Landlord Marketing Letter About This Tool: Use This: Fill & Download for Free

Being a landlord (the only sure way to actually benefit employees) is not a walk in the park.Each jurisdiction (each town, not just each state) has its own rules and regulations and tenants’ rights vary based on that. This means employing an army of attorneys and not being shy about evicting tenants/ employees which can be of questionable benefit to the employees and companies and their public image.In other words, it’s messy and expensive to maintain (landlords have responsibilities) and returns would only come from long-term employees - in US specifically, this will mean having an agreement to retain someone for a set duration of months/years, while it could be best if those parties part ways in short order (no one wins here and future benefits to the company are not assured).If you’re imagining that companies go the way of “free lunches” and subsidize housing, well, just as those free lunches have been taken away from eligible tax deductions, the subsidies for the housing will go the same way: no benefit to employers, and employees are likely to be taxed on that amount (employers paying taxes on those amounts AND employees paying taxes on those amounts too - not a win-win from accounting perspective).Increasing employees’ compensation to allow employees to remain in the designated area (close to the office) - has been mentioned in the earlier response and companies have been using this tool to attract the candidates they desire. Retaining those candidates is another matter.If someone would ask me whether it was worth working for a company who’s underpaying (based on the market conditions and the cost of living in the area), I would ask them to look elsewhere unless this person absolutely wants to work for the company in question.In the recent past, there was a public spat in a form of letters - an employee who claimed to live off a bag of rice while working for a company that didn’t pay enough for an entry-level person to maintain any standard of living. Hope you have read that already:The Yelp employee who was fired after her incendiary open letter to the CEO speaks outComplaining about low pay online ‘destroyed my life’

[A2A] What most marketers are doing is throwing something at the wall and hoping it sticks. This translates in marketing-speak to “I generate leads, then send them to a conversion tool and hope to make sales.” The conversion tool can be a video sales letter, a regular sales letter, a sales phone call, a video meeting, etc.THE BIG MISTAKE MARKETERS MAKEThis, of course, is sophomoric. The junior marketer has learned there are two pieces to making money: traffic and conversion. Thus they believe the revenue equation has only two elements.Sure, it’s better than nothing. But it’s uncontrollable. If I dump 1000 leads into the funnel and send them all to my conversion tool and make 3 sales…how have I done?No idea.What side of the problem do I work on to improve performance? The traffic side or the conversion side?No idea.Consequently, what do our junior marketers do?Change EVERYTHING. At once. They hook up new traffic sources, change the web page design, move the conversion tool from a VSL to a written letter, then rewrite it again, and bring in a branding expert to redo the entire color scheme.Resulting in…completely muddying the waters so that even if they succeed and squeeze out 8 sales from the next 1000 leads in the following period…what the hell did they learn?What worked?No idea.HOW TO FIX FUNNELSAs a marketer working on improving a sales funnel, you must change only ONE element at a time and then wait to collect statistically relevant results.Yes, this is expensive. Yes, it is slow. But it is the only way to learn whether what you did had an effect or not…and therefore be able to use it again.This is also called “Barrier To Entry” and is the result of committing to the process: you learn things your competitors do not, and out-survive them because of it.As to the thinking about funnels…Traffic and Conversion are important but not enough. As we have seen, focusing on these two elements only results in a mystery: to improve results, should I work on the Traffic side or the Conversion side? IE. do I need a better quality traffic source…or would I be better to concentrate on improving something on the conversion tool?What I am about to share is something I charge for. People get on consultation calls and I give them this information. It’s currently $2100 for a 2 call package so understand it is valuable. Use it.To split up the effects of your funnel you need to discern two things. Is the quality of your traffic source good? And is your conversion tool doing its job?Most marketers couldn’t tell you. They are busy furiously paddling in the waters and churning up muck so the results get confused. The tendency is to blame the conversion tool but this is often incorrect.Getting the wrong people into your funnel has, in my eight years of doing funnel consultation calls, been the biggest factor of poor performance.If I am driving tech fans into a funnel for gardening products, it doesn’t matter how many of them I cram into there, does it. I’m never going to get great results because that traffic source is simply not a match for my offer.But if I can get people to hop over from an online ad or banner on a gardening magazine’s website or gardening forum…now we have something. It’s highly likely these people will be a fit for this offer. And I can have a strong certainty of this “fit”—a message to market fit—before I send one lead to the conversion tool.Yet most marketers will start taking massive action on their conversion tool when results are not what they hoped for.WHERE TO START IN CREATING YOUR FUNNELSo your thinking needs to begin further back. All the way to “Are the people here at this traffic source likely to be interested in my offer?” Sounds basic? Many marketers aren’t doing this. They’re dropping their ladle into whatever river of traffic they first see flowing by, and scooping those people over into their funnel.A measurement needs to be included in the middle of the funnel. The truth is we don’t just need leads: we need qualified leads.Qualified leads are people who have a need or a want (pain point) for what we offer…have a problem large enough to warrant our involvement in solving it (budget)…and have a personality we’d like to work with (in the IM world, not serial refunders; in the consulting world, not a Client From Hell.)When we measure the funnel this way:Unqualified Leads >> Qualified Leads >> Saleswe suddenly have a way to measure the effectiveness of traffic and conversion. We can separate out the elements and discern which to work on first.Let’s say we dumped 1000 leads from Hot Water Heaters Weekly into our gardening funnel. It’s not a great overlap but could be worse: we’re likely to get some homeowners but mixed in there will be plumbers, landlords, and a majority of other folks who are not our ideal customer.Since we are not sophomoric junior marketers running willy-nilly down Sales street, and have instead been trained by Jason Kanigan, we know that it is just plain dumb to send leads immediately to the conversion tool.WHAT TO DO AFTER GENERATING THE LEADWe need to qualify the leads.And as we qualify them, we can warm them up.First, we capture the lead. This basic step is missed by even experienced and corporate marketers who ought to know better—last night I spotted a Facebook post by someone who pointed out a major retailer wasn’t using pixels to continue to market to leads. That company paid for the lead…and it’s getting away. Do not underestimate the half-assedness of other people. So we send the lead from the platform we sourced it on to an opt-in page.The lead gets the chance to sign up for an ebook or free video series or Top 10 pdf or whatever. This is the first opportunity for the funnel to fall down. And the funnel falls down at every stage. It’s Barrier To Entry again…stick with it and you’ll figure out something few others have. If one opt-in doesn’t work, try another.Now that you’ve captured the lead, you can continue to market to them. Send them stories of how your customers use the product. In ecommerce, we don’t just show them the flashlight, and give them a lame features listing: that it’s 6″ long and black and lights up the night. Tell them a story about how this father used the flashlight to guide his family out of danger when the power went out—that sells.Then give them one of many opportunities to go to the conversion tool.First we want to bring them around to our point of view…why this solution is important, why it matters, why you need it in your life. Then we give them the opportunity to buy.WHAT THE MATH LOOKS LIKE (and you had better stop being scared of a little math)After the 1000 leads have been processed, let’s say the results look like this:(U)nqualified Leads / (Q)ualified Leads / (S)ales1000 / 52 / 7That’s a 5% Qualified lead ratio…about what we expected given the traffic source, right? And a 14% conversion ratio on Qualified Leads to Sales.Now your average marketer would be concentrating on the 1000 leads to 7 sales ratio and freaking out, because they don’t know any better. They’d start the furious paddling…changing everything up since they had no idea how to diagnose…and getting nowhere.Instead of worrying about the (illusory) less-than-1% conversion ratio apparent in the 1000:7 numbers, you now know that there’s really NOTHING WRONG with the Conversion side of things. It’s converting at 14% which is actually good.Where the problem lies, as you can now clearly see with what I’ve taught you, is on the Traffic side. 1000:52 ain’t good enough. We need a traffic source that has better than 5% of our target market floating around in it. This is where we’d get our biggest bang for our buck in improving.Dumping 2000 leads from Hot Water Heaters Weekly, if that’s even possible—traffic sources have caps on the amount you can send over a period of time…after all, there are only so many subscribers to our imaginary online magazine—won’t get you the results you’re hoping for. If things continue as they have, all you’d probably get is around 100 Qualified Leads and 14 or 15 Sales.TWO BIG VARIABLES IN MARKETINGThinking about Cost of Customer Acquisition and Lifetime Customer Value, the two big variables in marketing, this result likely isn’t good enough to justify the effort. Advertising in the magazine to bring those hops over…the cost of the lead capture and autoresponder series to continue to market to the leads…how does this total cost compare to the total revenue you’re getting from 15 sales?Let’s say you pay $2000 to get those banner ads, and the maintenance cost on your funnel infrastructure with the content generation cost amortized over six months is $500 per month. Over the month you drive those 2000 leads and each sale of some fancy gardening tool set is worth $50. This means you paid $1.25 per lead and a total of $2500 to make revenue of $750. Congratulations, you lost money.Even if the sale price is tripled, $150, you lose money. Fail.Now a good marketer doesn’t make their money from a single offer. There has to be an upsell, a back end offer, and subscription models are the most popular right now as you get the customer once and bring in revenue again and again for your trouble.You can use the model I’ve given you to back out from the revenue figure you want to make all the way to the activity level you need to run at to get there: you can even calculate what Cost of Customer Acquisition this funnel can support BEFORE you ever run a lick of traffic through it. Imagine the power that gives you.What smart marketers do is come up with a Planned (aka Pro Forma) performance, and then compare it to Actual data later on. Most marketers are “too busy” to do this, or “the numbers never work out”…funny how in real corporate businesses this is how it is done. Shows you immediately where the mindset of these marketers is at, doesn’t it.I’ve given you plenty to think about here. Go use it.

Q: What if Romans adopted feudalism during the empire era?Funny thing is that they actually did. Not that “the Romans” as some broad arbitrating body had any real control over the broad dynamics that controlled the changes in their social, political, and economic systems, but we’ll get to that.If you want to draw the distinction between the Roman economic system and the Medieval economic system, sure. But if you do it, be aware that there was never an abrupt moment of change or shifting over a short period of time. The transformation took place as a result of the natural evolution of socio-political-economic conditions, and it was happening all around the Roman world for centuries before what we really think of as “feudalism” really took hold. We need to address several questions here.Wait a second. Could the Romans have chosen to adopt feudalism? Would it be possible for an ancient empire to change the foundations of its socio-political-economic systems? Could it have been like the Soviets implementing communism and shaping their nation?When people think of the Roman system, they think of a centralized, top-down organized state that had control over a national economy and could divert resources, administer justice, and make decisions in an expedient manner. They conceive of ancient Rome in a similar way that they conceive of modern, industrialized nations, that many matters of economy, society, and politics across the empire were controlled and overseen by a centralized government.There is a fundamental issue with this interpretation: the ancient world was not nearly as connected as our modern world is. Historians talk all the time about how connected the Roman world was, but the networks and connections still did not approach levels that would be necessary for assumptions like these to be valid.Obviously, there was no internet, no telephones, no machine-powered forms of transportation. If you wanted to get stuff from one place to another, your options were limited to walking, using animal-drawn carts, or sailing on ships. It would have taken several weeks to send letters, the fastest form of correspondence, across a place as large as the Roman Empire.The inevitability of these limitations was that the central government of the Roman Empire, while it was powerful, had far less direct control over its provinces than it might seem from the maps. When it takes weeks to do anything far away from the center of power, coupled with a few more weeks to hear back on status updates, it is impossible to intervene on a large scale in local affairs.Don’t let this fool you. Looks can be deceiving.A cohesive “national economy” when fifty trillion different merchants and organizations are floating around? Forget it. Trying to control local markets in the provinces when people are happy with how they do things? Think again. Standardizing currency or prices when lots of people dislike your ideas? Good luck with that. Cracking down on corruption in some small towns in the provinces when good information will never reach you anyway? Fat chance.In essence, these are all the things that us modern readers take for granted that a national government should be able to do. When held to this standard, Roman Empire’s capabilities seem positively crippled. I ask you to change your frame of mind. Forget the ideas of cohesive nations and Westphalian sovereignty and modern governments. Follow me into a different world.Because of all these limitations on transportation time, an ancient government like the Roman Empire operated with a great deal of dependence on its local apparatuses. Provincial governments, powerful aristocrats, city officials, military officers.There would have been no Roman parliament or anything similar. (Not counting the Roman Senate because it was so bad at being representative of the Empire’s provinces and also at getting anything done.) In those days, it was impossible to assemble powerful decision-makers from all across Europe and have them deliberate on matters of state, all while assuring that they maintained close connections to the places and situations they came from.The Roman system could not possibly control each and every city official or landowner or military commander. These powerful people in the provinces did not have enough access to information from all around the Empire to make their decisions with the greater, Empire-wide issues of Rome in mind. As such, they operated primarily on a local level for their own constituents and their own interests.If broad economic or climatic or political shifts caused some transformation in the system, the Roman authority couldn’t have done much about it. In regards to this question about an empire-wide institution of feudalism, they certainly would have had issues with forcing a very diverse set of constituents and entities to adopt a different form of social, political, and economic organization. The Soviets decided to use communism in the 1920s, but the Romans could not have decided to use feudalism in the 100s CE, the same way that the commercialized states of Europe did not choose to use forms of capitalism in the 1700s.Okay, thanks for that. But you still haven’t said how the Roman Empire had feudalism. That seems kind of surprising to me. I always thought that feudalism happened when the barbarians destroyed the Empire.A lot of stuff to unpack here. First of all, what was feudalism? Here’s an oversimplified rundown.The European feudalism that we are taught in classrooms is mostly the type of feudalism that was in place during about 900–1250. In this system, which is terribly complex, various kings had control over vast domains, and he had the authority to request services and resources from his subjects. He controlled vast personal finances, a lot of land, and usually a private army. His numerous subjects were broken up into various groups that fell into different places on the social caste system.At the top, right under the king, were the nobles, usually the ones who hung out with the king and his family and served as his advisers. These nobles were in possession of vast estates of property that yielded them a lot of profit and even more prestige. Collectively, the king and the noble class controlled a large portion of the land in the kingdom, with the Church also owning a substantial amount of property. Keep in mind: land ownership is synonymous with power. These nobles swore their loyalty to the king, pledging their own personal resources and armies to his service whenever they were needed.Below this highest rung of nobles were a lower class that still kept many of the traits of nobility: the knights. This class was still rich and many knights owned substantial tracts of land. Other knights served as vassals to the more powerful nobles, making agreements to lease the land of the nobles for their own personal use. These agreements were usually made with the knight agreeing to march with the noble’s army on campaigns, as well as a portion of the land’s productivity.On the same socioeconomic status as the knights were people like artisans, craftsmen, and merchants. These groups became more unified and cohesive through guild systems and the commercial developments of the High Middle Ages. When cities started growing again around the year 900-1000, the beginnings of a middle class began to take form.The final class, and by far the largest, was the peasant class. There were different types of peasants. Some of them were relatively prosperous and owned some of their own property. Some were tenant farmers on a lord or a knight’s land. Many worked on the manors, or fiefs, that their lords ran; many generations of a family might live out their lives on the same plot of land as tenant farmers.Others were serfs: tied to the manors/fiefs of the lord as property, they worked a plot of land, giving much of their profitable produce in exchange for protection and lodgings. The children of a serf were born into this form of bondage; unless a serf could find the funds or the reasons to break free from the system, there was no upward mobility whatsoever.That explanation was little broad and oversimplified. I will admit that I am not as well-versed in medieval history. It will suffice, however, for our purposes.Okay, so I know what feudalism is now. But how did the Roman economy work in comparison to this? How were they different?Well, first of all, we might want to consider what the Roman economy was like, especially in its latter days. Feudalism was founded upon agreements that many of the peasants worked a lord’s land in exchange for protection and a cut of the outputs. In the Roman economy, we see very similar contracts and agreements from all regions of the Empire. Land ownership in feudal economies was mostly monopolized by nobles and knights, where peasants benefited more from making agreements to use that land rather than owning it themselves. In the Roman Empire, the monopolization of land by magnates was a key feature of the economy.During the late Roman Republic, wealth inequality skyrocketed. Rich landowners began buying up all the land in Italy that had formerly been owned by independent farmers, making massive megaplantations that were worked by slaves. Poor farmers were now unable to find work, and so they flooded into the cities while their former land was hoarded by a select few.This problem was slowly alleviated primarily through two processes. The first was land redistribution, through which some independent farmers were able to prosper and raise families. The other, far more common approach (driven by the decline of the Roman slave market) was for these poor, free laborers to make agreements with the official owners of these large landholdings, usually referred to as villas. The agreements stipulated that the farmer would work the land for the owner in exchange for lodgings and an allotment of either land for themselves or a portion of the produce, creating a new class of tenant farmers.Wait, this sounds familiar…Yes, you’re right. The state of affairs in which a bunch of rich and powerful nobles and knights controlled most of the land in feudal Europe had its origins in the Roman latifundia system. When we hear “latifundia,” we usually think of the big industrialized operations oriented toward cash crop production and run by slaves, but we forget that in conjunction to this, there was always a place for the free laborers to sign agreements and become tenant farmers. The supply of Roman slaves had decreased after prisoners of war stopped being brought in from conquest, so the owners of the large latifundia and villas were forced to make use of free labor.When the political system of the Roman Empire finally came crashing down, the protection of the Roman military disappeared. Without the assistance of the central government, local magnates, landowners, and officials were forced to do what they could to defend their holdings. Most of the old Roman villas and cash crop latifundia were destroyed, but the people were still there, and so were their systems of tenant farming. The orientation towards commercialized farming, which had only been facilitated by the security blanket of the Roman authorities, shifted to a more general survival approach.Without a central government to provide regulation and authority, the world became a lot more violent. Many of the local elites who had been powerful within the institutions of Rome now shifted their approach toward defending themselves and looking out for their own interests. They built military forces, made alliances, and became independent warlords. Those lords still needed economic productivity on their lands, and they found that labor not through the slave, but through the peasant tenant farmer. Rather than working for profit or to have a job like he was before, however, the peasant was now working in exchange for the protection of the lord.When the Roman government was destroyed, the security that the Roman world had provided was removed. Every peasant, every soldier, every landowner, every town and city would have to look out for him/her/itself. The best way to do this, of course, was through the system of tenant farming and social-political-economic contracts that had already been well-established as a developing trend for centuries. The tenant farming agreements of the mid-to-late Roman Empire allowed for a seamless transition into feudalism once the authority of Rome was broken.You might also be interested to know that the economic decline that went hand in hand with feudalism was well underway in the Roman world centuries before the final fall.We can travel back to the Third Century when a generational crisis was gripping the entire Roman world. Coinage was horribly debased to pay the army, resulting in many areas abandoning currency and reverting to bartering, a trend that would reappear in the waning days of the Empire. The Emperor and his army were unable to defend all areas of the Empire at once, forcing many local nobles to take the defense of their towns, cities, and estates into their own hands.These were the beginnings of manorialism, the first time that localized units had to try operating independently of a central authority that seemed to be inexorably failing.Order was, of course, restored by a series of Emperors from Illyria, but the trends hadn’t disappeared. The great reformer Diocletian recognized just how bad things had gotten, and his taxes were not to be paid in currency, but in whatever goods and materials the person could provide. He also encouraged children to stay in the same trade and profession their parents had worked in, planting the seeds of the famous guild system.Perhaps his biggest blunder was his attempt to regulate prices with his Edict on Maximum Prices. It was a complete failure for the reasons previously stated: there was no way that a pre-industrial state could possibly enforce regulation like that over such diverse and disparate realms. He also tried to curtail the effects of trends like inflation and coinage debasement, with only limited success. I suppose it just proves that even such a visionary emperor could only do so much with the limited tools and time available to a man in the 3rd century.Diocletian had only delayed the onset of Rome’s fatal poisons. All of these trends would resurface in the late 4th and 5th centuries, mostly in the West. This time, however, the Western Empire was more militarily and economically weak than ever, and the sheer volume of tribes attempting to migrate was too much. The rickety structure of the Roman world finally collapsed.The volume and scale of trade fell massively. Currency fell completely out of use in many areas. De-urbanization was seen in many large cities as people moved to the countryside. Any semblance of central authority was lost as hundreds of different barbarian chiefs and kings claimed different tracts of land, and no one was there to stop them. Desperate peasants made agreements of perpetual servitude to the larger landlords, who were beginning to become warlords out of a necessity to defend their lands.Hopefully I have done this topic justice. I have explained that the change from the Roman economy to feudalism was a slow process, I have given a brief overview of the characteristics of feudalism, I have established a strong chronological link between the characteristics of Roman systems and those of feudalism, and I have shown that Rome was largely helpless to stop the overarching trends that drove its demise.Feudalism changed Europe forever. The development of several, highly concentrated centers of power that grew out of the contracts of feudalism meant that no one power would ever be powerful enough to unify the continent.Rome was the first state to unify the Mediterranean, and it would also be also the last.Ruins of the Roman Forum, the physical remnants of an empire that, like all things, lost its battle with Time.