I’ve been posting many ideas and secrets that have helped to create more than 6 million customers over my career, and I’ve been encouraging you to make comments.  Some of you have commented and shared your experiences; many others haven’t.

Can you imagine if just 10% of the members share an idea or strategy that could help other members…just one idea?

Today’s economy is one that we haven’t seen before in our lifetimes, and if we group together to help one another, we can all survive this economic downturn.
 
Let’s do it together.  Let’s help one another.  What would happen if we gave one another just one idea in answer to any question we may have regarding growing our businesses or creating customers?  I’m sure that we have a wide range of expertise within this group that would make a difference in the growth of our companies.

I want to help everyone in this group grow their business and create more customers.  If you had the opportunity to ask just one question about finding a solution to one problem you are having in growing your business, or in creating customers, what would it be?

I am hoping that when you ask the question, you will receive dozens of possible solutions to your question from the group.   Post your question in the comment section below.

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Technorati Tags: Business ideas, creating customers, customer acquisition

Last week, we were on the search for Infusionsoft’s Biggest Fan. We found them and several others who invested in the time to share why they are Infusionsoft’s Biggest Fan. We received several videos, a few blog posts and a number of Facebook updates from participants and are very thankful for everyone’s passion around this topic. If you haven’t seen these awesome submissions yet, you need to. We’re proud to announce the winners of our Biggest Fan contest!

The contest offered three prizes: one year of Infusionsoft paid on us and a Flip Mino HD video camera for two runner-ups. With that said, here are the winners of the Biggest Fan Contest:

JENNIFER BOURN, BOURN CREATIVE
INFUSIONSOFT’S BIGGEST FAN

Jennifer blogged her extensive reasons why she chooses Infusionsoft and is our biggest fan. Her blog post details what was happening before Infusionsoft, what led up to her switch to Infusionsoft, her memorable experiences at the Double Your Sales Tour, her consolidation of several systems into one and many concrete examples of why she continues to use Infusionsoft. We ultimately felt she invested a serious amount of effort into writing this piece up and that indicative she was our biggest fan.
Congrats, Jennifer, your next year of Infusionsoft is on us!

For the runner ups, it was a difficult decision. All the entries were excellent. Some were funnier than others and some were more straightforward about explaining why they are our biggest fan. Consistently, it was clear that Infusionsoft provides these users greater freedom, increased capacity and a better way of running their small businesses. We judged these two winners into two categories – the “Funniest” and the “Craziest.”

JARROD MORRIS, INTEGRITYSAFE
FUNNIEST — INFUSIONSOFT’S BIGGEST FAN

Playing on the Old Spice commercials, Jarrod dubbed over it and made a cheesy, but hilarious video. We couldn’t stop watching it. He also closes it with his passion of wake-boarding. Way to go, Jarrod, the Flip is in the mail!

BRIAN JOHNSTON, JOHNSTONSEARCH
CRAZIEST — INFUSIONSOFT’S BIGGEST FAN

Let’s be honest, we were a little shocked to see Brian’s “Vision Board” featuring snippets of our website, photos of Bob Britton and emails from Clate and Tyler. It’s clear Brian is a huge fan of Infusionsoft and even a little crazy about us. In all seriousness, Brian is focused on his success and we’re glad to be a part of it and thrilled he’s a huge fan of Infusionsoft. Enjoy the new Flip!

CASEY GRAHAM, THE CHANGE GROUP
HONORABLE MENTION — INFUSIONSOFT BIGGEST FAN

Casey and Russ beatboxed and busted a few lyrical verses based on the Pants on the Ground rap. He made a version of it for Infusionsoft. He was planning a more epic video, but was tight on time and came up with this. Because of its creativity, we’re sending you a Flip, Casey!

Thank you.

Thanks again to everyone who entered this contest. It’s awesome and glad we have a ton of people who stand behind our message, our company and our solution.

As always, stay tuned to the blog, our Facebook and our Twitter account for the buzz about Infusionsoft, our marketing tips and tutorials and even contests and prizes when we have them. Psst, there’s another one in the works soon.

[Image credit: ficken]

Every Thursday I host a weekly webinar known as Mastermind Webinars. It’s free and available to all Infusionsoft customers. As I was planning the topics for the next couple of weeks, I was a little bit stumped as to what to talk about. I looked at the topics that I have covered over the last year and realized that we’ve covered a lot of territory on the calls. The topic I chose last week was a little more personal than you might expect.

On the Mastermind Webinars, I cover topics from the absolute basics to advanced tactics like using the Infusionsoft API and everything else in between. We’ve helped customers live on calls, we’ve answered thousands of questions, we’ve had good calls, and we’ve had not so good calls. We’ve talked about Infusionsoft, HTML editors, mind-mapping software, programming languages, and online meeting tools (by the way our today’s call is about Google Analytics).

As I tried to think of something new and exciting to present on the call, I realized that I have been doing something that a lot of our customers do on a regular basis as well – Promoting Events.  For the last year, and really for my entire tenure at Infusionsoft, I have been involved in promoting our sales webinars, training webinars, product launches and live events. I’ve learned a trick or two about how to leverage the power of Infusionsoft and other traffic generating tools to make sure these events are well attended.

I also realized I have my own event coming up in September that needs a bit of promotion. Three weeks ago, I proposed to my girlfriend. We have hundreds of friends and family scattered throughout the country (small business owners call them “prospects”) that we needed to make aware of our special day. We also need to get address information from them so we can send their wedding invitations.

My fiancé and I are both active on Facebook and have the majority of our friends and family on our Friend List, so I decided to leverage that channel to drive people to our event. With the help of Infusionsoft’s Community Manager, Joe Manna, I was able to quickly setup an Event page on Facebook and a new sub list of my Facebook Friends that I wanted to invite. Inside my Infusionsoft application, I setup a Web Form to gather the mailing and email addresses and tied a Follow up Sequence to the form to remind people about the reception. I couldn’t put the form on my Event page on Facebook because of the recent changes, so I registered a domain name at GoDaddy and setup a simple WordPress site to host the lead capture form. I also put up pictures of my fiancé and me for our friends and family to see on both the Event page and the WordPress site.

On a side note, I was planning to spend the entire night before the call getting this setup. I ended up going to a movie the night before, and I didn’t get it done.  I came in a little late Thursday morning (about 8:30AM) and got the website, the Facebook page, and the Web Form setup and in place before I started the call at 9:45AM.  This stuff is super easy (and cheap) to get setup. Maybe I’ll cover that on a future call…

Once everything was set up and ready to go, I sent an invite to all of the people on the sub-list I created (I did this live on the call).  Within seconds, I had comments and visits to my website.  My User Home page has the Activity Feed widget that shows any action people in my database have done.  By the end of the one-hour phone call 25 of the people I had invited had filled out the form on our website (that number is a lot higher now).

I realize that Infusionsoft wasn’t built to “get people to come to your wedding reception”, but this goes to show that Infusionsoft can have an impact on just about anything you can imagine.  If you’ve been on my Mastermind Webinars or have attended one of our Infusionsoft Success Courses, you’ve heard me say “The process is always the same – it’s the content that changes.” Whether you’re promoting a webinar, live event, tele-seminar, birthday party, or product launch the process is the same.  It’s the content that changes.

Don’t forget to register for these excellent Webinars. If you want to see what we’ve discussed in the past, check out the archives. They’re great for Infusionsoft users, but anyone is welcome to check them out.

Blackjack is one of the most widely known games in casinos and email marketing is the most common solution businesses use to market to their prospects and customers. For many, both are a game of chance not strategy. Email marketing has many similar characteristics that make marketing like walking into a casino. Are you going to take down the house or walk out empty handed?

In Blackjack, there are certain combinations of cards that are more likely to induce a favorable result. Traditional Blackjack strategy dictates to never hit above 16, to split on same-value cards and never take insurance. This is good to have fun, but will you win that way? Possibly, but it doesn’t scale to a decent win. If anything, only enough to break even or at most a couple more hands to play. Because of this limitation, more advanced Blackjack strategies exist to help players win the game.

In email marketing, there are certain characteristics that will keep subscribers happy, clicking and driving sales. That includes having a catchy subject line, killer content and having impeccable timing. However, for most marketers, it’s always a gamble as to what combination of subject lines, content and timing will work to their advantage. Thus, for most small businesses, email marketing a game of chance, not strategy.

In this analogy, email service providers and ISPs are the pit bosses and if you’re pulling shenanigans, they will politely (or not so politely) ask you to leave. They are there to ensure everyone is playing fairly according to the defined policies of that casino and the gaming commission for their jurisdiction. In the world of email marketing, email compliance managers make sure people honor the policies of their service and the legal requirements of the industry. Spam filters can be regarded as modern-day card shufflers because they both nullify the likelihood of one cheating their way to the win (or to the inbox) –  like how they limit card counting practices.

So, what’s an email ‘gambler’ to do?

Learn the game, practice and execute. No matter how many cheat-sheets, shortcuts or best practices you read, it will never substitute the actual results and lessons you learn by doing it. In addition, this requires you to be open-minded about the “game” and to be willing to try new tactics — and be willing to face failure head on.

Through practice, losing a few hands (or sending out a few low-performing emails) doesn’t seem to matter when you pay attention to the game at hand and know what works – and what doesn’t when you’re at the table – by sticking to a strategy.

I mentioned card counting earlier. This legal but frowned-upon tactic could work, but many people don’t execute it well, except for those kids at MIT. I admit my card counting is weak and I don’t do it. Nevertheless, the equivalent in the email marketing world would be to measure every click for every email and studying your subscribers’ activity so every move is calculated and expected. For that, the email marketing pit bosses want you to make every move calculated.

As you can see, both Blackjack and email marketing are similar in how ‘the game’ is played. Depending on your attitude and mindset, it can be either a game of strategy or chance. It’s up to you whether you want to leave with cash in your pocket or let the house win.

[Image credit: banspy]

After last week, it’s clear we have a ton of raving fans of Infusionsoft! We want to thank everyone who has invested their time and energy into entering our contest to find the Biggest Fan.

Last week, we kicked off a “little” contest among Infusionsoft users to tell us why they are Infusionsoft’s Biggest Fan. We received an outpouring of videos, blog posts and Facebook updates telling us why they enjoy using Infusionsoft and how they benefited from it. Here are the entries which include the many videos, blog posts, Facebook updates all wrapped up in one blog post that why people love Infusionsoft and are our biggest fans.

Tip: You can hold your mouse over the little filmstrip icon for the videos to play automatically. Try it!

VIDEOS

Jarrod Morris: Infusionsoft’s Biggest Fan

Mike Fountain:  Why I Love Infusionsoft

Bob Britton:  Infusionsoft’s Biggest Fan

Brian Johnston: Why I am Infusionsoft biggest fan!

Anthony Magee: Infusionsoft’s BIGGEST Fan

Jeremy Moskowitz: Infusionsoft’s Biggest Fan

Casey Graham: Sales on the Ground (POTG Remix)

BLOGS

Les Proctor: Why Small Business Owners Love Infusionsoft

Jennifer Bourn: Infusionsoft’s Biggest Fan

Mike Rosich: An Ode to Infusionsoft

FACEBOOK

Since Facebook is primarily text-based, we figured it was good to immortalize it by taking screenshots of what people have said about Infusionsoft.

As you can see, judging these entries will prove more difficult than originally thought. All of them are excellent and really capture the essence of why people choose Infusionsoft every month and not just “use” it, but actually grow from it. The key theme in all these open-ended answers is automation. There’s a reason why – we nail it while others force users to be the victim of their own success. We’re proud of being the preferred small business marketing automation solution by entrepreneurs and small business owners.

More importantly, we’re proud many people have entered and shared their honest accounts of why they are our biggest fan. We salute you! Stay tuned to the blog to find out who the winners are.

(Want to know when the next cool contest like this is? Like us on Facebook, Follow us on Twitter and Subscribe to the Blog to be the FIRST to be notified. We know you love us, so why not stalk us? )

[Image credit: wwworks]