Good morning! How was your weekend?

This last week, I spent a bit of time on improving my workstation workflow in the office. Of course, it also led me to nerd out and spend some money and the result is this…

A new Mac Studio with a 4-screen setup. So far, diggin’ it!

Will this new setup increase my workflow? Will I get more done… faster? Well, that’s what I’m tellin’ myself. 😉 LOL.

So, I’m sitting here basking in the glow of all these monitors. Coffee in hand. Getting over a fever (yeah, that happened over the weekend, too.) And… ready to rock a new week.

So, let’s kick things off here… starting with a packed issue of the newsletter.

Here’s what’s on the menu for this issue…

GROWTH STRATEGY: Building your product backwards.

SITE STRATEGY: Sidebar or no sidebar on your site?

TOOL OF THE WEEK: AI-generated headshots of yourself

WP TECH BUZZ OF THE WEEK: New WordPress admin panel coming?

Featured This Week

Product Creation By Working Backwards

Are you working on creating a product or membership for your business? Working on creating a new course? Or working to launch a new membership?

Here’s what I find most of the time…

People are working on their products or memberships in a vacuum of their own assumptions. And we’re biased! Since we’re the ones coming up with the ideas, we obviously think they’re great!

But, then you do all the legwork to create this “thing” you think is go great. And then you ask, “How do I sell this?”

And you create a sales page. Stick it up there. And more often than not… crickets. Nothing. Few (if any) people actually buy it.

The other issue with creating the product first is that you may inherently limit the scope of the product based on your assumptions. And we tend to have tunnel vision.

So, here’s what you do instead…

Build your product or membership backwards.

In other words, start with your offer.

Before you sit down and create any deliverables for your future customers, I recommend you stop… and write your offer. Write your sales page.

I highly suggest you go through all the various components of your offer, too. I’m talking about the stuff I cover in the Offers That Convert course in the library:

Think through things like:

What is the exact outcome they want and how do you intend to deliver it?

What’s the primary benefit and your big promise?

What are the secondary benefits? In other words, what positive effects will this outcome have for them? How will they feel? Why will it matter?

What are the features needed so they can get this outcome?

What is the benefit of each feature?

What objections will they have and how will you overcome them with components of your offer?

What’s your target price?

Why should they buy now and not later?

How will you remove risk?

Any bonuses? And for each bonus, why? Is it overcoming an objection?

I encourage you to brainstorm all this stuff before creating any deliverables. And then write your offer.

And better yet, put the thing up for sale. Yes, before you’ve created it! See if it works before taking the time.

But, even if you were just to go ahead and start creating the deliverables, the very act of starting with your offer first means that you will much more accurately create the exact set of deliverables that will back up the offer. And you were then able to create that offer with blank slate. You can create the offer solely based on the promises and what will make it attractive… and without any baked in limits because you’re trying to make the offer fit what you’ve already built.

The difference is everything.

Write your offer first.

Sidebar or No Sidebar?

Do you have a sidebar on your site?

If you do, is the sidebar on all pages and posts? Or just posts?

I’ve gone back and forth on this issue. If you’ve been following my site for awhile, you’ve probably seen the sidebar come and go several times. And as of this very writing, I do indeed have a small sidebar on every blog post.

But, honestly, it may disappear again soon. 😉 See, here’s the thing…

For the most part (and my past testing has shown this), people don’t pay any attention to blog sidebars.

In fact, in the most recent post I did about the topic, I declared the sidebar to be dead. And in fact, I actually found that the alternative I was using at the time (ConvertBox driven callouts) was converting 3.1X better than the same call to action in a blog sidebar! 

So, why the hell did I put any form of sidebar back?

Honestly… laziness. It started with a performance audit of my own site and I found that the presence of the ConvertBox script was lowering my performance scores. So, I kinda wanted to get rid of it.

(Just to be clear, I may begin using ConvertBox again. While the app has been acquired and it isn’t developing much lately, I still find ConvertBox to be one of the best and most full-featured optin systems around. You can read my ConvertBox review here if you haven’t already).

Without ConvertBox, though, I started to feel a bit of a lack of space for things. So, I ended up going against my own test results and putting the sidebar back.

Just a little sidebar! A teeny-weeny one! But… still a sidebar that (and let’s face it), people kind of ignore.

That’s the thing… no matter how you slice it, people tend to ignore the sidebar.

So, why bother with it?

People like simplicity. People like space. Cluttery sites are more difficult. Make people feel claustrophobic. Are harder on conversions. Suck on mobile. The list goes on. So…

Maybe it’s time to re-think the sidebar. Traditions are meant to be broken, right?

In terms of site design, your best bet for placement of calls to action and opt-in forms is right smack within the content itself. In context. Right where people are already paying attention.

Anything else is low-conversion window dressing.

People tend to forget, too, that a lot of people are visiting our sites on mobile. And those sidebars tend to get kicked down to the bottom of the page anyway on mobile. Literally nobody sees them! Well, why do we waste our time?

Well, cuz reasons. Or laziness. Like me. 😉 

AI Headshots?

It is nice, at times, to have professional looking headshots to stick on your website. But, how can you get them?

Usually, what we end up doing is one of two things:

We end up raiding our personal photo library for pics of ourselves and cropping out the weird stuff. 😉 

We go out and pose for photos, either having a friend take the pics or hiring a professional to do them.

Well, check out Aragon. This tool will take those selfies and personal photos of ourselves, work some AI magic, and generate professional headshots.

Now, I tried it. I paid up a few bucks and I gave it a try. And… some of the photos it generates aren’t bat at all! Others are kinda funny. 🤪 Behold a couple of examples of your’s truly…

There were a few other really cringy ones, but still…. many of them were good enough to use in the right context. It is still a little limiting and you’re not going to get different aspect ratios. But, it may be worth trying.