CHAPTER 9 The Source - Let’s go back to 2002. A family friend had invited me and my brother to his apartment in Somerset, New Jersey. He did mention that there would be a presentation of some sort but I wasn’t paying too much mind to it.
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Soon enough, we found out it was a life insurance MLM (multi-level marketing) business opportunity presentation. But it was a completely new concept to me. To my surprise, my brother had already been exposed to it.
For some reason, we ended up not signing up but I don’t remember why. I’m sure it had something to do with being broke college kids at the time. It must have been about $200 to sign up but we didn’t.
I want to say… something around a few months later, I was in the NJIT (my alma mater) library studying when I ran into a school mate. As a common talking point, I might have uttered something to the effect of “looking to make some serious money.” “Wanna make money?” He asks. I answered “yep”. “I can show you how to make money fast.” He says. Before I knew it, I found myself at another business presentation at Newark Penn Station.
Less than a week later, I went for a full blown training on how the business worked where I found out that the “source” of all this money was people; particularly, my family and friends. After much thought, I declined to fully join the business. Of course, my school mate was disappointed because that was sales commissions being flushed down the drain.
He took the ‘L’ like a real ‘G’. I ended up joining my first MLM in 2009; about 7 years later. The timing was right; I guess. But I was presented again with the idea of my family and friends being the only “source” of life for my business.
I fully understood that money comes from only one source; and that’s people. I learned a long time ago that the revenue you are going to generate in business is already in the hands of someone. So there was no confusion there.
But having to beg my family and friends like my friend and schoolmate from 2002 did with me continued to seem like a bad idea. After all, that traffic, leads and business generation strategy didn’t work on me. Why would it work on my family and friends? But I managed to recruit my brother into partnership with me.
Great minds think alike. I was still willing to set up a business presentation at my apartment and about 22 people showed up. As a businessman with about 3 years of success at the time, selling people to come over and grab free snacks wasn’t hard for me.
Out of my 22 guests, only one person signed up. Less than 24 hours later, she called me and requested a refund. I am sure that family and friends as a “source” of business might have worked for many others before and after me. But you can’t judge me for concluding that it would probably never work for me.
So after a little bit of research, I stumbled into the magnetic marketing concept. It was presented to me as attraction marketing and another guru, Mike Dillard, also presented it as magnetic sponsoring. Well, it made too much sense. My brother also confirmed that he had stumbled into this idea while doing his own research.
We signed up for courses, training and seminars to continue to master this skill-set. In one transaction, I spent more than $600 and then it dawned on me. “I had just given money to a stranger over the internet.” The internet is the new source. This was an exciting discovery.
If we are going to be honest, this is about making money because you and I know that we can’t afford to run a business without enough revenue to justify it. So when we say “source”, we mean nothing can literally happen in digital marketing without talking about online traffic.
Exactly, how do we plan to attract visits to our websites, webpages, videos, landing pages and business. It’s not enough to set up a website in the middle of nowhere on the internet. In fact, we can’t claim that we are talking about digital marketing until we break down online traffic generation.
As I stated earlier on in the book, more than 90% of webpages on the internet get no organic traffic. More gets no traffic at all outside the bots crawling it occasionally to determine if anything is happening over there.
For the most part, most web pages are a ghost land. And there is no real excuse for this because we know that Google is sending free traffic accounting for at least 50% of traffic on the internet as of 2022. Only 15% of online traffic is paid for. So why is your website not actively working as a “source” of new people, leads, deals, customers, clients and partners for your business?
You are already aware that an average human being goes to one place “and one place only” to research, find solutions and answers to problems; the almighty Google. So why isn’t that sounding like the source of all the goodies you need to generate from this digital marketing thing?
Forget about researching and all that boring stuff for a second. Where do you go when you are bored and just want to relax and “chill”? Be honest! Isn’t it Instagram? Oh! Sorry, I meant to say TikTok.
The good news is that you are in control of how many people you want visiting your websites. All you need is a strong enough desire and you can get it all set up in no time. I know that most people still assume that generating traffic is tech-intensive activities.
If you can order to print a pack of 500 business cards to promote your business, you can definitely go through a 3 steps process to set up a simple ad online to generate clicks over to your website. So it’s just a matter of desire.
In this time and age, I want to let you know that online traffic generation is a basic skill. Your business simply won’t make it if you are not operating at that level. It’s the equivalent of swimming against the ocean tide. I would just hope that you are an exception and in fact, know what you are doing.
There are a few exceptions. For example, there are businesses that get a steady supply of new clients from their alliances with government agencies and insurance companies. That’s fantastic as long as they understand that scalability will be limited.
But my guess is that you are reading this book because you want a better control of sourcing your business with new blood steadily. I don’t blame you. The internet is where everyone is hanging out either for leisure or to research answers and solutions.
There is no better time to jump on this as an opportunity. Just like many other opportunities that have come and gone, things will evolve with generating online traffic as well.
But you will learn in a bit that you never need to panic about that. If you master the fundamentals, it’s a transferable skill for the rest of your life as a marketer and/or an entrepreneur.
Here are a few reasons why you need to be in almost full control of how much online traffic comes to your business on a regular basis. First of all, no condition is permanent. And that same concept is true for traffic “sourcing” and generating in of itself. That means even when you fully buy into what I am saying right now, certain sources of traffic won’t continue to work forever.
So just as much as you should never count on just government contracts and leads to run your business, you should also never count on one source of traffic. Therefore it’s very much the same reason why you should be in control of how you attract new people and how much new traffic of people you attract steadily.
When you understand this concept, it will suddenly become okay and more affordable for you to make the inevitable mistakes that most people make in their business. Honestly, that’s a perpetual contradiction. You simply can’t afford to make the mistake of using the hope strategy when it comes to generating fresh business and customers.
So I guess what I meant to say is that you can afford to make mistakes related to conversion rates inside your funnel when you are generating consistent and quality traffic; remember the connection and the system. But those things become pretty much useless when you don’t prioritize consistent flow of traffic into it.
Have you ever tried to multiply anything by zero? The product is always zero right? There is no perfect sales funnel, connection and systems falling out of the skies. Never mind what we discussed in chapters 4 and 5.
If you are not generating and attracting consistent traffic through the funnel, you are not generating any data as discussed in chapter 7, you can’t test and you can’t optimize for maximized profits.
There are four different categories of online traffic sources that we have to further breakdown in a few minutes namely organic, direct, referral and social traffic.
Organic Search Traffic - This is the source of traffic of people searching for particular solutions. When they searched, a search engine result page (SERP) had one of your web pages listed and they clicked on it and were redirected to your website. A user of your website was generated for your website from organic search traffic.
Direct Traffic - This is traffic sourced from a user who types your website address directly into a web browser that loaded your web page from scratch. This user knew the exact web address on the world wide web (www). Most of the traffic generated online is not generated from direct traffic sources.
Most people you give your website address to one time will forget or lose where it is written before they get to a web browser; even though there is a web browser on their smartphone. For the most part, people will be clicking over from some other web page and redirected to your website.
Referral Traffic - This is traffic sourced from other self-hosted websites that manually links to your website. For example, if someone types www.myempirepro.com into a web browser on a device and it loads our webpage, that is considered direct traffic. And to be clear, if you are reading this book on a Kindle or PDF file and you click that link directly, that would not be considered direct traffic. That is considered a referral traffic since it’s a click redirecting from another web based content.
Social Traffic - As you probably already know, social media is one of mankind's greatest inventions. It consumes and generates so much attention because in so many ways, it represents entertainment for 4 billion plus people.
So as business owners and digital marketers, we are sharing articles, videos, photos and more to social media. When users click any of these creatives on social media generating a redirect to your website, it is considered social traffic. And yes, you probably should be taking advantage of this as a major source of traffic for your website and business.
I am just sharing these categories with you to make it easier to comprehend your experience properly when you do start to execute. So this is not a guarantee that other platforms will categorize traffic sources exactly like this. But it will be somewhat close and you will be able to generate traffic to your website on-demand after a few minutes of assessment on how any platforms’ analytics is set up.
Our website www.myEmpirePRO.com at press time generated 43.76% from organic search traffic, 26.52% from direct traffic (we have a specific domain name hybrid strategy for that), 2.29% from referral traffic, 1.03% from social traffic (which we can definitely improve on) and 25.14% from “others” all in the last 28 days alone. A total of 1,012 new users.
“Others” traffic sources are simply traffic sources that the robots were not able to categorize properly. Always remember that digital marketing will never be perfect. Nonetheless, it’s the closest you will get to perfect marketing.
After the launch of this book, we will be scaling it all up even bigger because what I teach is clearly working. These are real humans with real life interests and opportunities to serve stopping by at our websites and we are going to be scaling.
But I want to share www.LOLAandOLA.com traffic sources with you as well. From 1,059 new users in the last 28 days, 77.93% came from organic search, 17.13% came from direct traffic, 0.84% came from social, 0.74% came from referral traffic.
This is what I want you to do. I want you to step up your traffic generation game. What do you sell right now? How do you make money today? Yes. You do have something that you sell even if it’s just your time by way of a resume.
And the more eyeballs your resume gets, the higher the chances that you will get a new job offer. It gives you more options to exercise which means you get to set your own prices in the marketplace. Isn’t that empowering?
It’s easy to look at everything I’ve been sharing with you as digital marketing. But it might have been harder for you to relate it to what you sell today. It doesn’t have to be. Just simply use “eyeballs” on your resume, products and service interchangeably with “traffic” or the “source.” Then it should start to make sense.
Starting today, start relating with social media and the search engines like a producer and not another consumer. As I told you earlier, there are more than 4 billion social media users in the year 2022. There is more than enough supply of consumers obviously because the whole human race is not even up to 8 billion people.
More than half of us are just consuming social media in general. What if you learn and master step-by-step how to produce social media? Are you fully and cognitively aware of the magnitude of opportunity that is when you find the value you can bring into today’s social media marketplace?
There is something that you do effortlessly but that thing is also extremely valuable to someone either hanging out on social media right now or actively searching for that same exact solution online. That is probably the value that your employer recognizes but they are paying you only 1% of what it’s worth. And I don’t blame your employer.
It’s time to get your talent, products and services in front of the people that are most likely going to value them appropriately. That’s why in the next chapter we will be breaking down “the structure”.
We are getting closer and closer to executing these multi-million dollar proven concepts for you and your business; even if you don’t already own a business.
Only a handful of people will do it. But that’s the point. The scarcity of “YOU Inc” is precisely “the source” of your fortune. If you don’t stop, I won’t stop, not only until I finish writing this book, but also until you become a success story from this book.
In the next chapter, I am going to share with you some more sources of the right people. And I will share the fundamentals that work on any platform for setting up and scaling out a 7 figure digital marketing campaign.
CHAPTER 8 The Information - About two years into my digital marketing journey, I discovered high ticket offers as a strategy. I will explain what it means to you in a second. But first, understand it’s probably going to be the defining demarcation between suffering and thriving for your bottomline.
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I had managed to become a top digital sales producer on a few platforms but it also felt like I was working too hard to make $30 commissions. To be honest, I was a little spoiled. I was waking up quite often to $219 commission notifications; sometimes more and sometimes less.
Till today, I still get random sales commission notifications from work I did years ago. But I wanted more. I came from the real estate world where I cashed up to $82,000 in one deal. I knew I had to bring 10X that type of value in order to make that type of money on one single transaction.
So I decided to create an offer with a $4,997 price point for the community I had built and sold a $47 offer to.
There are about ‘107’ $47 in one $4,997. Even though I had packaged an offer with 1,000X value, I still had a little fear whispering in my left ear.
In fact, one of the first feedback I got while delivering the sales presentation was extremely discouraging. It was a random guy in the chat who called me a joke. “Who is the sucker that will pay you $4,997 for this crap?” It was scary.
However, that same presentation created 5 sales. Let’s do some quick math. 5 sales of a $4,997 offer is equal to $24,985 from one sales presentation.
And the shocking part about that was this. These new customers told me in their application interview that they had seen the $47 offer but it was too cheap for them to even take it seriously.
Inside the last chapter, we explored data in so many ways as related to running your business in a digital age. You learned that every activity and process is an opportunity to collect data right?
How far did it go with respect to an objective? But how far should it go? We covered all these different metrics and data to collect and why we collect them. From a visit to a lead and eventually to sales.
We also touched on “views” as a metric when it comes to videos. Videos are powerful ways of connecting with web users. So it is important to collect data as these users watch videos in order to optimize the performance of these videos.
To an extent, digital marketing professionals and business owners do need to be obsessed with collecting data for optimization. But you also learned that modesty is necessary because what’s the point of collecting a bunch of data that will never be analyzed, much less used to optimize campaign performance.
Anytime a user visits one of your web properties, value is being created, transferred and distributed. In fact, money is being spent even before people actually initiate transactions as they consume content that ultimately influences transaction initiations.
So since each little mini-steps informs and influences subsequent steps in the user behavior, you learned that we need to be collecting data to measure in order to optimize for the ultimate goal.
All clicks matter when it comes to digital marketing. But all views, pageviews, actions and user behaviors matter even more. So we must collect these numbers (data) because you never know which one is going to turn to a $19,000 sale… or a $42 sale and everything in between.
In addition to collecting these data, we need to analyze and convert them to meaningful “information”. You would think that I have the confidence to try new things after that 100x revenue story I just shared with you right? Nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve also had enough experiences of losing everything because I tried new things.
The negative traumatic memories are a more impactful stronghold on the human mind. I’ve had to question my own documented abilities and success stories (millions of dollars in production) many times because of fewer bad results. So it’s not as simple as that success story might have made it seem.
While I really enjoy the passion I feel from digital marketing activities, I started to feel exhausted with the amount of hours I was unnecessarily spending on minimum wage technical activities. I started craving for opportunities to deliver big results which I knew I was capable of doing in exchange for bigger fees especially knowing that I had done it before. I can’t call this experiment.
But I was also afraid of creating a new offer that could distract me from what was already working. Distraction is real and it can cost significantly more than what you are thinking when I say that. It’s a variable that’s often underrated. I feel like I am still a victim of distraction in business. Like I said, I am a little traumatized.
As a creative mind, ideas come to me all the time and I truly believe my personal net worth would be 100 times of what it is right now if I had been able to control my creative urges a little more.
I get bored easily. And boredom can be a sign of a healthy business. Do you feel me on how much of an oxymoron that is?
So I am terrified of trying new ideas when business is working well for me even though the ideas never stop flowing. Some of these ideas could potentially 100x my revenue even with less effort but because I went broke a few times trying new things; it’s a real struggle.
As best practices in marketing, you have to test your way to the results you are looking to achieve. All the data being collected should be collected as you test variables against itself at least in 2 variations at any stop in the user or customer experience.
For example, the fear that tends to overwhelm me when it’s time to test all these ideas that I get is easily mitigated once I think about them as opportunities to test for. It starts to feel like fun. In fact, testing new ideas and variations are highly recommended.
The issues come when there is no structure to guide certain levels of creative chaos. But that problem is finally solved when you master the art and science of converting data into “information”. You can then use the information to decide on scaling the new idea or killing it.
So in my story, all I had to do was to generate a certain fraction or percentage of my traffic (we also call this visits) towards my $47 offer and whatever is left of the generated traffic towards the $4,997 offer for a period of time until I’ve generated a minimum of 100 visits in total. The idea of the 100 visits is to statistically have enough samples to make a call of the winning variation. The higher the sample-visits, the better.
In the case of this example, you collected the clicks data which is 100 visits. Some analytic tools might call this 100 users or 100 clicks. You also collected 2 additional pieces of data; 2 sales of the $4,997 offer and 19 sales of the $47 offer.
Up until this point, it’s all data. But after analyzing these data points, we found that 2 sales at $4,997 is equal to $9,994 for the bottomline and 19 sales at $47 is equal to $893. With this “information”, we can make a business decision accordingly.
This activity of converting data points to meaningful information for the purpose of intelligent business decisions is called analytics. With analytics and the information you get, you can be more objective in your approach to testing new ideas for viability and therefore reduce the overall emotions in the outcome of your digital marketing campaigns.
Remember that digital marketing is all about a user or prospect journey from the first moment they land on your website until they convert to a customer. One of the many opportunities that digital marketing presents is the ability to track, monitor and measure the user behavior throughout that experience in order to use it to optimize.
While the idea is to optimize for maximized profit ultimately, the purpose also by default is to make the experience soothing for the user. You want to be able to deliver value not just with whatever the core product is, but also with the experience.
You can analyze and you can report elaborately and also visually. Business decision makers at enterprise level will most likely not have time to be digging through so many data points that today's digital analytic tools are able to collect. So these visual representations after analysis are necessary.
Data collection, which is what we covered in last chapter, is more about the “information in quantity” which are quite also useless by themselves for business decisions. But once it is analyzed and converted to information in reports, it's about “quality information”. It can be reviewed quickly by stakeholders.
95% of businesses are still failing within their first 5 years. One of the many reasons for this is an ever evolving consumer pattern. Things get older very quickly in the digital age. With digital marketing analytics, there are patterns revealed earlier enough to pivot before it impacts the business negatively.
If you haven't noticed yet, I've used the title of this chapter to simplify the understanding of digital marketing analytics. Analytics is simply a fancy way to describe analysis and reporting of user behavior data as useful, meaningful and business decision making "information."
There are 3 types of analysis that we are generally concerned about overall. Some of these terminologies may change and evolve as you continue your digital marketing journey. However, the concept is evergreen.
And the 3 types of analysis are Acquisition, Behavior and Conversion (ABC). User data is being collected and analyzed in all of these 3 segments of a user's journey on your online properties such as your website (your main hub) or one of your main nodes such as your YouTube channel or Facebook page.
In this phase, the bounce rate (which is the rate at which users are viewing only one page in a session, an indication of low engagement), the number of pages viewed per session on average and the average session duration (which is how long they are spending on your properties) are measured. As you can see, it gets into a little more analysis of the user behavior.
For example at press time, I have pulled out more recent data for the last 30 days of our Google Analytics.
We've acquired 1,042 users of which 1,020 are new users. 1,031 sessions were initiated. Let's quickly take a closer look before I get into the "behavior" segment.
When you look at the difference between 1,042 users and 1,020 new users, that means only 22 users were repeat users. Already, I don't like that number. At least, I want as close as possible to half of our total users to be repeat and revisiting users.
Hopefully, the readers that this book attracts will help us accomplish that. We will be implementing additional measures to improve that number and I will be sharing more inside myEmpirePRO Inner Circle training.
Also, only 1,031 sessions were initiated. That's barely more than one page viewed by each user. There is art and there is science to improve on engagement. But the point of this lesson is showcased in the next set of analysis; "Behavior".
In that segment, the reports indicate a 74.48% bounce rate, 1.61 pages per session and an average session duration of 1 minute and 2 seconds (00:01:02).
With regards to “conversion” such as leads or sales generation, can we use you as an example? When you acquired this book, you became a lead for our business. At the very minimum, you gave us your contact information as indication of interest in digital marketing either as a career or 7 figure side-hustle. What do all these mean?
Well... we have a little more confirmation of our first analysis which is the fact that we need to improve on our engagement level on www.myEmpirePRO.com
The reality (and I promise... not an excuse) is that we have been working on this book and a pivot into teaching more of digital marketing as a 6 figure career and 7 figure side-hustle. We expect a sharp increase as we release more in-depth training and success stories and we will be sharing.
The main point of this chapter is to highlight the transition from last chapter which was about learning these data-points and metrics into using analytics to convert them to business intelligence. And I've just demonstrated that in real time with our own main hub; www.myEmpirePRO.com
As your first step to setting up analytics for collecting, analyzing and reporting on user behavior data, you obviously need a main hub commonly known as a website. You also need the website to be self hosted. It's just a lot more unreliable to use free blogs.
I also recommend that you build this website on a content management system (CMS) called WordPress. There is a very strong reason why WordPress powers 43% of websites online right now. One of the reasons is that it is easy to set up, plug and play.
With WordPress, you can add and remove features as it automatically updates for free. In this time and digital age, you should already expect that software and apps need regular updates. I'm sure that you notice the same phenomenon on your smartphone mobile apps. Sometimes, it stops you and makes you update before continuing to use.
WordPress is the material and structure for your online property. While WordPress is a free CMS, the online property (kinda’ like a land in real life) and its digital and easy to reference address (like www.myEmpirePRO.com) is not free. But they are extremely affordable.
For as low as $5 per month, you can be hosted online. Go to www.myEmpirePRO.com/hosting and set up your WordPress powered website right away. It's quite user-friendly and that’s in addition to the fact that you can chat with live support if you need help.
They will also help you with setting up the Google Search Console for tracking and optimizing organic traffic and Google Analytics features so that you too can start collecting and analyzing user behavior data.
If you'd rather spend money than time on user and customer acquisition to your website and online properties, you might want to check out this third party analytics tool at www.myEmpirePRO.com/clickmagick I think they offer a free trial. Don't quote me.
All of these tools are self explanatory and easy to use especially if you read this book multiple times; 10-15 times. It’s necessary in order to create mastery.
And like I said earlier, we are teaching digital marketing as a 6 figure 9-5 career and also as a 7 figure side-hustle opportunity. It's wild-open and anyone can participate either as an employee (21+ job opportunities at various levels) for businesses as a digital marketing analyst or 7 figure creator or messenger as an entrepreneur.
In the next chapter, we will be addressing a major problem. According to ahref.com, 90% of online content and websites gets no traffic; ghost-land. No one comes to these websites.
Hopefully you execute today what you've learned by setting up your very own WordPress powered professional hub online. But the worst thing that can happen is to not figure out how to be in that top 10% that's getting all the online traffic and generating all the money.
If you are not generating consistent traffic of users to your website, there is no data to collect much less to analyze, report and use to optimize. It's all useless and a waste of resources.
So we will be diving into the four categories of online traffic channels and then we will break them down to the different "sources" and media. We will talk about the pros and the cons of each one. But we also have to reference them to the resources you already have available.
One of the major issues with people that try to implement digital marketing is when they don't realize that they already participate in one shape or form. I am calling that out and we will leverage your existing activities and sources of traffic online. Then we can build on top of it.
We will also cover the pros and cons of free and paid traffic generation. Some people will hurt their chances of success going after paid traffic and the same is true for some that will chase after free traffic. We will be breaking that down as we've done with the book up till this point.
Welcome back to LOLAandOLA.com. Let’s talk about the 7 stages of an emotional affair; a sequel to “5 signs of an emotional affair”.
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Be sure to watch that video too.
As usual, we are answering your question. Feel free to continue leaving them in the comment area or send an email to questions@LOLAandOLA.com
Let’s check out this story.
“So my wife seems to be having an emotional affair with her boss.
She locked me out of her home computer a few months back (it was shared).
Just before that I noticed she'd been trying to find a way to stop her phone messages being saved in the cloud.
When I did see some of her messages she's been texting with him all times of day and at weekends.
When she went away on a trip a couple of times, he was getting pictures and texts etc. I got nothing.
He talks back with her a lot.
She's deleted a lot of the texts (presumably the worst ones??).
Some of the texts seem to be suggestive but I can't see if they lead anywhere but I don't think anything physical has happened.
It's more flirting.”
Sorry about this trauma. It’s going to take a lot of work to get out of this funk. And I am sorry you have to go through this.
Maybe understanding the stages of emotional affairs can help you put things in better perspective so you can move forward in the most effective way.
Let’s get into it.
In order for another person to occupy the space of intimacy in a relationship, there must be some type of void.
This is not to blame or assign fault away from the transgressor to the other partner but to highlight the fact that it is what it is.
If you caught your partner in this type of bad behavior, always remember it’s not your fault but that’s not equivalent to not assuming responsibility in the overall status of your relationship.
You’ve always had friends anyway. For women, they often need to feel safe and secure.
So the closest person to that when there is a void they want to fill in their present relationship or marriage are ex’s.
Ladies. Be careful with keeping friendships with your exes. It might seem innocent because after all there are stages.
You probably already know that everything feels wrong but right at the same time with this inappropriate relationship.
If you are not careful, you will eventually find yourself justifying it. Don’t wait for it because again, friendship is a seemingly innocent stage of emotional affairs.
In this stage, the transgressor is getting comfortable and starting to share intimate details with the loser on the side.
Why are they losers? It’s just the reality because you are clearly not 100% emotionally available but yet, they are hoping to build something serious usually.
There is a void as I stated in stage one but it is not the same thing as being emotionally available which is a requirement for a healthy relationship.
Not only was that lady sharing details, when she went away on a trip a couple of times, the loser was getting pictures and texts while the husband got nothing.
At this point, the marriage is in the danger zone.
What happens next? The transgressor is leaving exhibits and digital footprints on SMS, text messages and WhatsApp right?
These are now secrets which in this context can be described somewhat as lies. They have to tell more lies and create more secrets to cover up.
But there is a problem.
No matter how much they try to delete messages, it gets worse because even though… remember that story…
“She's deleted a lot of the worst texts ,the remaining seem to be suggestive.”
Yes he couldn’t see if they led anywhere or think anything physical had happened. But the mind doesn’t know that.
Up till this stage, nothing has necessarily happened physically. But the natural order of things is for the mind to engage images of going all the way through.
At this stage, the transgressor is starting to fantasize not just about physical intimacy but also about what life could be like with the side person.
The mind won’t rest or let’s flip it. The mind may not be able to comprehend the danger in all of these until a physical act has happened.
That’s why people would call it a mistake while in reality this can only be realistically described as premeditated in reality.
At this stage, the transgressor has spent a lot of energy on this side relationship. Yes. they might as well call it a relationship because it’s denial.
They’ve started to fantasize about life with this person and the last thing they want you to call the interaction is an affair.
If you don’t speak to them in a day, your mind won't rest. It’s an unhealthy dependency because you can’t really live in truth; nonetheless a dependency.
Don’t forget that the transgressor still depends on the actual partner for something hence the difficulty in just leaving as opposed to cheating.
At this stage, a transgressor is actively trying to turn a lie into a truth.
Actually, they are probably being honest since they have been intimate with another person consistently over a period of time.
There is an illusion of greener grass on the other side.
So even though it’s a dishonest lifestyle, it was filling a void and therefore feels like the truth and it’s just being actively justified.
At least, it might feel justified. It is not. That band aid must be ripped off that open and rotten wound once and for all.
Many pieces of advice on the internet will probably be conclusive and I know that you probably don’t want to end the marriage. So it’s confusing at best.
You might not know how far the affair has gone but it really doesn’t matter. Emotional affairs can hurt just as much if not more because of the fear of the unknown.
Reference our last video for recovery tips if you’ve caught your partner in this bad behavior. It’s called “5 Signs of An Emotional Affair + 5 RECOVERY TIPS”.
We share our own story inside the book "GET MY MARRIAGE BACK" which you can download for free at www.GetMyMarriageBack.com
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CHAPTER 7 The Data - In 2010, I was in a partnership with my brother and we thought we could make things move a little faster with growing the business.
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https://myempirepro.com/digital-marketing-certified-chapter-7-the-data-key-performance-indicators-examples/
--> WATCH VIDEO VERSION HERE
https://youtu.be/GXxzFDbbhng
The New Jersey Northeast Corridor train line travels all the way through our neighborhood from the greatest city in the world, New York City, to the state capital city, Trenton.
So many professionals get on and off this train all week during rush hours daily. These were the types of people we wanted as prospects for the business we were trying to build. So we thought why not print a bunch of flyers and give them out to all the people coming off the train at 5:45pm in the evening. Great idea right?
No it wasn’t. Let me explain. First of all, it was a gross assumption on our part that most people ever want to be sold unsolicited products even if it’s free. It's a red flag at best.
As they collected the flyers from us, which seems like it was done out of pity, they dumped them in the next visible garbage.
I understood it but damn; it hurt. Not only did we spend money on printing those flyers, we also spent time and even worse; a lot of emotional energy anticipating success.
Anyway, we did not get a single person from that terrible marketing to sign up. I don’t believe it was particularly because of the marketing channel. I think it was more so because there is no focused way of tracking the success or some type of progress from this activity at least for us at the time.
We just wanted to get the words out as soon as possible. But oftentimes, that’s the mindset of people who lack strategy. Marketing with no strategy? You might as well grab a lighter and burn down your money.
So we were talking about the list in the last chapter right? You learned about the mistake that has cost me millions of dollars over the years. By the way, I continue to have urges to mess with the same mistakes.
You learned that the timing is not always right for your prospect but you must set up in a way that the timing is always right for you to serve when they are ready.
How do you do that? It’s as simple as serving your prospect the old fashioned way by serving first in exchange for their contact information. That gives you the power to re-engage and re-market to them at a lesser cost.
The original discovery and exposure of your business to prospects cost you marketing dollars right? But when you focus on list building as the main objective of that front end campaign of your business, it offsets your marketing cost dramatically.
In that chapter, you learn the various ways to ensure that you are capturing leads (contact information) even when you are offering free shipping and handling. The ultimate goal is still to capture contact information and build a list of these highly targeted prospects.
This list we are talking about becomes the greatest asset of the company since money comes from only one place; from people.
You learned that it’s not just about the data, email addresses, phone numbers and people’s names. It’s more so about the fact that the individuals associated with this data have demonstrated high interest in what is being offered.
Remember. You learned that many people will attempt to sell you data online. But they will mostly be selling you useless data of prospects who haven’t shown or demonstrated interest in your offer.
At best, you will lose money in these types of activities. There are some hacks around retargeting purchased data online with major advertising platforms. It’s still a gamble.
But I wasn’t even talking about that type of data. There is a big problem.
There is nothing worse than getting excited about the extremely profitable opportunities that digital marketing presents and then losing your life savings to Facebook and Google trying to implement.
Remember that money I lost in 5 minutes? It is even easier to waste resources on marketing that doesn’t collect data. If you are not tracking the present status and performance of your marketing campaigns, how could you possibly create a plan to get you to a desired destination?
To jump on an advertising platform is one of the easiest things to do nowadays. It’s user friendly. But again, it’s just as easy to lose money. In fact, the more buoyant you are, the easier it is for you to lose money.
On the flip side, if you are broke, you would be watching every penny which takes your focus off collecting big enough samples to create a profitable business.
Most people initiating digital marketing campaigns might set up a $5 per day ad campaign and leave it running. By the time they get charged $150 on the 30th day, they suddenly realize that these advertising platforms know exactly what they are doing. They are not playing. They will take your money in a heartbeat.
At press time, Meta Platforms Inc (formerly Facebook) is worth USD $372.52 Billion and Alphabet Inc (The owner of Google) is worth a whopping USD $1.29 Trillion. They don’t need your money if you are not going to make money from advertising with them.
But also, they continue to make serious money because digital marketing works for many companies. One of the factors that separates the losers and the winners in digital marketing is data.
Every marketing activity creates some type of data. The question is are you collecting that data?
In our flyer story that I shared with you earlier, we couldn’t tell you how many flyers we printed and how many ended up in the garbage. That’s a major problem.
It’s not enough to just plan and execute a digital marketing campaign. You set a smart goal from inception right? But there are also so many stops before the destination which is probably a net profit.
How much did you spend on the campaign and how much was the revenue that was generated from it? That’s too wide of a gap to wait on executing in order to track and ensure success.
When a prospect encounters your ad for the first time, that is a discovery. An impression was created. That’s literally the first goal that we want to track.
How many impressions did your business, message or ad receive in the last 28 days, last 7 days and yesterday? The answer is data that we want to continue to collect because the more it is, the better; all things being equal. It means exposure.
When you are a novice in marketing like my brother and I were, you are marketing but you are not collecting data to measure success. And if you do, you are not doing so unless an actual sale has happened.
That’s not good enough because you are not able to troubleshoot and diagnose without involving so much emotion. But when you start collecting meaningful data as early as when an impression is created for an ad, an image, a copy or a message, you stand a better chance at tracking performance as early as possible all the way till success.
And even when data indicates an undesirable result, you are able to generate that data much faster and earlier. That also means that you are able to pivot and adjust much earlier in the direction of the results you want to create.
The answer is data and data collection. It’s just a fancy way of saying success tracking. With digital marketing, you are able to track micro-levels of success. Unmanaged expectations only lead to disappointments. So it is necessary to have ways to track and measure expectations, goals and objectives in order to avoid overall disappointments.
Without it, you will keep wasting a significant amount of your resources on marketing activities that, not just fail, but also leave you with a bad taste in your mouth; kinda like distributing a bunch of flyers that get thrown in the garbage right in front of you.
What if you are tracking how many of those flyers go in the garbage along with how many calls you get from the ones that were kept? More importantly, are you patient enough to be tracking this data? The more you add yourself physically into the process, the less chances that you even know how to track your marketing properly in the digital age.
Tracking these data allows you to identify benchmarks and baselines to track your marketing performance against. It facilitates exponential growth and reduces your chances of entertaining costly distractions across the board.
In business, there is often a confusion between methods of performance analysis. Between qualitative or quantitative analysis, which one is better? It depends on who you are asking and their general outlook on data-driven business decisions.
By tracking these numbers, you are better positioned to objectively orchestrate the results you are looking to create from your digital marketing campaigns. The data being collected becomes available for further analysis and competitive advantage. Your competitors will have a hard time matching your level of performance.
On the flip side, many emotions are involved and camouflaged as qualitative analysis when you put your heart and soul into dinosaur and old school marketing activities. You are telling yourself a lie that will consume your resources and return almost nothing.
So let’s break down 7 or 8 of the most important metrics you will encounter on a consistent basis when collecting digital marketing performance data over a period of time. The period is typically set as default at “last 28 days”. But it can also be “last 7 days”, last 90 days, last 365 days or even lifetime. Let’s identify the different metrics.
Impression - This is the number of times a digital creative (content, ad copy, image, video etc) is visible to the human eyes.
Users - This is the number of individuals that have seen a digital creative. If one person sees the same content twice, it is counted as one user because it’s the same user. On some platforms, the number of users is also called “reach”. This metric is also broken down to new and returning users. Ideally, you want both metrics to be increasing.
An increasing number of new users means you are doing a good job at attracting new eyeballs on a consistent basis. And increasing returning users means you are delivering value that’s highly engaging; potentially creating repeat customers.
Click - This is the number of times creatives are engaged with a mouse click or mobile's finger or stylus tap that actually redirects a loaded webpage to another.
View or Pageview - While the clicks we are mostly concerned about redirects the user to another webpage, it doesn’t always result in a full pageview. Pageview is the metric that measures the number of times a page is fully loaded by a user.
This is called a view if the main creative on the page is a video that autoplays at a full page load. However, not all page views lead to a video view because some videos are not set to auto play.
Lead Conversion - This the conversion metric that measures the number of user contacts that are captured for list building and future follow up; indicative of a higher interest.
Sale Conversion - This is the conversion metric that measures the number of transactions that increase revenue. On some data collection and tracking platforms, a conversion is also called an action or a goal.
Cost - This is the total amount of dollars spent on marketing and advertising. And here is a bonus but probably the most important metric.
Revenue - This is the total amount of money generated associated with, tracked or attributed to running a digital campaign.
Presently, we have two main digital marketing projects that I’d love to share with you. These are real life businesses and I’d love to share a few examples of data we are collecting with you at press time.
As a matter of fact, two email notifications came in as I am writing this chapter. They usually come in between the 1st and the 3rd day of every month from the Google Search Console team. This report is particularly received for sites that generate organic traffic from Google search.
So our first main project is myEmpirePRO.com which generated 19,700 impressions and 224 clicks in the whole of the last month. There were also 38 pages with their first impressions ever. That means Google showed these 38 webpages to their users for the first time ever.
New content achievements such as the top three growing pages generating more clicks from the search engine results page (SERP) ranking was also reported. The top two growing pages generated 5 more clicks than the previous month and the third runners up generated two more clicks than previous month’s.
Also top performing pages with the highest total number of clicks generated was also reported. The highest performing page generated 44 clicks, the second runners up generated 24 clicks and the third runners up generated 19 clicks. There is more data reported and also a button to take you into the full report hosted on the Google search console.
Our second project is LOLAandOLA.com which generated 24,600 impressions and 519 clicks in the whole of the previous month. There were also 15 pages with their first impressions ever. Again, that means Google showed these 15 webpages to their users for the first time ever.
New content achievements such as the top three growing pages generating more clicks from the search engine results page (SERP) ranking was also reported. The highest growing page generated 10 more clicks than the previous month’s, the second and third generated 8 more clicks each than the previous month’s.
Also top performing pages with the highest total number of clicks generated was also reported. The highest performing page generated 64 clicks, the second runners up generated 47 clicks and the third runners up generated 45 clicks.
We have access to these data and so much more which means we can track the performance of these digital marketing campaigns. That means we can scale the winners and kill the losers.
This is what I want you to do to start collecting these data-set for your digital marketing activities. I want you to set up two tools on your self hosted web projects. Two tracking tools set is perfect because there is no one single tracking tool that is perfect. They all have discrepancies in their collected data.
Google Search Console - These sets of tools and reports help you measure your site's search traffic and performance, fix issues, and make your site shine in Google Search results.
The data sets I shared with you from the monthly reports of our two projects are from that console. It’s particularly good for you if you want to invest time and resources into generating organic traffic for the Google search engine.
Simply go to: https://search.google.com/search-console/
Add your website information, click continue, and follow the instructions to start collecting the data. It’s free like many Google tools and modules. If the interface is a little different by the time you are reading this, just follow the instructions on the screen.
For traffic that we are generating from sources other than organic, we use a third party tracking that helps us to, not only measure clicks data, but also optimize ads and the whole sales process.
Check it out at: myEmpirePRO.com/clickmagick
It comes with more flexibility if you don’t want to depend on the reports from the ad platforms selling your traffic; avoiding conflict of interest.
What do we do with the data we are collecting? How do we leverage them to facilitate growth and better performance? That’s what we will cover in the next chapter.
We will get into generating useful information from these data sets to make better business decisions.
Do I need to remind you that 95% of businesses fail within their first 5 years? A lot of the business decisions they make are emotions-driven; that’s why. And it gets worse when they notice that they are losing money.
So you will be learning how to generate useful and presentable information that business decision makers leverage to grow sales and revenue in a digital age.
We might also talk about how to flip information into a $204,555 monthly revenue business. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn’t. But then that means there is a little probability left to assess right?
After all in this digital era, it’s all numbers, data, ones and zeros. If you are not leveraging this opportunity, it’s okay. Being average is pretty normal too.
And by the way, you can also overdo data collection and analysis. Overkill does exist when you are obsessed with tracking everything trackable.
Just like in every endeavor, modesty is key when tracking performance at every level of your digital marketing campaigns. Every performance tracking activity consumes energy and therefore must be managed.
Let’s talk about the 5 signs of an emotional affair.
Welcome back to LOLAandOLA.com.
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As usual, we are answering your question. Feel free to continue leaving them in the comment area or send an email to questions@LOLAandOLA.com
“I am 38 years old. I recently realized my 34 years old wife has had an emotional affair for the last four years.
The past two weeks have been hell for me. We've been married for 9 years and have two beautiful kids.
I caught my wife last week chatting with someone and when I confronted her she said it was just a casual talk with a friend for stress relief and that it started a few months ago.
As I dug up more evidence she has gradually admitted that the affair started four years ago and now has finally admitted that he was her ex lover in college.
She has apologized and said that she will end for good and that she is ashamed of having continued it for so long.
But I find myself obsessively rewinding all the things I did over the last four years.
She had the affair through almost half of our married life, through the birth of our second child and even when I was hospitalized.
I can’t seem to move on and have a gnawing feeling of doubt mixed with anger, jealousy and sadness.”
First of all, I am very sorry for the emotional pain this has probably caused you and your family. This is not going to be easy.
An emotional affair involves emotional intimacy with a person other than a partner that you are committed to even when it doesn’t involve physical intimacy. It can hurt just as much if not more.
As usual, we want to share the top 5 signs that you or your marriage may be suffering from an emotional affair. And then we will add 5 tips for recovery for you.
Let’s get into it.
So this sign is like two-in-one because sometimes the transgressor is also wondering if their behavior is inappropriate or dangerous.
If you find yourself fantasizing over and over about another person in a romantic way, this may be a sign of an emotional affair or a brewing one at least.
On the flip side, if you notice that your partner seems absent in the relationship, there is usually no vacuum of energy. There is a reason.
Your partner is probably intimate with another person at least emotionally. After all, we are talking about something that’s all in the mind.
But then everything in life starts from the mind.
Recovery tip number five is that it’s not your fault.
But then I am guessing we are talking about a person you love and want to nurture a better relationship with.
So “this”... not being your fault doesn’t mean you can’t assume responsibility in rekindling your relationship with a better foundation.
Naturally when a partner is involved in inappropriate behavior, they might start doing things in secret.
The concept of a secret lover is not a joke. But it doesn’t necessarily start like that. It starts long before that.
We are talking about signs right? The symptoms! That’s why you want to make sure you watch the next video on the stages of emotional affairs.
At this stage however, it’s probably becoming obvious that your partner is actively hiding something over a period of time.
If they were planning a surprise party for you, this suspicious feeling you have… probably won’t last longer than a couple of weeks.
Recovery tip number four if it’s no longer a secret is that you should take some time and space away from the relationship.
There is no good decision that can be made when you are hurting emotionally.
If you are on the receiving side of this bad behavior, you are probably starting to hear your spouse compare you to random others.
You’ve been noticing that nothing you do is good enough. But also, there is an unfair comparison with your partner’s friends, siblings or randoms.
As a transgressor, you should simply know that the grass is probably greener on the other side because someone is watering it or it’s flat-out synthetic.
It’s FAKE!
Our recovery tip number three is that you should engage wise counsel. Better yet if you can afford it, engage a therapist.
Don’t attempt to get out of this funk with common sense tactics, advice or by your own self. It’s much more complicated than right and wrong.
Ideally, your partner should be spending their gist and relaxation time with you because we are all busy with life right?
You can’t wait to come back to a partner you are in love with.
So when a partner seems like they’d rather spend hours on the phone with some other BFF who acts as their emotional tampon, it might be a sign of concern.
Likewise if you’ve noticed that you enjoy time with some old friend, especially an ex, that’s the danger zone and the end is probably not going to be good.
Recovery tip number two - If you catch your partner already, like the story I shared earlier, determine if they still want the marriage.
It’s not the determining factor if you should leave the marriage or not but it’s a condition because you can’t afford to negotiate “desire” in a romantic relationship.
So none of these signs are valid unless it’s consistent over a period of time. There is no one event that can dictate the fate of your relationship.
You must have noticed emotional absence, secrecy tendencies, unfair comparisons, inappropriate engagements with friends… all of these signs over a period of time.
As for recovery tip number one, do you still want the marriage? Rember that you can’t want the marriage more than your partner in this type of situation.
This is the first of a two-part sequel.
So make sure you are subscribed with all notifications turned on in order to get notified when part 2 “The Stages of Emotional Affairs” is released.
We share our own story inside the book "GET MY MARRIAGE BACK" which you can download for free at www.GetMyMarriageBack.com
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