E-Commerce

By John Taylor

Testing is defined in the dictionary as this…
“A procedure for critical evaluation; a means of determining the
presence, quality, or truth of something”

…and that’s exactly what it is, a way for you to determine the presence, quality and truth of every aspect of your business, in other words, a way for you to find out exactly what works and what doesn’t work, what produces results and what wastes time, what makes you money and what costs you money.

This is why it is so vital to your business.

Testing is one of the most important aspects of building a business that you can possibly do, it really is, testing can be the difference between $100 a month and $10000 a month, it can be the difference between a 1% conversion rate and a 5% conversion rate, it can be the difference between success and failure.

That may sound a lot like hype but it really is the truth, if you’re not testing aspects of your business and marketing process then you’re leaving money on the table, possibly a LOT of it.

Testing is vital when it comes to Internet business, there are so many factors involved in running web sites and marketing them that it is simply a must to test, otherwise, you may find that your dreams of building a huge business online quickly becomes something that is only ever going to be a dream.

There are a number of reasons why testing is so important:

•    You will know what advertising methods are producing
•    You will know what is bringing in the traffic and WHY
•    You will know how to get the results quickly
•    You will know how to reduce your costs
•    You will know how to increase conversion rates

There are seriously so many different reasons why you must test that I couldn’t list them all here, it would take me forever and I’m not exaggerating, nearly every tiny detail of your business and marketing process can be tested in some way in order to improve it.
Even more important than all the things listed above is this…

You can then take that data and use it on your next site and the one after that and so on!

Just think about that for a second, you put a site up, you start marketing it, you test everything you can about it until it is making the most money for the smallest investment, you now have concrete data that tells you “x produced twice the conversion rate as y”, you have data that is a result of testing and you can now use that data when you create your next site.

You can do this for every project you do, use the data you already have from your previous tests in order to make sure you get the best results even faster than before with your next project.

This is really powerful stuff, it may not seem it right now but it is.

When you use testing to improve your business you will be very surprised at just how small a change can make such a big difference.

I hope you realize just how important testing is, most marketers think that the best way to increase their sales is to increase their traffic, well, it’s true that doing that should work, however, you can probably increase your sales with the exact same amount of traffic as you have now, there’s only one way to find out and that is to TEST it!

What Is Split Testing

Split testing is a very simple concept, you basically use a script to rotate two web pages on a domain for every other visitor that comes to your site, it would then provide you with data that would help you understand which page produces better results and more importantly why.
For example, let’s say you are selling an ebook about how to relieve stress, what you would do is create two different sales pages to sell the same product, you would then use the split testing script to rotate both the pages so that they are both exposed to equal amounts of visitors, the script would then let you know which converted better and you would be able to use that one for your permanent sales page.

Can you see how profitable this can be?

You can use split testing to constantly increase your conversion rates and therefore put more money in your pocket, sometimes just the slightest change can make a huge difference to your bottom line and it’s so easy with split testing.
Let me give you an example of how profitable this can be, if your ebook is selling at $27 and your sales page currently has a 1% conversion rate, for every 100 visitors you send to it you will make $27, so after 1000 visitors you would have made $270.
Now, if you can use split testing to increase your conversion rate to just 2%, not a big change, you would instantly double your sales and your profits, so for running a simple little test you would have added an extra $270 from those 1000 visitors to your income!

What Parts Of Your Business Should You Test And Why

I cannot even begin to list all the elements of your business that you should because there is simply so many factors involved, however, I will share some of them with you that you can begin testing immediately.

Headlines
The headline on your sales page is one of the most important parts of the whole page, it is the part that gains the readers attention, builds their curiosity and interest and sucks them into the rest of your marketing message.
Testing a headline can be as simple as just changing a few words at a time, sometimes just a minor change can have a big affect on how effective it is.

For example, which one of the following two headlines do you think would be more effective:

“Discover How To Increase Your Opt-In Rate Using Simple, Proven-To-Work Methods!”
Or
“Discover How To Gain More Subscribers Using Time-Tested, Easy-To-Do Methods!”

Guess what, there isn’t really any point in guessing because that’s all it is, a guess, the only way to know which one would convert better is to test them both. Most marketers don’t do this, they just throw up their page and drive traffic to it, hoping for great results when something as simple as testing the headline could give them much better results. It literally takes a few minutes to rewrite a headline and upload it to your site yet the gains could be huge.

The Opening Paragraph

While your headline is THE most critically important element on the page because it’s purpose is to attract your readers attention and pique their curiosity, you must have a strong opening paragraph to draw your reader into your sales letter. In my extensive experience the most effective opening paragraphs are when the writer has an interesting, and relevant story to tell. People love to read and to listen to stories, especially when they themselves can relate to the situation being described. Your opening paragraph should arouse the readers interest and engage them so that they keep reading.

Images

The images you display on your web site is another easy thing to test, this could be things like: Having an ecover versus not having one Having a banner versus not having one Different titles in your banners and ecovers.  It has become common for marketers to use custom designed templates on their sites, the usual way of thinking is that it looks more professional and makes the page more appealing, well, that may be true but how do you know it isn’t having a negative affect on your sales? Just because you see someone who is successful using a nice fancy banner at the top of their sales page does not mean you should have one on your site, in fact, they might not even have tested it on their own pages.  If you have a page up that has a banner graphic on it then it would be a good idea to remove the banner and see if that produces better results, you may be surprised.  This can work for all sorts of images, not just banner graphics, you should be testing everything, otherwise you are just guessing and that is certainly not the best way to run your business.

Color Schemes

This one is often overlooked and not given significant importance, the colors you have on your web pages DO have an affect on how they appear to your visitors and I’m not just talking about how nice they look or how friendly they look, I’m talking about how they affect the way your visitors read and react to your site.

The bottom line, just because a color scheme may look nice and may seem like the logical way to go when you are creating a site doesn’t mean that it is best for your bottom line, even the ugliest sites can do better than beautiful sites in terms of income.

Again, the only true way to know is to test it.

Object Placements

Many of us display adsense ads and opt-in forms on our sites, obviously our main goal for these things is to get the most clicks and opt-ins from them, well, it may be possible for you to increase both by testing where you place them on your site.  For example, you may have an adsense skyscraper going down the right hand side of your site, how do you know you wouldn’t get more clicks if it was a block in the top left? You may have an opt-in form at the bottom of your page, how do you know you wouldn’t get double the opt-ins if it was in the middle instead?  There is only one way to find out, by testing out object placements on your sites.

Traffic Sources

Let’s say you are generating traffic using five different methods, you spend an hour per day on each one and $100 in total per week.  What if you found out that only three of those methods were actually generating traffic for you and you were spending $50 on something that didn’t produce any results at all? Wouldn’t it be great to know that, this is the importance of testing. You would now be spending only three hours per day compared to five and $50 per week compared to $100 yet you would be getting exactly the same results as before!  You’ve cut your work load and costs down and you now have more time and money to spend on other business related issues, all because of a little testing.

Advertising Copy

One of the popular methods for generating traffic is using AdWords, you pay for every click-through to your web site and then try to convert that traffic. One of the most important factors with adwords advertising is the click-through rate.  If you can increase your click-through rate then you have increased your traffic, you can test the headline of the ad, the first line, the second line, the display URL and so on, with a little ad testing you might be able to double your traffic or more.

Email Marketing Elements

Email marketing is a big part of most information marketers arsenal, building contact lists and then selling to them is an important part of building an online business as it gives you the ability to regularly contact your prospects and customers and promote products to them.  Testing email marketing elements should definitely be something you do, especially if email marketing is a big part of your business, you can test things like email titles, opening paragraphs, link formats, email formats (html vs. text) and other things.  For example, if you make money by promoting affiliate links to your email list then by testing different link formats you might be able to increase the click-through rates and your income.

Order Links

Another very simple thing to test that has the potential to increase your sales, testing your order links is very easy, here are a few things you can test:
Have a text link saying “Click Here To Order” Test changing the text in the link
Having a button with PayPal on it
Having a button with credit cards on it Having the text on the button say “Buy Now” Having the text on the button say “Pay now”
These simple little changes may seem insignificant but you really never know until you test them, it would be silly not to test something as simple as this, you can change an order link in literally minutes and it could put more money in your pocket.

Scarcity

This can be a very powerful thing to use, people don’t like to be left out, they want to be in the know and part of the loop, so you can use this to your advantage on your sales page, you could only sell a limited amount of copies of your product, this means that readers will realize that if they want to get it then they have to get in quick before they are all gone, you could only give away certain bonuses for limited amounts of buyers, for example, the first 100 buyers get bonus 1, the next 100 get bonus 2 and so on but make sure the bonuses get worse as they go on.
These are just a couple of ideas for you but you should be aware that scarcity is a very powerful thing, it can make people feel that they must get your product urgently as it will not be there for much longer.

Deadlines

This quite similar to scarcity in the sense that it can create that sense of urgency in your prospects mind, it’s also very simple to put to use.
If you are about to launch a new product and you want to sell as much of it as possible in the shortest time period then use a deadline, maybe the price will increase after x amount of days, this will make people want to get in early so they get the cheapest price or maybe you could even say that the product will only be sold for x amount of days and then never released again.
Give people a reason to get your product as soon as possible, if they know it won’t be there for long or will be more expensive the next day then they are more likely to get it right there and then.

Price

The price of your product is a big factor in the decision of your prospect, you can have all the benefits and features made clear to the reader and have them sucked into your message but most people want to know one thing - How much it will cost them!
Now, don’t think that this means the lower your price, the more you will sell as that is not always the case, sometimes increasing your price can actually make it sell more.
Just test different prices and see which ones make you the most money.

Guarantee

If you come across a product that you want and the guarantee says that you can get a refund within 3 days of purchase, would that not put you off a little, I mean, three days doesn’t sound like they are very confident in the product, why such a short time?
What if it said three months instead?
Three months to accurately use and test the product and find out just how good it is and if it was worth your investment, all the while knowing that you are safely inside the guarantee period.

Bonuses

Everyone loves getting things for free, I mean, why wouldn’t you?  This can be used to increase the appeal of your product, adding bonuses beefs up the value in your offer and can make it seem as though you are sort of doing the buyer a favor, you know when you see a sales page and it says that if you buy the product you will get x,y and z products absolutely free of charge, sounds great.  Use bonuses to add value to your offers and make it seem as though you are giving out a better deal than you should be.

What Can AdTestPro Do For You

AdTestPro is a new split testing tool that gives you the ability to test multiple pages in order to find out which one produces the best results.
For example, if you are going to put up a squeeze page for a niche market you want to start selling to then you could create two versions of the page, just word them a little differently, try different images, things like and then let AdTestPro run them, all you need to do is drive traffic to your domain name and the script will automatically rotate the pages so that each page receives the same amount of visitors.

The script will provide you with the data you need and will show you which version of the page produces the best results, then you simply go with that page or even better, create another one and see if you can beat the results, if you continue doing this then you will be constantly increasing your conversion rates.

The great thing about AdTestPro is that it is extremely easy to install and easy to set-up, this script has been created specifically for the purpose of making split testing easy for you to do, you don’t need to learn any sort of coding and there isn’t anything difficult about getting the entire thing set¬up and ready to go.

●    Easily install and set-up the program - No complicated code to worry about
●    Test everything about your web pages - Graphics, wording, layouts and more
●    Gain important data that puts more money in your pocket when used
●    Run alternate versions of the same page - Squeeze pages, sales pages, etc
●    Find out what little changes can make big differences to your bottom line

Conclusion

I hope I’ve explained the extreme importance of testing and how vital it is to the growth and profitability of your online business, testing really is one of the most important things you should be doing, you can increase your profits and cut your costs and workload just by making tiny little changes that take less than a few minutes to implement.  Trust me, I wouldn’t be telling you this if it wasn’t true, if you’re not testing in your marketing process at the moment then you are probably leaving a LOT of money on the table, don’t leave it there any longer, start testing things and I know you’ll be pleasantly surprised with what you find.

Thanks to John Taylor for this information.  Read more about John and his products at his blog.

I have spent the last year marketing online, and frankly, I’m tired. I did make some good money this past year, but I earned every penny.   I’ve marketed my own electronic products, promoted rebrandable e-books, sold on eBay, offered digital downloads, ran an affiliate program, created autoresponder messages, cloaked my affiliate links, tracked my sales, advertised on AdWords, promoted joint ventures, built an email list, created a blog, set up a merchant account, signed up for Clickbank,  optimized my search engine position, created membership sites, did one-time offers, created DVD’s marketed PLR products, created product feeds, gave away free bonuses, tested my sales copy, used friendly urls, did keyword research, optimized my robots.txt,  revised my permalink structure, created xml sitemaps, dropshipped products, wrote articles, syndicated my content, put a product on Amazon.com, sent a newsletter, submitted to social media sites, wrote paid reviews, and all of this while I regularly created fresh, engaging content on numerous blogs.  I even managed to get one of my domains banned from Google.   No wonder I’m tired.

Since I’ve done all of this stuff, I figured I could make some more money by telling you, gentle reader, how you can do it, too.  I just don’t recommend you trying to do it all in one year’s time.

I’m in the process of implementing a new e-learning site, yet unnamed - where I’ll spill the goods on how to do all this stuff, and more.

Sign up for my announcement list, and I’ll send you a free pass for the site’s grand opening.  Stay tuned for updates.

I’m very proud to announce my newest CD-ROM information product “Add A Shopping Cart To A Open Source LMS”. There has been much discussion online on the various forums and newsgroups on exactly how to add robust e-commerce to the open source LMS products. I’ve developed a method that will work with any of the popular LMS packages, and I’ve published these instructions on an interactive CD-ROM.

If you are creating a pay-to-learn web site, you have no doubt looked at the various web-based open-source LMS (Learning Management Systems) or sometimes called CMS (Course Management Systems). These programs were designed by educators, not marketers, so they don’t contain the payment solutions that marketers want to cash in on the ‘Boom’ in pay-to-learn web sites.

Add A Real Shopping Cart 

You need the flexibility of the LMS, but you also want:

• A professional-looking cart and checkout system
• The ability to use any payment processor - not just PayPal
• A pro-grade affiliate management system
• Ability to track payments
• A system that integrates with popular 3rd party systems such as autoresponders
• Professional design and a reliable system

Buy the CD-ROM for $29.95 with FREE US Shipping.

Or, Check Our Sales Page For More Info… 

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Delivering quality content to your visitors can be made easier and more effective by packaging your paid or membership section in Moodle. Moodle is an open-source Course Management System, used by thousands of schools, organizations and businesses worldwide. The software is very flexible and can be integrated easily into your own membership and payment system.

Moodle was written for the needs of educators, not internet marketers. Most of the help you need to configure Moodle will come from their excellent forums, but if you are looking for e-commerce and affiliate marketing integration answers, you won’t find much help.

I have found one solution that has shown some promise - using Moodle with a hosted shopping carts like E-Junkie. E-Junkie allows you to put shopping cart buttons anywhere - including your Moodle site. Simply pass your Moodle course number and logged in user id in your E-Junkie cart buttons - then configure E-Junkie to IPN to a script that enrolls your user with his chosen course number in Moodle.

I’ve been testing this and it seems to be working well, but keep in mind that unless you want to learn to write modules for Moodle - this type of e-commerce setup is really just a hack, and won’t be trouble-free during upgrades, etc.

Stay tuned for more on this, I may release some detailed instructions as premium content - leave a comment if you are interested.