical products and weight loss products) Purple – Sophistication, royalty, mystery, spirituality. (Great for Yoga products) Green – Freshness, safety, growth, vitality, calmness, prestige. (Great for Drugs, Medical products, and Nature and Natural products as well. Use Darker Green for Financial or Make Money products) Orange - Enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success. (Works great for toys and puzzles.)

Hopefully this quick look at color helps you start thinking about these things when you design your marketing collateral. Keep in mind that this is only a rough guide: There are hundreds and hundreds of books about the psychology of color and how it affects buying habits.

I will include some additional resources at the end of this article for you Stompers who want to learn more.

Summary

Pay close attention to where you position things on your pages. Follow an F-Pattern with your layout to make sure the highest number of people possible sees your vital information.

Use fonts people are familiar and comfortable with, and above all else make sure your creatives are easy for people to look at and consume.

Use colors that create positive emotions with your audience and frame them towards buying what you are offering.

Resources Renowned web usability expert Jacob Neilson has published some excellent research on F-Patterns  for you Stompers who want to learn more: http://www.useit.com/eyetracking To learn more about fonts and typography without getting bored to tears, Erik Spiekermann and E.M. Ginger's “Stop Stealing Sheep & Find Out How Type Works” is a great place to start. Interested in Color Theory? I recommend starting with "The Elements of Color" by Johannes Itten and "The Art of Color” by  Johannes Itten. Both are excellent books and can be found on Amazon.com. One last tip. Buy some comic books! Comic book writers and artists are experts at capturing complex ideas in very few words and limited space. It's a great way to study how to market to today's attention-fragmented society.

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