“I love you, and because I love you, I would sooner have you hate me for telling you the truth than to adore me for telling you lies.” ~Pietro Aretino~

Unfortunately, Pietro is not well known and few marketers and self-help gurus would want to hear those words. Why? Because most people who are successful cannot honestly transmit their high self-esteem, high level of financial success, and pinpoint success systems to most of the people they wish to influence.

Life is a solo journey and each of us has a purpose to uncover during our sojourn. Other peoples’ methodology can never substitute for personal experience and, yes, failure. We must learn to trust our intuition rather than that of a man or woman who says that they have the key to the truth door.

With that in mind, I want to introduce you to an interview I did with Dan Hanneman, a life coach and hypnotist who also hosts a spiritual talk radio show. I hope I cut through some of the fluff…

Russell Brunson is a go-getting, usually high-value marketer. He recently wrote that his mastermind friend convinced him that sending two emails a day – one pure content and the other selling something – was a wise idea. I’m not at all convinced and have a strong inkling to unsubscribe in a blink. This was my response:

Dear Russell,

It’s a stretch to do that, regardless of how content-rich one post may be. Matt Bacak has done that and finally I got fed up with it and unsubscribed. I had bought from him before but felt abused. If, like your winners of the Corvette said, you unsubscribe to everyone else and fully put the trust in one mentor, that methodology of sending out two messages per day may work.

Surely many of your loyal and satisfied subscribers will turn a blind eye to such abuse for a time, but with the volumes of everyday messages cluttering my box I will indiscriminately delete most. Human nature tells me that people will keep you on a “good guy” list for a time, but my trigger finger is getting quicker and quicker with each passing day.

Did you know about the Pavlovian dog experiments? I’m not talking about the one that focuses on dog’s salivating. I’m talking about the flood phenomena. In Russia, every spring the heavy rains arrive. One rainy spring, Pavlov’s notes were read by the curious police state. The waters had risen unusually high and many of the dogs were in danger of drowning. All the canines were yelping and in a constant state of panic. Then the rains subsided. Pavlov deduced that if the animals saw even a drop of water thereafter, they would go into a frenzy. His theory proved correct and this breakthrough in psychological warfare was quickly introduced into the police states that be.

So I beg to differ with this blatantly abusive spam style of mailings, not because they are obnoxious but because they are an unnecessary form of e-commerce torture. Rethink, my young man, before following your marketing nose. There are more stealthy and less abusive/spammy ways to sell your thingies.

RP

There are 10 steps I take to find out everything I need about a prospect. You probably haven’t heard of most of these strategies. But this is some of the most important work you’ll do for your business. The better the information you gather here, the more likely you will achieve the success you dream of.

Buried Treasure Finder #1: Build a Better Keyword List

If you don’t know which keywords represent 80% of your market, you need to figure it out. Your keywords are what bring your prospective customers to your site.

You need two resources: Google’s keyword research tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) and KeyCompete (http://www.keycompete.com).

First go to Google’s tool and type in your most popular keyword to see what Google recommends and the amount of traffic it receives. Choose the 10 most popular, relevant keywords.

Next, head to KeyCompete.com.

1. Type the first keyword you got from Google into the search box.
2. You’ll see all the domains bidding for that keyword, so click on one of the top sites listed to see all the keywords that site is bidding on.
3. Write down any interesting keyword phrases – those you’ve never thought of – and click on them to see which companies are advertising with those terms.
4. Repeat with all 10 keywords.
At the end, you’ll have a killer keyword list based on the efforts of your competitors.

Buried Treasure Finder #2: Stand on the Shoulders of Your Competitors

You can learn a lot about your prospects right from your competitors’ websites.

Go to Google and type in your primary keywords one at a time. Check out the pay-per-click ads (the sponsored listings) that appear when you search for each keyword. Are there any common themes? You should certainly pick up some clues on this page; it’s a goldmine once you’ve done it a few times.

Scan the ads until the ideas and insights start percolating. Then record all your thoughts.

Next, click through to your competitors’ websites.

If your competitor happens to have sales letters on hi site, you’ve just hit a jackpot. If he happens to have great copywriters writing those sales letters… then you just hit the mother-lode. You see, if you read a sales letter through a few times, you can easily tease out the beliefs, feelings, and desires the writer was trying to target. When first starting out, you might have to read each sentence and think about it for a second. Do it anyway, because with a little practice, you’ll eventually be able to read the sales letter faster and still get what you’re looking for.

Spend some time on the site. Read the ads, skim any articles or blog entries, and look for anything that may be a clue to what your competitor believes about his visitors. Sign up for any free offers or newsletters so you can study your competitor’s marketing strategies.

When you are done, head over to compete.com, do a site profile, and pay careful attention to their search analytics. Then head over to quantcast.com and check out the site’s demographics. The site demographics may not be 100% accurate, but I do believe they’re right more often than they’re wrong. And if you look at the demographic data from each of your big competitors you should get a very accurate representation of who your competitors’ prospects are.

Buried Treasure Finder #3: Use Amazon to Reveal Your Buyers’ Thoughts

You can learn a lot about your prospects at Amazon.com. Simply use your keywords to search for the best-selling books associated with your market. Read all of the customer reviews (both positive and negative) of the books. Pay careful attention to the words the readers choose – and to the reasons they either liked or hated the book. Write down any observations or insights you have.

Buried Treasure Finder #4: Leverage Your Own Site’s Analytics

Do you already have a website? Does it get any traffic? If so, you’re sitting on heaps of highly-prized data that’s guaranteed to grow your business. (If you aren’t running analytics on your site, you should be!)

Look at your keywords report. This will show which queries brought visitors to your site. When you look at each keyword phrase, ask yourself, “What are my visitors looking for? What type of language brings them to my site? What does this tell me about my visitors’ motivation and goals?”

After that, look at your referring site report. This will answer questions like, do my visitors come from search engines or other sites, or do they arrive directly with no referrer? What do these answers tell me about their online habits? And, what does that tell me about who they really are?”

You’ll also want to segment between new visitors and returning visitors to discover:

• …which content repels first-time visitors and which content sucks first time visitors into your circle of influence. Just look at your new visitor segment, then look at the most popular pages in order of their bounce rate. Those with the highest bounce rate aren’t working – since more people are bailing off this page than any other (by the way you should fix these as soon as possible). At the bottom of the list (the lowest bounce rate) are the pages that are resonating the most with your visitors.

• …which pages are most popular with visitors who’ve been to your site before. In other words, why do visitors return to your site? Your analytics program tells you the answer, which gives you a glimpse into their core complex.

• …the keywords that bring visitors who stick around or return to your site. Just sort the most popular keywords drawing return visitors to your site and compare them to the most popular keywords drawing single visitors to your site.

And that’s just the beginning. Analyze the differences between these two groups on every metric you study. You’ll be amazed at how much insight you’ll gain in a short time.

Buried Treasure Finder #5: Find and Mine the Forums

There’s a goldmine of useful information to be mined from forums. To extract some really juicy information at breakneck speed, you need to find the popular forums in your niche. The easiest way to find them is to go to Google and search “(your primary keyword) and forum.”

A totally overlooked, fast, and easy way to get some overall market knowledge is to get the visitor profile on each of those forum sites. This is priceless information every marketer wants to know and this is how you get it: Just go to www.quantcast.com and get a profile of each forum you identified by typing in the URL of the forum. Go through the forum’s demographics by clicking the demographics tab. Make sure you print out the demographics and cut and paste it into a Word document.

Before diving into each forum, summarize the visitor based on the profile from quantcast. Then put everything you uncover on that forum into a list below your summary.

Now you have to drill down deep into the forum. Pay close attention to the threads that get the most action in views and posts. There’s a lot to be found by sniffing around. Remember, you’re looking for clues, not answers. You should be able to find clues about:

– Their purchasing hot buttons. Identify the most common questions, what they consistently ask for advice on, and the words they use to describe themselves.

– The real reason they are buying what they are buying. It’s easy – just uncover the posts that mention their goals. Pay careful attention to how they describe their goals. What do you think they’ll get out of achieving their goal – how would their lives be different afterward? How would they feel after each accomplishment?

– How best to communicate with your prospective customers. Record the words and phrases they use. Identify what gets them excited (most active posts). This will help you form a bond with them and get them to like, trust, and most importantly, buy from you.

There are many other profit multiplying insights you can glean from a forum. Keep going and explore.

Buried Treasure Finder #6: Use the Most Popular Blogs

Blogs are another amazing resource. And once again, they are overlooked by almost everyone. If you want to know the topics your prospects get excited about, and the words they use when they are excited, you can easily get it all from blogs.

1. Locate the most popular blogs on your topic by going to www.technorati.com. First type in your main keyword in the search box. Then filter your results (it’ll show up in a green box right there on top of your results) by changing the first dropdown menu from “search posts” to “search blogs.”

2. Next, run their visitors’ profiles by going to www.quantcast.com again. (If you’re game, the same summary and list method I described in the forum section applies here and it is just as powerful.)

3. Scan old posts and approximate the average number of comments. Any post with significantly more comments tells you a lot about what turns these visitors on. Read those comments and you’ll know the words they use to describe what gets them excited. For example, if you were to study StrategicProfits.com, you’d find that any time I write about procrastination we get lots of comments. In other words, procrastination is a hot topic for our readers. Don’t dismiss the posts that have far fewer comments than average. They’ll give you a clear direction on which topics to avoid.

Buried Treasure Finder #7: Magazine Stand Magazines

If there are magazines in your niche, you should be analyzing the covers every month.

You’ll also be able to spot areas of interest to your ideal customers, and gain insight into the ultimate benefits they are looking for. Some sophisticated magazines have different cover copy for different groups of subscribers. If you can identify any of these advanced marketers in your niche, pay very careful attention to both covers. What’s the same and what’s different? From this, you can identify the different bait that attracts your prospects and retains your customers.

Buried Treasure Finder #8: Delicious Search

Delicious is a great resource. Simply type in your top keywords and read through the content that’s been bookmarked the most (you can find that information in a blue box to the right of each result). Read the top bookmarked content carefully to identify what about it got it bookmarked so much. Just go to delicious.com and search under your main keywords–it’s that simple.

Buried Treasure Finder #9: Q & A Sites

Question and Answer sites are great resources for learning the problems and issues your prospects want advice on. There are tons of these sites: answers.yahoo.com, wiki.answers.com, answers.google.com, pointask.com, and many more. Just search for your keywords and see what you discover. The information you find here can easily boost your profits.

Buried Treasure Finder #10: Clicktale

How would you like to peer over the shoulder of each and every visitor to your website? Watching what they read and what they skip over? What gets them to do a double-take, and what triggers them to start scrolling? Clicktale offers a free service to get started with and you’ll love it for everything you discover. This is such a valuable tool – it’s the closest you can (legally) get to being “Big Brother.” You can learn all about it here… ClickTale.com

Who’s Your Ideal Customer?
Once you’ve used the 10 “Buried Treasure” tools, you’ll be closer than ever to answering the question, “Who is my customer?”

You really can never know too much. Knowing your customer is the central leverage point of all marketing, product development and improvements, sales, and profitability. It really is the primary determinant of your business success.

Consistently be on the lookout for clues that define your customers as accurately and precisely as you can. Try your best to know their age, education, income, position, background, etc… What do they value? What are they willing to pay for? How much are they willing to spend? What does your customer want or need that they feel they’re not getting from anyone in your industry? Why do they buy from your competitors? And what would you have to do to get them to switch to your products and services?

The big challenge for you is to do this research now.

Remember, your ideal customers are the people who are going to pay for you to live your ideal life. You owe it to yourself to know as much about them as possible before you design your profit model and build out your business blueprint.

The choice is yours. What’s it going to be? Greatness or mediocrity? Only you can choose!