Pictures in your emails – your marketing messages, articles, and blog posts – they increase readership and response rates, right?

Well, maybe. 

And then again, maybe not.

The default setting in most email programs is to not download pictures.  Your reader has to specifically request that the pictures be downloaded before he or she can see them.  Otherwise, all they see is a little placeholder icon.

Yes, the default settings can be changed.  And yes, your reader can add you to the “safe senders” list, which in most programs causes pictures to be automatically downloaded.

But do you want to bet they’ve done that?  Are you willing to bet your precious message – the material you’ve worked so hard to develop and write – on your belief (or hope) that they’ve done that? 

Here are three things that can happen.

1. If you embed any part of your message in an image (a picture), you immediately lose some of your readers. Because if they don’t download your picture – and many of them won’t - they can never read your message. 

   If your whole message is in the picture, you’ve totally lost out.  (See the example below)

2. You also risk losing readers if the picture is the first thing in your message. Why?  Because if they’re looking at a preview of your message (i.e., not full-sized), or if they don’t have their email reader maximized on their computer screen, they may see just the picture (or the picture placeholder, if they haven’t downloaded images).

   Remember:  the purpose of your headline is to get someone to read the first sentence … and the purpose of your first sentence is to get them to read the second sentence.  If they can’t see the first sentence, there’s nothing to catch their attention and draw them in to the rest of your message.

3. Finally, if your picture isn’t immediately and directly relevant to your message, it’s nothing more than a distraction. Just think of the last Super Bowl you watched.  Remember all those great ads?  Fantastic images, right?

   Um … do you remember the products those images were supposed to get you to buy? 

Here’s an example

This is the entire message:

The email subject line was “Now is the time to stock up on art supplies.” 

I’m not an artist.  I’m not interested in art supplies.  ::delete::

Turns out this was a promotion for their one-cent frame sale.  Now, I am a photographer, and I do my own framing and matting.  So I am interested in frames and a one-cent sale on frames – lemme at it!

But the only reason I know it was a promotion for their frame sale is because I was writing this blog post.  I needed an example to show, and this was the one I fished out of my deleted items folder.  (Of course, it didn’t help that it has a truly lousy subject line.)

See what I mean?

I’m not saying don’t use pictures.

I’m saying, use them carefully and intentionally. 

Remember that what you see as you design your email, article, or blog post isn’t necessarily what your reader will see.  Design according to what they will see and what they are likely to do – not according to what you see, or according to what you hope they’ll do.

You’ll have much more success that way.

Ideas?  Thoughts?  Comments?  What’s been your experience, either in sending or receiving emails with pictures?

People skim web pages.

We all know that.  We all do that.  And probably most of us complain about it.  All that effort to write persuasively compelling copy, and they don’t even read it!

So, yes, it’s frustrating.  But if your page headers are boring, you have only yourself to blame when your website visitor clicks away. 

Because it’s the headers – the parts in big bold type – that draw a visitor in to stop skimming and start paying more attention … and start actually reading all that lovely copy you wrote.

Don’t waste your headers!

Take a look at your website.  If you have headers – big bold type, or even small bold type – that say anything that isn’t directly relevant to your message, then you’re suffering from boring headers.   And if you have boring headers, your website isn’t producing the results it could.

Replace them with interesting, compelling phrases that you pull out of your content. 

Then your message becomes far more clear – and more compelling – to even the fastest of web page skimmers.

For more on this, sign up for my free teleclass on the secrets of writing compelling home pages.

Also, see my recent article 5 Easy-to-Fix Website Readability Mistakes.

You know those people who only show up in your email in-box when they have something they want you to buy?

Yeah.  Me too.

They may be there with lots of truly high-quality, valuable information that they’re giving away as part of their promotion.

They may be people whom you’ve come to know, like, and trust in the past, when they’ve shown up more consistently.

You may have purchased from them before, and found their work to be useful, applicable, and relevant.

In other words, you may have been happy – or even downright thrilled – with just about everything they’ve sent your way, whether free or paid for.

But then they disappeared.  And now they only show up when they have something to sell you.

Makes it harder and harder to buy from them, doesn’t it?

Don’t be one of those people. 

No matter how successful you may be, no matter how much you make on your product launches, you can still blow it.  You can still lose credibility in a heartbeat. 

Marketing is very personal.  And your customers take your behavior very personally.

Here’s what you may not expect:

Consistency doesn’t require writing a blog post every other day no matter what.  It doesn’t require sending an article to your list every week, no matter what.

In fact, it’s possible to be consistently inconsistent.

Consistency means sticking to your personal pattern AND making sure your audience knows what that pattern is. 

If you only write a blog post when you have something you want to write about, with no particular schedule, that’s fine.  Just don’t disappear.

 On the other hand, if it works for you to write an article every other week no matter what, that’s fine too … and it’s fine to be late one week, or even skip a week every so often.  Just don’t disappear.

Be as random as you want … but don’t disappear.

And especially don’t reappear only when you have something to sell. 

Because even if you lead your sales effort with a week or two of high-value content, your customers aren’t stupid.  They can smell that tactic a mile away, and you will lose credibility.

And there’s a very direct, very straight line between lost credibility and lost sales.

You know more than you think you do – about your business, about marketing, about your clients, and about what to do next to be successful.

That’s true whether you’re just starting out, or you’ve been in business for years.

I’ll prove it to you. 

You’ve had at least one, probably several, and maybe all five of these experiences.

1. You purchased a product or paid to attend a workshop from a highly-respected authority in the field. Yet you don’t feel like you learned much; it wasn’t what you’d expected or hoped for.

   It’s not the teacher’s fault for not teaching what you signed up to learn.  You simply already knew what was being taught.  You know more than you think you know.

2. People you respect engage with you on Twitter or Facebook, retweet your Tweets, recommend your articles, products, or services, respond to your comments on their blogs, and/or write comments on your blog. 

   They’re not doing it because they feel sorry for you or because they’re trying to encourage you.  They’re doing it because they respect your work and find you informative and interesting.  You know more than you think you know.

3. You wonder why someone is making what seems to you like an obvious mistake.

   Maybe it’s not as obvious as you think. Whether because you’ve learned from personal experience, or because you have the understanding to recognize that whatever they’re doing isn’t going to produce results … you know more than you think you know.

4. You find yourself strongly disagreeing with someone who’s an acknowledged expert.

   Don’t assume that you’re wrong because they must be right. There’s room for more than one opinion, and there’s more than one way of doing things. You know more than you think you know.

5. Finally, my personal favourite:  you hear yourself saying something about your work that’s completely unexpected, yet it resonates right down to the soles of your feet and the tips of your fingers. You know it’s right – and so does your audience, without question – even though you didn’t know you were going to say it, and you have no idea where it came from. 

   Yep! You know more than you think you know!

Allow yourself to take this in.  Give yourself credit.  Recognize your own authority and expertise.

It’s neither arrogance nor bragging to stand in the truth of your own understanding of what you do.

It’s a gift to the people who need your help.

In the last week, life has been handing me a lot of lessons on the dangers of making assumptions about people.

This person isn’t really serious about her business.  I have nothing in common with that person.  And the one over there? Way too intimidating for me to try to connect with. 

I’m glad and grateful that I have a wise friend who reminds me that this is horsepucky.  (My word, not his!)

If I’d listened to those assumptions instead of to his (very firm) words of encouragement, I would have missed out on some beautiful connections.  Connections that are poised to grow my business and enrich my life.  Connections that will benefit my clients as well as myself.  Connections that I can give to wholeheartedly, because it’s clear that I can trust the integrity, professionalism, and skill of the people involved.

Beware assumptions.  They’ll eat your business, chew up your creativity, and destroy your ideas before they even hatch.

Do you remember the good old days of social media?

No, I don’t mean back when Twitter first started.  I don’t mean the early days of Facebook.  I certainly don’t mean MySpace.

I mean … bulletin boards.  Listservs.  And, yes, AOL chat rooms.

Do you remember AOL chat rooms?!

These days, after a trip through my social media accounts on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+, I find myself feeling sad, frustrated, decidedly unsocial, and disconnected.

It seems to me that social media has become all about competition.  Who has the most friends and followers?  How loudly can each person promote their stuff – and how cleverly can they mask “their stuff” by apparently promoting other people’s stuff?  How effectively can they churn their Twitter account, following lots of people they really have no interest in, just to get the followbacks?  And how much money can they make by calling themselves a “social media consultant”?

The promotion-to-actual-content ratio is dreadful.  Even on Facebook, it seems everyone is posting other people’s stuff, in the form of the latest cute cartoon or viral video. 

In my darkest, most cynical moments, I find myself wondering … does anyone think for themselves any more?

At a conference a few weeks ago, a presenter declared that social media would soon replace email.  (Yes, folks, we now have people predicting the death of email.)  As proof, she cited the fact that some colleges and universities are no longer issuing email accounts to students.

My guess is that’s far more likely to be because students already have email accounts – and maybe for cost-cutting reasons – than because social media is taking the place of email!

On the contrary, I’m seeing more and more people drop off social media.   People I used to talk with are no longer around, and haven’t posted or Tweeted for days and even weeks.  So I’m communicating with them through – surprise! – email, Skype, and the phone.

Those AOL chat rooms and listservs?  I made real friends through them.  Friends I’m still in touch with (through email and phone!) decades later. 

There wasn’t any promotion back then; we were all just exploring this new way of connecting and helping each other out, whether by showing up for casual conversation, or helping each other solve whatever problems we were facing. 

Call it nostalgia if you want, and call those days naive if you will.   It probably is nostalgia, and those days certainly were more internet-innocent. 

But today’s world of so-called social media seems awfully anti-social to me.

Fantastic TEDx talk from Simon Sinet at TEDx Puget Sound. 

The core message?  People don’t buy what you do.  They buy why you do it.  And they buy it for themselves. 

I know that last sounds obvious, but how often do we, as marketers, completely overlook this?  We understand it at the intellectual level, but then we don’t take it deeper – we don’t get it at a level of felt experience.  And then we overlook opportunities to use this understanding to help refine our marketing – and connect with our customers.

It’s a question I’m asked a lot:  “I have all these ideas, I offer all these services, doesn’t that mean I need multiple businesses and multiple websites?”

No!

It seems logical – you’ve got several ideas, you offer services that appear to be different, perhaps you even serve clients in different demographics or industries.  It’s easy to leap to the conclusion that you need to have multiple businesses.

Again:  No!

To begin with, even if you have a strong team of people backing you up in each of those businesses, you just don’t have the emotional, intellectual, or physical energy required to do a good job of running more than one business.  One – or both – will suffer, and so will you, your friends, and your family.

But the real thing is, it’s not necessary.

Because your clients’ perspective on your work is that it’s a single entity.

This is crucial to understand.

Your clients’ experience of you and your work is whole, unified, all of what you offer.

When you split your work up, you dilute it.  It becomes far less than it could be.  You reduce its value and worth for your clients.

On the other hand, when you understand how your work is a whole, you have a stronger, deeper, and more resonant offering.

The ideas you have may seem contradictory.  The services you provide, and who you provide them for, may seem incompatible.

However, in all the times I’ve been asked about this, I’ve never yet seen a situation that couldn’t ultimately be reconciled.

And not just reconciled:  the end product was richer, stronger, more powerful, and more rewarding for both my clients and the people they serve.

This is not the same as failing to focus or failing to understand your niche

Focus is critical.  If what you’re actually struggling with is a lack of focus or a desire to spread your net as wide as possible in order to appeal to as many people as possible, then you not only don’t have multiple businesses, but chances are that pretty soon you won’t have any business. 

It’s actually a deeper focus…

You reconcile your diverse ideas and offerings by creating deeper focus. 

Somewhere deep down, there’s a unifying thread to all you do.  When you dig down into what the value is that you provide, you’ll find that thread. 

And remember:  value is defined by what your customers experience, not just by what you think you do.

Then it will be obvious:  you have one business.  And with this greater focus and clarity, it’s likely to start becoming a more successful business.

It’s a traditional sales-meeting rant:  “Let’s make it happen!” 

It’s a charity fundraising chant:  “We’re gonna make it happen!”

It’s something my clients say to me:  “I have to make this happen!”

But you cannot “make” anything happen.

There may be a few small things in your immediate vicinity that you have that much control over – such as buttoning your shirt, brushing your teeth, and possibly putting dinner on the table.  (But even those, especially dinner, and particularly when anyone else gets involved, are questionable.)

Thinking you have that much power is a set-up for feeling painfully bad about yourself when something you thought you were going to “make happen” … doesn’t happen.

And it demands a tremendous amount of effort.  Even the words feel exhausting: I (that’s me, all by myself, alone) am going to MAKE this happen (force, push, compel, insist upon, and take full responsibility for…).

Wow.  And, ow.

Let yourself off the hook.  Breathe.  And … allow things to be a little easier and a little less all your responsibility.

Because the problem with “making things happen” is simple. 

You can’t.

But you can create the conditions that allow things to happen.

You probably felt the difference just in reading those words.

The mindset “I’ve got to make this happen” is filled with a grim, gritted-teeth determination. 

It tends to be filled with fear and even resentment.  It takes over your life; every waking moment – and often many sleeping moments – is consumed with the grinding responsibility of having to make it happen.

But creating the conditions that allow things to happen is creative and fun. 

Not so incidentally, creating the conditions that allow things to happen is also a great way to get clear about all the things that go into a project.  

While making things happen is a great way to get overwhelmed by the huge project you’re facing and somehow need to complete.

So relax.  Focus on creating the conditions that will allow things to happen. 

And then open your perception to see what does happen.  It may not be what you thought you wanted.  And it might be better than what you expected.

So there you are  – here we all are – all of us smart content marketing folks, busily putting out top-quality, useful content for our audience.

Right?

But … that audience may not be feeling quite as lucky and privileged as we’d like to believe.

In fact, some of them may be feeling downright frustrated and disgruntled and even taken advantage of.

Why do I say that? 

Because every time we ask someone to do something – even something as simple as reading a blog post or watching a video – we’re asking them to make an investment.

We think we’re the ones making the investment.  We think we’re putting all this time and effort into what we create, into making valuable and useful Good Stuff. 

And we are.  But we’re doing it with an ulterior motive.  We want something in return. 

We want our audience to read or watch what we’ve created.  We want them to comment.  We want them to subscribe.  We want them to actually use what we’ve written to make their lives or their businesses better.

Ultimately, of course, we want them to buy.

And they know that.  You know that, when you’re out being an audience for someone else’s material (like right here and right now, for instance!).

They know they’re being asked to make an investment. 

It may not be a financial investment – not immediately – but it is an investment of their time.  And even more importantly, an investment of their attention … and their respect.

Make it easy for your audience to make that investment. 

Write clearly and succinctly.  Don’t be repetitive in your writing or in your video narration.  (It’s so easy to go on and on in video!)  Tell people how long your video or your podcast is, so they know how much time they’re about to invest. 

Understand that even when you’re offering something “for free,” that just means there’s no dollar amount attached.  It doesn’t mean there’s no investment attached.

If you’re aware of that, and respect the investment someone is making because they trust you and your work … I think you’ll find that it starts to shift the conversation in a very good way.

Care to invest in a comment on this post?