Guest Post by Ken Moorhead
I was bitten by the writing bug this week. I wasn’t sure what I needed to say, but I knew I needed to say something. I wrote nothingness for a while and finally hit a nerve with this…
What’s been going on behind the scenes with all these changes around ElizabethPW.com?
Elizabeth told me, “write what everyone thinks and no one says.” Speaking what everyone thinks and no one says is typically easy for me – especially with EPW.
There’s no humble way to say I was the catalyst for a lot of the changes that have occurred with ElizabethPW.com lately and the way Elizabeth does her business. I scrutinized everything she did, drilled her on why she did it that way, and in many cases told her she was going about this absolutely wrong. I wanted to take the opportunity to bring you all up to speed on what’s been happening because we’re going to kick into high gear this summer and involve you all more.
In a few months time, I’ve observed a lot, asked a lot of questions and pushed Elizabeth to justify a lot of the how’s and why’s of her business methods. A few things from the pre-Ken Moorhead era have stuck – obviously the core EPW brand has been preserved (something I may have obsessed over more than Elizabeth at times). But there are a lot of changes that I’ve driven and insisted upon…
New website design and functionality
“So, Elizabeth… I’m looking at your website and… what exactly is it that you do?”
Fifteen words into our first phone call, EPW and I realized there was probably a lot more work to do than we expected. Elizabeth had one strong feature on her old website – she made it easy to convert people to her newsletter. Getting people to opt-in and give permission to market to them is huge, and Elizabeth WAS (and still is!) doing this very well.
But, to be frank, everything else sucked. There was too much going on, and it was absolutely impossible to buy (or even figure out if you COULD buy) anything from ElizabethPW.com. Why? Because Elizabeth had always made the sale on a separate website. Unless you *happened* to catch a post where she linked directly to it (unlikely on most days) there was pretty much a guarantee that no sales would occur from anyone who landed on the webpage.
I insisted on a simplified frontpage – the homepage should *always* be designed for the first time visitor. Before, the user was presented with seventeen (SEVENTEEN!!!) recent blog posts, a smattering of worthless (and often broken) sidebar widgets. Now with a slick above-the-fold slideshow, everything a first time user needs is handed to them and easy to navigate.
What’s more, I insisted she pitch her programs above the fold. Now, the first time you land on ElizabethPW.com, you can find out in under three minutes what EPW does and, more importantly, what she can do to help you.
No more longform sales letters
I was honestly baffled that this was Elizabeth’s sales model. Ridiculously long copy, backstory of everything behind the product, dozens of bullet points and numbered items… all of it just creating tons of opportunity for potential customers to throw their hands up in the air and leave the page. This is particular to me, but my take is that if you can’t sell me your product in four sentences or less and give me the opportunity to buy, there’s something wrong with your product. No sale should need that level of persuasion before making an attempt to close.
Now, Elizabeth’s programs leverage her videos AND her branding. 3DaysToVideo.com (you can get there directly from ElizabethPW.com now!) was our first test of this. It uses the same design as the website, so everything’s familiar. The content is organized above the fold (see a theme?) and on every pane of the slideshow — you can buy! Hopefully fewer users feel overwhelmed by this presentation. I grilled Elizabeth for hours (just prior to the launch…ugh. That was a night.) and fought her on the length of the copy for this. I think we’re both happier with the flow of this approach and I suspect that the analytics reinforce the decision through longer on-site times and lower bounce rates.
More community involvement
Elizabeth does a lot of things well, but one of her downfalls is her insistence on always going it alone. You all comprise one of the best, most engaged communities on the web. The recent flood of guest posts wasn’t a sudden move, it was calculated strategically. EPW can only say so much before her voice gives out, and more importantly, before people stop listening. There’s been a steady trend of the growth of this community leveling off recently – she needs to rely on others to help spread the Live Your Truth message.
Guest posts are great for any blog - the guests are going to drive their subscribers to check out the post, and fresh eyes means new opportunities. It also lessens the content creation burden with multiple people contributing – EPW can spend more time per post and produce higher quality content. AND she has time to network more through guest posts on other blogs. I can’t think of ANY drawbacks to inviting guest posts, and encourage everyone to pursue it for their own blogs NOW.
Harder deadlines and less stress
Like anyone else, Elizabeth obsesses over perfecting things before pushing them to production. But that is a terrible way to build a business, especially an internet business. I let her slide on a few deadlines, but on others (like 3DaysToVideo.com) I pushed for it to go live and fix it after the fact.
Striving for perfection is admirable, but the returns on time spent for a 2% improvement when the project is already at 93%… just publish the damn thing already. You’re never going to be fully happy with it and no one’s going to know the difference, so just push it live and roll with it. What you really need is user feedback anyway, not the pride of seeing a plan completed perfectly.
Selling the click in an email instead of the product
This is one of the most recent items. Within the past two weeks I was talking with Elizabeth and remarked that I never read her newsletters anymore. A small part of this is because I’m constantly aware of what’s happening, typically before anyone else. The larger part of this (and the problem) was that the emails were too freaking long. Epic blog posts unto themselves. Longwinded content that exhausted the reader.
The mere mention of this set off the lightbulb for EPW that email newsletters are about selling the link back to the content and not about selling the content itself. Already she’s seen better activity on her emails and actually an increase in subscribers by changing the messaging from “I’m doing things X, Y and Z this week. X is starting on this day and will cost…” to “Check out this blog post on what I’m up to!”
There are more changes coming for EPW and the LYT community.
Elizabeth & I are very excited because there are some great growth opportunities ahead. I’m off the payroll but I’m still heavily involved with the goals and strategies around here; we talk constantly about what’s going on and how to approach situations as they arise. I hope you’re excited to be a part of this tribe – you’re going to be called on in the near future to get active and bring new people in to be a part of this experience!
About Ken Moorhead: When not yelling at EPW via skype, text, and telephone, Ken works in sales & analysis for social media startup Compendium in Indianapolis, Indiana. He’s 23, an MBA student, a cocktail blogger, has a degree in physics, did research for NASA, can drink EPW under the table, and claims to be both a hustler and a baller. Find Ken sharing social media & business resources, opinions, snark, and awesome yet occasionally inappropriate conversation on twitter at @KenMoorhead. (disclosure: this bio was written by EPW. #thatisall).
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