June 2008

Remember the door-to-door salesmen who used to call on your house when you were a kid? I often wondered how hard those guys had to work just to make a few sales. They had the advantage of ‘being there’ with the customer so their sales pitches could not easily be ignored. But many, if not most of these face-to-face prospects would listen politely, but never buy anything.

On the web, we don’t come to the buyer, he or she comes to us. We call out to those who may be interested in what we are selling. We have at our disposal a  neon sign to call those readers who may have an interest in what we sell, it’s called a headline. The headline is the most important piece of a sales letter. The headline functions as an announcement to all ‘passers by’ just what the offer to sell is about, and most important, why the reader should stop and read more.

A headline calls to those, and only those who are interested in what we have to say- and those are the only people that interest us. Think about how you read the newspaper. You scan the headlines and stop to read more when the headline offers something that is compelling to you. You may not be interested in a story about gardening - but understand that there is some reader out there who can’t wait to find that story about trees and shrubs that you simply passed by.

Web surfers read at a more frantic pace than even newspaper readers. Your job as a marketer is complicated because visitors to web sites are used to ads, sales pitches and offers. Our job is to get them to pause and read. The most carefully-crafted ad copy is useless unless the reader stops to read. Spend as much time on your headline as on your sales copy.  Make your headline clear, but compelling - offer the reader a benefit to consider your offer. Don’t try to hide your intent - the reader knows you are selling something, make them glad they stopped to read.

My friend Robert Phillps teamed up with traffic guru Fred Black for a great 2 hour SEO audio session. I’ve waded through tons of SEO material over the past 2 years, and this interview manages to distill the important stuff down to a manageable plan of action.

Robert does a great interview with Fred, and takes you through their linking stratgegies, along with the tools and services they both used to get to the top of Google for the competitive search term ‘Internet Business’.

If you are new to SEO, or if you’re baffled by all the seemingly contradictory information out there, I highly recommend you purchase Robert’s interview.

Real estate agents comprise my biggest group of clients. I get lots of requests for help setting up websites, linking to MLS systems, etc. But when I suggest they set up autoresponders and AdWords campaigns, they usually give me a funny look - like “how much more is this going to cost me?”.

Truly, adding AdWords and an autoresponder to your web marketing activities will not ‘cost’ you - it will actually ‘pay’ you. A well-crafted AdWords campaign might cost you $50-$1000 per month, depending on your market. The payoff from AdWords is in the form of leads - and the value of that lead depends on the Realtor’s ability to convert them into a buyer or seller.

The concept is simple: get your visitor to your web page and collect their email address. Sounds easy, right? Well, that depends - on what you are giving the potential subscriber in return. Are you just saying something like - “join my email list” with a vague or non-existent benefit? Or are you offering the visitor something valuable to them in return, like a free report, free market data or something similar? 

Here are some report giveaway ideas:

• “Ten Mistakes Most Home Sellers Make”
• “How To Get Top Dollar For Your Home”
• “Home Sales Data In Yourtown, NY”

You can easily type up a 10-30 page report, create a pdf of your document (sign up for MY list on this blog and I’ll send you the software to do this FREE) - and upload it to go out with the first message of your autoresponder. Then follow up every 5-7 days with additional information.

How much does all of this cost? Only $20 a month - the most incredible deal in internet marketing today. I heartily recommend Aweber Communications. They are the absolute best in the business - and they use their product very well to promote their own service.

Take a free test drive of Aweber’s service - even if you don’t end up as a customer, it’s worth the time to observe how they promote themselves and walk you through their process - a very impressive company.

Since you spend so much time working on traffic to your ‘flagship’ blog - it only makes sense that you should be able to offer both free and premium content on the same site. I do that here on my site - and I’m ready to show you how you can do it, too. All you need is a neat little program from iDevSpot called iSubscribe.

In this video post, I walk you through step by step how to set up your WordPress blog just like I have mine- with pages that require payment via PayPal and secure login. It’s a great way to offer information to your customers who want ‘instant gratificaiton’, or who are simply in a hurry to implement a solution.

I posted earlier about this topic, but have had numerous requests for more specifc instruction - so here is a detailed, step by step video for you (about 40 min).

This is a Video E-Course post - (only $15!)

Purchase Access:

This 40 minute video presentation shows you step by step how to integrate the iSubscribe software into WordPress so you can implement a Pay-Per-Post or E-Course system (It’s the same system I’m using for this post!) Post is available an entire year for a one-time $15 fee. Pay with PayPal.

Note: my affiliates will earn 50% commission promoting my E-Courses! More info….

One of the most often overlooked aspects of long-term copywriting success is testing. Top copywriters and marketers are always be testing their successful ad copy against variations. Will shorter or longer sentences work better in a sales letter? Should the headline be changed? The only way to ever know the truth is to test. It is ultimately the buyer who decides which is best.

Don’t allow yourself to come to any conclusions about your ad copy unless it is supported by testing evidence. If you don’t have a method to test new copywriting variations and measure the results, you wont maximize your copy’s potential. The sole reason for your ad copy is to make a sale. It is not designed to enhance your image or to win any creativity contests. Your ad copy only exists to make sales. 

Don’t rely on gut instinct or the opinions of other to evaluate your ad copy. You buyers will ultimately tell which is your most effective ad copy. It doesn’t matter if you use multivariate testing or split testing, just test! Once your buyers have told you which copy is the best, make this your control copy. Now try to beat that control with something new. Often, your proven ad copy will prevail over the new copy.

Don’t let that deter you. You have to test to uncover all of your customer’s likes and dislikes. Stop guessing in your marketing efforts and start continuously testing your ad copy. Listen to your buyers in a measured and scientific way. Only trust your buyers to tell you the truth. This is the only way your will know.

Try AdTest Pro - it’s an inexpensive and very effective way to start testing.

Here is an easy recommendation if you want a ‘real-time’ web analytics solution:  StatCounter.com.

It’s free, and has tons of stats - you can even make the counter code invisible on your page.  I use Google Analytics, but I like to add StatCounter’s code to my pages as well, so I can get ‘real time’ stats - Google Analytics only refreshes their stat report daily.

StatCounter has zillions of features:

Writing good AdWords ads is always tough- you have very little space to get your message across. After you have carefully crafted an ad that is both eye-catching and relevant to your landing page - your next step should be to write a competing ad along with it - and configure your AdWords campaign to serve both ads evenly.

Your second or ‘challenger’ ad should be something truly different - a different take, perhaps a 180 from the concept of the first ad. The idea is to not let your own personal tastes govern what ads you serve - you need to let the customers decide.

Here is an example, ad #1 - this one gets lots of clicks:

Girl Power
Pink Taser C2 -Free Shipping
Bonus Pepper Spray w/Purchase
YourDomain.com/PinkTaser

And it’s competitor (a bit more conventional):

Taser C2 Protection
Free Shipping
Large Selection - Low Prices
YourDomain.com

Now go to Edit Campaign Settings and under Ad Serving, check ‘Rotate: Show ads more evenly’. Then you wait. I usually wait a couple of weeks - it might just be days if you get a lot of clicks. You can then use the free Verster tool to see if your click thru rates between the 2 ads are statistically different - and establish a ‘winner’.

Once your winner is clear, scrap the loser and create a new ad - and try to beat your new champ. Over time, you’ll improve your click through rates, and sales.

I have a great new report that explains in detail even more advanced AdWords techniques. Order “Why You Pay Too Much For Adwords” - only $7 - instant download link sent to your email!

Yes - for most sites.

Contrary to what most gurus are saying today, for sites with under 1000 unique visitors per week, simple split testing will work better for you. Why? The first is simple math. Tom Lindmeier explains it better than I could - but the bottom line, without big, stable traffic numbers and a steady, measured conversion rate, your multivariate testing results are not much better than choosing a ‘winner’ sales page at random.

Any freshman statistics student learns that for a statistical observation to be reliable, it needs to be derived from a sample size large enough to ensure reliability. If you are launching a new product or site with zero traffic to start - you are making a mistake if you are making copy writing decisions based on statistics based on just a few hundred visitors and a handful of sales. Keep in mind also, the more variables you test, the more observations you will need for a valid test. The second reason I don’t like this approach is that the software used in multivariate testing puts your sales letter into ‘cookie cutter’ mode. You have to break your approach down into predictable chunks: “ok, here is the guarantee, here is the call to action”…etc. This flies in the face of good copy writing development technique. When you are launching a new product - you need to test more than just variations on the same basic sales letter. You need a few different sales letters, that have variations in headline, appeal, target audience and content order/format. You can’t be bound to what your ’software’ says you can do with your variations and ideas.

My advice: split test 3 or 4 sales letters first - in 30 sales or so, you’ll know what overall approach is working best - then you can work out the minutiae of what color, guarantee copy, etc. converts best. John Taylor has an excellent script that is inexpensive and works well. It is better than Google’s free solution and some of the older tracking scripts like the Scientific Marketing Assistant because it keeps all of your traffic on your domain’s index page- a very important SEO advantage. Check out the sales page for my enhanced version of AdTest Pro. My enhanced version allows you to add pages to test AFTER the test has begun, and allows you to edit pages after they go live. John has kindly allowed me to resell my version of the script. Check out the sales page, or just click the button below to buy:

AdTest Pro - $9.95
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Made Through PayPal

As you build your mailing list, you should notify your mailing list subscribers about your regular blog posts. This is a proven way to build repeat traffic to your blog. Each time you post, your list gets a notice with a link to your new post. Here’s how it’s done with Aweber:

Log into your Aweber control panel, choose the appropriate list and click the Messages tab - then click Blog Broadcast.

In the rss feed box, put the url to your blog feed - in Wordpress, it’s normally http://www.yourdomain.com/feed.

Select Auto Send, # of Items = 1, basic template.

For your subject line, use something like this (all on one line): 

{!firstname_fix},

A New Blog Post:

{!rss_itemblock}{!rss_item_title}{!rss_itemblockend}

In your message box, use something like:

Hey, {!firstname_fix},

I have just posted a blog entry:
{!rss_itemblock}

{!rss_item_title}
Read more: {!rss_item_link}

{!rss_itemblockend}

To Your Success,

Carl Ringwall
Data SystemsPlus

{!contact_address}

That should do it. Post regularly, and try to keep your content relevant to your list.  If you have not tried the Aweber autoresponder service, it is highly recommended.

In a previous post, I outlined the importance of split testing the ‘big stuff’ with sales letters. Unlike multivariate testing, where you are tweaking small portions of basically the same sales page, this approach doesn’t assume you are ‘dialed in’ the the correct sales approach for the standpoints of:

• Overall Ad Appeal, i.e.:
  • Professional or ‘Regular-Guy’
  • Benefits are presented matter of fact vs. emotional 
  • Bonus-driven sale vs. product driven
• Ad Tone
  • Hard sell vs Conversational
• Ad Target Audience
  • Beginners or Experts
• Layout
  • Minimalist or busy
  • Placement of bonuses -
• Look and Feel
  • Bare bones vs. lots of graphics
  • Video clips vs. pictures

If you know your customers well, some of this testing will not be required. But if you are entering a new market, with unknown customers, you’d be wise to use a split-test script to test these concepts.

With his kind permission, we have taken John Taylor’s AdTest Pro script and added additional functionality and offer it for sale here. You can now edit your running split-test campaigns that are in-progress by adding additional sales pages, editing existing pages and deleting running pages. We feel these improvements give the script the kind of power and flexibility you will need to really test throughly.

The big advantage of this script over other similar solutions, including Google’s free slit tester, is that this script keeps all of your traffic on the index or home page of your domain. You won’t have search engines spidering and indexing your ‘test’ pages with this script, your search results will always point to your home page. This is a huge advantage for the SEO of your page plus you won’t have to keep the various copies of your test pages active to avoid broken links. Here is the order link, we have kept the price at $9.95:

AdTest Pro - $9.95
Secure Payments
Made Through PayPal