It’s time to spike (and dye) your hair, don a lab coat and work on your maniacal laugh. Yes, folks, it’s time to channel your inner mad scientist.

Because social media is a great lab for your evil experiments.

Even if you don’t have much of a presence, it works. In fact, if all you have are friends and family, you have all the raw materials you need to create something.

If anyone has ever called you mad (mad, I say!) here’s your chance to prove them wrong.

Continue reading “Dr Facebookstein’s Laboratory of Mad Experiments” →

If you’re a hypnotist looking to use social media, then you have choices. You could follow other people in the field. It’s not a bad idea to see what your colleagues are up to. They’ll say things or do things in a different way – use that.

Being a professional means knowing the state of the industry, after all.

But there’s a group of people who are far more important to follow.

Are you shocked if I say it’s your potential clients?

Probably not, right? Because there’s an ancient, mystical, amazing, diabolical secret marketing technique, developed by an obscure order of monks with data science degrees and…

Okay, nah, it’s nothing like that.

It’s as simple as listening to them.

The moral panic brigade likes to harp on about what the big, bad internet does to people. All anyone does these days is log on and shout their grievances to all of cyberspace. Twitter is a hateful echochamber. So is Facebook. Woe to the poor souls who complain upon the webs.

I say, good.

Continue reading “Find Free Market Research among Hateful Echochambers” →

If you’re a hypnotist looking to build your digital reach, you’re gonna think about social media. Everyone’s on it, everyone’s talking about it and it can multiply your impact.

But before you go diving into it, there’s a few things to sort out first.

The main thing is to get your website in order. If someone likes your tweets or posts, they’re unlikely to become a client just like that. They’ll want to see the details, and the best place for that is your website.

Have something good you can point them to.

Then you want to capture their email address. Even if someone follows or subscribes to you on social media, that doesn’t mean they’ll even see your content. Email is much more visible and, yes, personal.

(It cracks me up that Facebook and its ilk talk about how ‘intimate’ their platforms are. Social media is a busy town square, whereas email is inviting someone into your home.)

Once all that’s sorted, you need to figure out where your potential clients hang out. There’s no point upping your retweet game if none of them are on Twitter.

And then, once you have it all figured out, you still need to decide what to focus on.

“I want to focus on selling,” you say. That’s a good instinct to have – always have the end goal in mind with everything you do.

But no, not quite.

Continue reading “Don’t Sell with Social Media” →

We’ve talked a lot about using emails to build relationships and keep you in your clients’ minds. I strongly recommend doing this – either yourself or outsourcing it. But I also understand that you might want to take a different approach. Or at least start the email stuff later.

I get it.

In that spirit, here’s the bare minimum you want to do with email. Put these foundations in place, then come back to regular, engaging emails as soon as you can.

The simplest useful thing to do is to send a reminder. The day before, email each client and mention the time of their session, plus anything else they need to know. Things like your address, parking/public transportation and stuff like what to wear.

Hey, if people are wondering it, you should address it. The goal is to make things as smooth and simple for them. Don’t give them any excuse to cancel, forget or get lost along the way.

But there’s another email you should send. Not all professionals do this, but it makes a huge difference.

Continue reading “The Emails Hypnotists Need to Send” →

You might be wondering how long you should make your emails.

The good news is that there’s a lot of advice about that out there.

The bad news is that there’s a lot of advice out there.

You have the opportunity to trawl through it all, try to figure it out and start A/B testing it. That’s what most marketers would do.

They’d read one marketer telling you to keep it short, because Twitter has eroded attention spans.

Another will tell you to make them long, to demonstrate your knowledge.

Yet another will make that joke about it being like a miniskirt – long enough to cover the essentials but short enough to be interesting.

Forget all of that.

Because you’re not a marketer, are you? You know marketing (and you’re learning more as you read these articles) and you use marketing, but that’s not your role in society.

You are a hypnotist, so let me talk to you like one.

Continue reading “Don’t Mistake Emails for Miniskirts” →

If the thought of using emails to sell intimidates you, don’t worry. The good news is that if you screw up email marketing, you’re in good company.

You can even get decent results if you make these mistakes, apparently. I wouldn’t know – I was lucky enough to receive some excellent training before I started dabbling.

Even without this training, I like to think I’d avoid some of these. The biggest screw-ups seem obvious to me. Based on what pollutes my inbox (temporarily, before I race towards the unsubscribe link), even some experts need a little schooling on this.

Don’t think of this as a rant. Think of it as a list of things to avoid doing.

Continue reading “Avoid these Obvious Email Mistakes (That Even Professionals Somehow Make)” →

Urgh…

Hold on, gimme a sec…

If there’s one thing digital marketers love, it’s funnels. It’s all they talk about. And it’s all some of them try to sell you.

Me? The thought of pointlessly complicated setups makes me queasy. Even writing the headline above made me ill. It’s gotten to the point where I’m allergic to… that phrase.

(I’m not writing it again).

The point of them is to guide a customer towards making a buying decision. They start with simple, low-commitment calls to action, like offering a reward in exchange for their email address. Over time, the offers become higher scale and more ambitious.

And they work great.

So why do they turn my stomach?

Continue reading “The Only Digital Marketing Funnel You Need” →

Search engine optimization used to have different rules. Google and similar sites want to match the user to the best set of webpages, but the way they do that has changed.

It used to be simple to trick search engines into thinking your site was better than it was. After all, search engines use algorithms to rank sites. Knowing what information they used made it easy to game the system.

In some cases, that’s not so bad. Google punishes pages with poor spelling, so it encourages sites to write readable text. That’s a win for everyone.

But there were other metrics. One of the classic ones was the number of backlinks. The idea was if lots of pages link to yours, then yours must be good. It must be informative, entertaining or valuable, otherwise no one would bother.

And that’s true.

The problem came when people knew this and started artificially increasing their backlinks.

That’s why article directories were so popular a while ago. These were large sites with content submitted from thousands of writers. If you submitted your own articles, they’d point back to your site.

Many links from a high-traffic page meant an SEO bonanza.

But search engines want to return good results, not cooked results. Years ago, they shifted emphasis away from backlinks to other metrics. A whole SEO strategy turned from gold to lead overnight.

Continue reading “SEO Strategies that Won’t Turn to Lead Overnight” →

If you read about digital marketing, it won’t take long to come across search engine optimisation (SEO). People describe it as the Holy Grail, the lynchpin, the foundation of all your marketing endeavours.

It’s something they tell you to master, otherwise you’re doomed to failure.

I don’t agree.

Is it important?

Well, yeah. SEO is about making your website friendly for search engines like Google. Search engines use many factors in deciding how to return results to a user. If your website is irrelevant or low quality, search engines will tend to ignore it.

So you need to know enough optimisation to show up in results.

Don’t worry – it’s not much.

And you don’t need any so-called technical skills.

Continue reading “A Layperson’s Guide to Not Mastering SEO” →