So Where Did The Vzine Go?

I took a break from the Vzine in July and it never really got going again due to a proliferation of visitors and house guests out here in Greece. I had been a bit disappointed with audience numbers/growth and it’s tricky and relatively expensive to produce, so I let it languish rather badly.

Until I realised my Clicks And Leads Academy membership sales were down and in the process of analysing why, I took a look at the traffic stats to my sales pages…

I realised that while the overall traffic to my website hadn’t been affected by the lack of Vzine (and it’s spinoff podcast), the numbers of warm prospects visiting those pages had HALVED! So I’m back and if you’ve missed me, do leave me a comment!

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Clicks And Leads is a “tongue in cheek” digital marketing Vzine by entrepreneur, author, podcaster, speaker, Nicola Cairncross.

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Hi, it’s Nicola here, and yes, the Vzine is back! I’m going to explain why I stopped it for a little while and I’m also going to explain why I’m starting it again.

In the meantime, it’s mid-November and it’s still glorious weather here in Greece. Interesting time of year here, because when you sit inside like this it’s actually quite cool because the houses are all made to be cooler through the long summer months.

So when you go outside, it can give you quite a shock as it’s actually pretty warm out – it’s sort of, 20, 25 centigrade in the sunshine and you get a bit disconcerted because it feels cool in the house, so you dress for winter, then you go outside, and you think, “Oh damn, I’m overdressed, it’s too hot.” So you have to wear layers at all times, which is a very sensible thing to do.

Okay, so why have I given the Vzine a rest for, well, it was supposed to be just July and then it ended up being July, August, September and October. And why have I started it again, in fact?

Well, it’s an interesting lesson in watching out what you measure, because I have no way of tracking whether this Vzine was making any difference to the rate of signups of clients at Clicks & Leads Academy or not.

Basically, to track where your leads and your customers come from right across multiple platforms you need to invest in some really heavy duty software like Wicked Reports – a very good bit of kit but it’s a big investment, and it’s a lot to set it all up. I’m not ready for it yet.

The other way you can track things, of course, is by using UTM links by using Google UTM Builder. It’s a way of adding a string of code to your URLs, so when you put your URL into things like blog posts or into ads, all sorts of things really, it shows you when things come into analytics on the URL, the UTM is shown. So if it says Facebook, paid ads, this campaign, this ad group, then you know that you’re getting leads, and especially if you’ve got your goal conversion set up in analytics, to track your UTM links, it’s a really good thing.

Also, my Drip account measures when new subscribers have come in through a UTM link as well. Because it appends that UTM link to the person’s records, so as each new subscriber comes in, I can click through and see where they came from. But it’s a pain and I’m not very good at consistently putting the UTM links on.

So when I was looking at my Vzine numbers, I could see that Vzine number one only really had about 400 views on YouTube. On Facebook, it was going great guns, because I was able to boost it, and get it in front of thousands of prospective customers and clients, and I was able to do that very cheaply on the optimise for video view Facebook ad campaign.

But then Facebook suddenly started taking against my videos, and they still are. I have to appeal pretty much every one and I just sort of gave up, really, I thought that’s a bit useless if I can’t boost it.

How many people were seeing it without boosting? About 200 or 300, I suppose? And you can make audiences out of people who watch your videos 25%, 50%, 75% of the way through. So, I sort of got a bit discouraged, I think, with the Vzine.

And you know, it’s not the cheapest thing in the world to produce and I actually find it quite hard to sit down and record these bits, and then compress them down and get them over to Phoebe.

It does give me something to disseminate across all the platforms, and it is something that gives value to people, I hope, to the right people, anyway.

So, I just gave it a little rest in the summer, and then that went into September, and that went into October, and I thought, okay, so let’s see now, I’ve had a few months off, I suddenly realised, actually, that what was happening was new customers were drying up.

I was getting customers for the big done-for-you-service fine, but the new members of Clicks & Leads Academy, which is the thing I really want to work on long term, had dried up over the summer.

Now, the problem was I didn’t what had caused that.

Was it stopping the Vzine? Was it the fact that I couldn’t advertise to a bigger audience anymore? Was it the fact that I had changed my sales page? I’d done the cardinal sin of changing three or four things at the same time, and I didn’t know what had caused the difference.

So, I started putting things back to how they were and I looked at three months before I stopped doing the Vzine, and I looked at all my analytics and my sales figures, and then I looked at the three months during the hiatus from the Vzine.

I tried to see if it had made any difference at all, because the viewing numbers were not big enough to have really made any difference. The interesting thing I found, that made me decide to start it again, was that, while the traffic to my website hadn’t decreased, noticeably at all, in the three months when the Vzine wasn’t going out, the traffic to my sales page, where I offer membership of the Clicks & Leads Academy, had halved. Wow, that’s pretty big, isn’t it?

Half the traffic to my sales page, good God. And so I thought to myself, well obviously what’s happening is, although the numbers aren’t huge on the Vzine viewing, it’s attracting really tightly targeted people who are getting to know, like and trust me, who know what my offer is, and who come and find their way to the sales page pretty quickly.

So that’s when I decided to start it up again and then I went through a load of, what’s the word I’m looking for? A load of agonising about whether we should revamp it, whether we should change the theme tune, whether we should make a new theme tune, you know, all these things,

I’m a creator and I love to create new stuff and I thought no, don’t make it a bigger deal than it has to be, just get the damn thing rolling again and see what impact it has.

So, my message for you today is, don’t change more than one thing at once on your website because you won’t be able to track the results, and B, don’t just measure things like visitors to your website. Measure visitors to your key pages and particularly, measure visitors to your sales pages, because that’s what makes the difference in your sales.

It’s not about how many people randomly visit your website. It’s about how many tightly targeted people who know, like and trust you, come and see what your offer is on your sales page.

Okay, so what’s on the blog and the podcast?

Well, it’s been a bit of a sad showing on the blog recently because there’s only been the Own It! podcast to keep it going.

We’ve got an interview with Paula Gardner, who I know from back in 2003, 2004. She got in contact when I had the hotel and she was a really cool PR person. In fact, she still is a really cool PR person, and she did some PR for the hotel in return for coming and staying at the hotel, and also getting some wealth coaching, as it was in those days, about how to make her business less dependent on her.

So we interviewed her on the podcast and she came up with some really good stuff. She’s retrained as a psychologist and she’s very interested in chaos theory. Now what’s the other thing? Happenstance theory, so if you’re interested in the law of attraction, or indeed if you’re just interested in physics and synchronicity and stuff like that, go and check out the blog.

Okay, the episode before that episode, 201, was all about why are entrepreneurs so annoying? Why do we all buy big ticket items and training courses, and then not finish them? Or try to bend the rules on how we do them? Judith’s got a particular bug bear about this, so go and check that one out. It’s got a great picture of an owl, that episode, I really enjoyed choosing the picture on that one.

And before that, it was our 200th show. Yes, we’ve done 200 episodes of Own It! The Podcast, and iTunes has rewarded us, by moving us up from number 79 in the What’s Hot charts, to number 73! Wahey! So,that’ll bring in a lot of new listeners, I don’t think. So yeah, just go and check it all out and if you’ve got any ideas for anything you’d like me to cover in future episodes, then you can come along to my contact page and I’ve got a mechanism on there called Leave A Message, it’s a Speakpipe app, and you can leave an audio message, so you don’t even have to type it out. Give us a shout, and we’ll try and cover your challenge on the show too.

That’s it for this week. I hope you liked the Vzine being back. Do let me know in the comments as feedback is really, really helpful. Speak to you soon. Bye!

Creative Direction & Video Editing
Phoebe Soremekun

Intro Music
Pool Cosby

Incidental Music
Ehrling – Palm Trees (Vlog No Copyright Music)
[No Copyright Music] Happy Life – FREDJI
Earth Tones – Hpnotic718 (No Copyright Music)

Drone footage of The Mani
Georgios Ser-Aouas

Check out more videos on my YouTube channel

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