How One Stupid A/B Test That I Never Thought Would Work Created a 50% Increase In Conversions

Stupid A/B Test Creates 50% Increase

As you probably have gathered over the past few months of reading my emails
I love testing things.

There’s landing page that I have created that hasn’t undergone some form of a/b test.

It’s amazing the difference you can create with a simple a/b test.

For clarity – that’s when you divide the traffic you are getting to a page ( let’s say for example a landing page) over 2 or 3 different versions of that page to see if you can find a particular combination of words, colors, design and calls to action that perform better than others.

That is measured by a single goal: a mailing list subscription, a purchase, a facebook page like… whatever you are trying to achieve.

So on one of my sites I have done nothing but split test like crazy just for the fun of it and the other day something interesting happened…

Usually on a landing page I would be trying to achieve a signup…
So for that reason I would not normally have anything on that page that didn’t lead directly to achieving that purpose.

I like clean simple design and minimal graphics except for those that are working to convert people to my list.

So on this new page I created I had already tested the headline (which is usually the first place I start)

Then, using the best headline , I tested the call to action above the button…
Then with the best headline and the best call to action I tested the words on the button: Get instant access | watch now | load my free video etc…

All of these changes made small but noticeable differences…

Then a friend suggested something I would never have normally associated with a landing page… putting a popup with a form on the page…

Why would I not normally do this?

Well redundancy mostly… they are already looking at the page which is asking them to sign up… why would you then have a pop up which asks them to sign up?
…also I would have thought that it was an annoyance or a distraction…

As I always tell clients though – you just never know until you test it… so I tested it…

Now let me be clear: all the other changes on the page… the headline, the call to action, the button text made around 4-8% difference to conversions which was small but valuable difference…

The popup?

I can understand adding one to a blog where people are coming to read the content on that page but on a landing page???

Seems to me that it is doubling up on what’s already there… and it’s a distraction and there are all kinds of other reasons why it shouldn’t work…

But here’s what it did…

Increased registrations by 50%

I nearly fell over.

WE ARE NOT TESTING THIS POPUP – OVER A LANDING PAGE THAT SAYS ALMOST THE EXACT SAME THING TO SEE IF IT INCREASES THE WEBSITE CONVERSIONS. YOU CAN GET THE SCRIPT WE USED – HERE

Now the thing to test is whether using the same bullet points on the popup as on the page will work best or whether it’s better to use different bullets on the popup compared to the page will further increase those results.

Anyway if your business is being built on collecting prospects for your list so you can send them great information then you owe it to yourself to make sure that you have got an effective pop up working on your website.

And once you get one up and running start testing it to see if you can improve those results.

You can check out the popup script we used to do this HERE – it’s very easy to use and works brilliantly.

How 6th Grade Maths = Predictable Profit Online

How 6th Grade Maths = Predictable Profit Online

There is a generally accepted rule of thumb in the internet marketing game.

You can generally make around $1 - Per subscriber on your list - Per month…

So around $12 per year per person.

This in itself should inform most people of the importance growing your list.

But what else can we get from this?

Firstly, assuming that you are creating good, interesting & engaging content…

that you could probably afford to spend at least a few dollars getting each subscriber.

If it costs you $4 to land a subscriber - you know you are still ahead.

If it costs you $8 to get each subscriber - you are not making as much in the first year but… still ahead!

Even at $12 - at least you know that in your second year you are going to be in profit.

Now that might seem like a long time to wait to make money but think about this:

Most high st businesses take at least 3 years before they make any profit at all.

Ok… Ok, I know I’m not painting the most glamorous picture here.

This is not the “start your online business and be making a fortune by the end of the week” hype that you normally hear, but I’m telling you this for a reason.

When you hear all that hype - when they paint a picture of there being some “secret” which if you could only discover would allow you to ...blah blah blah…

The problem with that is that it doesn’t provide you with a plan you can use. If it all comes down to one “secret” then you either have it or you don’t…

And in most cases even if you have it - it’s only part of the picture.

The great thing about understanding the average customer value is that, with some simple maths you can work out what you can afford to pay for a customer.

You can, in a way, buy customers…

It’s a simple measurable way to see how you can grow your business.

It’s a plan you can implement, count on and grow a business with…

and look… no secrets!

The question is this.

If you know you can make $12 per subscriber…

and let’s say you could “buy” customers for say $5…

Q: How many do you want?

A: As many as you can afford, right?

In fact at that price wouldn’t you be throwing every spare cent you have at getting subscribers?

Now here’s the great thing about this whole plan…

You can generally get subscribers for way less than $5 each (depending on where you look)

and, if you write good content, make good offers and build a good relationship with your subscribers you can often make much more than $1 per person, per month.

Let me give you a good example…

We recently created a landing page (a lead capture page) that converted around 30% - That’s 30 subscribers for every 100 odd people that went there…

and we used a major ezine directory to find people who would send out a “solo ad” to their list.

A solo ad is a single email that goes on to a persons list advertising or telling them about your special (often free) offer.

They charged us $0.30 a click…

That’s $30 for 100 clicks to our page…

That’s 30 new subscribers @ $1 each…

Simple maths right?

All other things being equal, you can then calculate that $30 = 30 subscribers

and 30 subscribers = $360 a year

Now subtract your costs ($30) and you are $330 in profit for the year…

That’s an ROI of 9X

Show me a business, any business that can produce a 9x ROI in the first year

When you know your “figures” you can build your business predictably.

Imaging what you would be doing if you ran an ad like that every single day…

Adding 30 people a day to your list…

What about 100 people?

You see where I’m going with this?...

Using the ezine directory is just one source of traffic and there are many more things that you can do to get people to your page...but it’s a great place to start because you can order targeted buyers who you know are interested in what you are offering.

Finally 6th grade maths is paying off (*Grin*)

Mike G

http://InternetPhenomenon.com

What the #&@! is Trend Jacking?

Mastering guerrilla warfare for your business

So it was the Melbourne Cup yesterday and Australia stops for the day to watch a bunch of horses race around a track.

Lot’s or people dressed up and looked glamorous and lots of people threw money at the bookies in order to make bets.

Why is this important for your internet business?

If you had though ahead you could have found a hat supplier (because all the ladies will be wearing hats) who sells online and has an affiliate program.  Then you could have places some ads on Google or facebook and targeted women in Melbourne and sold them the hats they needed for their outfits.

OK so that’s a little left of field.

Let me give you another example…

Let’s go to America where the government shut down recently. For a full two weeks the government was closed for business. Of course when this kind of crisis happens everyone runs out and buys guns, they strip the supermarkets of food stores and start buying up survival gear.

Also Bible sales are up massively because of the crisis.

How easy do you think it would be to sell people on any of those items if you could find a supplier who was willing to pay you for some web traffic?

Perhaps that’s a little mercenary… Let’s look at one more example…

A quick search on Google trends reveals a great list of things that are either getting good traction right now or are predicted to over the next 12 months.

Google glass, smart TV, smart watches are set to take off, 3d printing & new gaming consoles means there will be new games and associated products.

let’s see…. what else…

13 of the 20 top searches are about American sporting  matches so clearly people want to watch these events, watch replays or just want to support their teams…and there are programs and products for all of those opportunities.

What I am doing here is showing you what some people call ‘trend jacking’. It’s like guerrilla warfare, or guerrilla warfare for the internet. You have to be able to think fast and move fast.

Your campaigns are never going to last long but if you get good at it you can get in make a stack of money and run it until it stops making you money… in the meantime you are already well on to the next thing.

While there is some art to this, it is at its heart, a science. And it’s a science you can learn and master. It’s the same skill that really took my business from doing around $1M  to growing rapidly expanding to well over $10M in the space of a couple of years.

In fact it doesn’t really matter what you are selling online.

You could be trend jacking, or you could be selling an eBook or a video training program… however you are making money you are going to need traffic to get to your desired target.

…and the best way to do that is to master media buying.

Mastering the skill of placing ads and banners

Once you get the hang of creating ads that attract attention and inspire action then you can drive targeted visitors to anyplace you want and this is the true source of wealth.

What’s the difference between betamax and VHS (now I’m showing my age) – the difference was numbers – more people bought VHS (for whatever reason) that the other.

More people bought iPods that other similar media players that did all the same things (and sometimes much more)

More people liked using Google than AOL or Yahoo and the rest is history.

If you can get the numbers there then you can make money.

The good thing about trend jacking is that there is often little or no competition before the trend takes off so if you are quick you can make a killing before the “Johnny come latelys” drag come flooding in and crowd the market.

Exactly the same thing happens in the stock market. A few sharp people make a fortune… then when the price gets high and 90% of the money to be made is already made…

Then the plebs all rush in thinking that the market is going up and invest their dollars just as the market is beginning to turn, only to catch the crash.

Then they complain that you can’t make money in the stock market.

How many people have you heard saying that you can’t make money online?

I heard a bloke the other day at a conference saying only the “gurus” make money online and they only do it by scamming people. To that I say RUBBISH.

He’s just missed the trend, missed the boat and not educated enough. Education is always the difference, that’s why I’m so passionate about educating myself and why I started an education company.

So make a plan to learn about media buying. Test some ideas with a small budget and measure everything. Then you will be on your way to mastering traffic.

Making money doing what the guru's do rather than what they say

Making Money Online Means Doing What The Gurus Do, Not What They Say To Do.

and there's a big difference!

I want to let you in on a little secret.

When you start to look at making money online you will encounter hundreds of so called experts telling you how to do it and selling you a product to show you how to do it.

Some will tell you one thing and some will tell you the exact opposite, and it's pretty confusing for you if you are just trying to get started…

So let's create some clarity.

Now it's true that there are hundreds of ways to make money online - those guys aren't lying but there's also one thing that they all have in common…

There's one thing that when you read between the lines shows up again and again - regardless of the strategy they personally use to make money, regardless of who the "Guru" is, there is one things that they all have in common that they do to make money online…

So the point is that you can get lost doing what the guru's are telling you to do or you can start doing what they are actually doing…

So what is this one thing... (I know I'm teasing you)...

It's product creation.

These guys are making information products which they can sell online over and over again.

I wanted to clear this up because I keep getting emails from people asking me where they should start and more importantly where they should start if they want to make big money.

It's one of those questions where people tend to not want to hear the answer - like "is Santa real Mummy? " or "Do the politicians really have our best interest at heart?"

It tends to ignite people's lack of faith in themselves and they start telling me that they don't know how to do it etc..

Product creation is not hard so let's not make it a bigger drama than it really is…

Step 1: do your research to make sure that you are creating a product that people actually want and will pay money for.

Check whether there are other products in your niche.

Check the Google keyword tool and see how many people are actually looking for information in your niche and check Alexa.com or quantcast.com to find out the demographics of your potential audience. There's no point in selling to people who have no money and won't buy your information.

Step 2: Make a list of the things that you want to teach or create the product around.

Step 3: have you got the expertise to create the product around this subject?

If you have then move on to step 4 - if you haven't then you can do one of two things: find an expert and interview them, or find an expert and outsource the product creation to them.

Step 4: Make a list of the things that you want to cover and either get the information down on paper or use one of those two ways to get the information down in a format you can sell (ebook, manual, audio recordings, video)

Step 5:Once you have the information compiled into some sort of product then you are in the position to start selling it.

As I said information products are generally made up of text, sound (audio recordings) or video.

The other option is that you can sell software. There are many people out there who have had an idea for a piece of software that fills a need out in the marketplace, have found a programmer to make it to their design brief and gone on to make a fortune.

But keep this in mind - especially if you are just starting out…

...Your product doesn't have to be some massive extravaganza. It doesn't need to be bigger that Ben Hur or perfect in every way…

It only need to answer a question, solve a problem or give people the information or skill they are looking for.

I have bought products that have been 3 pages of text and have provided more value, and I've got more benefit from than other products that have been information monsters with audios and videos and workbooks galore…

It all comes down to how well targeted your audience is and how well your information solves a problem for those people.

Obviously there are perfect people out there who have no problems and these guys are obviously not your target market - lucky there's not many of them. Just focus on those people who have a certain problem.

Once you have the information you need to build a website (very easy nowadays) write a sales pitch that will sell people on your product. (if you don't know how to do that go here) This is a critical part of the process because it's the part that will get people to take action.

And then pay for some traffic from Google... (yes there are many other ways to get traffic and  we'll talk about those on another day.)

The point is that you have ideas, you have information and there are people out there who want, need and will pay for that information.

So go back to step 1, write down a list of ideas and start doing so research to find out where the sweet spot is -  that gap in the market that you can fill.

Signed with success

Jon Giaan

P.S. The link in this email solves a problem too - The hardest part of this process is writing a convincing sales letter- one that will get people to whip out their credit card and buy buy buy.

If you don't get this right you will be leaving money on the table yet this piece of software can fix this for you in just a few clicks. Click here to see it in action.

Are You Making These Common Profit Killing Mistakes In Your Web Business?

Are You Making This Common Mistake In Your Online Business? Because It Could Be Eliminating Your Chances For Success.

Remember that baseball movie a few years back “field of dreams”?

It spawned a saying which people just love to quote… and now I’m going to do the same. Here it is…

“Build it and they will come”

You’ve heard that before right? We’ll I’m here to tell  you that although that may be true offline but it couldn’t be more false online. Yes you can build a website. You can build the most gorgeous, wizzbang, awesome website the world has ever seen…

You can be giving away the secret to live eternal, instant effortless riches and lifelong happiness… it could be the best offer the known world has ever seen and yet… there’ll be nothing but tumbleweeds and dust…

If you can ‘t find a way to either attract people directly or search engines which will in turn send people then you won’t make a red cent. It would be great if that were not the case… but it is!

Alternately, you can have a crappy website, with an average offer and an ordinary ‘run of the mill’ product and if you have the traffic… if you have a flood of people coming there seeing your offer then you will at least make some sales.

Yes, obviously it’s best of you have both…but I have seen some horrible looking websites do quite well on the sales front over the years simply because they had the traffic and did a reasonable job selling people the idea that their product was going to help them.

So, you get the order of importance here right?

1-traffic

2-sales pitch (either long form sales letter or video… or both)

3-Then …making your website pretty (which includes a logo and branding)

So let’s cut through the clutter here and have a look at traffic…

There are 3 kinds of traffic.

You can pay for it – number 1…

this means that you can totally control the flow of traffic to your website but you have to know that your sales pitch and your back-end sales are going to work. If you know that then you’ll also know exactly how much you can afford to spend on buying visitors.

If you get this wrong then it can burn a hole in your pocket very quickly.So this strategy is somewhat high risk.

You can go for organic traffic – number 2. This means that you have to do whatever it takes to attract search engines and have them rank your website for your keywords.

In the past this has been generally a recipe comprising

•  1 part know how,
•  3 parts voodoo or witchcraft,
• 10 parts hard yakka and
• generous helpings of luck.

Those that do make it to the first page of Google however have found the holy grail – a constant stream of highly targeted buyers who are looking for your information or product.

Then there’s viral traffic but this is even more hit and miss then search engine optimisation.

Problem is…

…There’s no guaranteed way to make it work… there are things that you can do to increase your chances and you can throw out tons of bait in the hope that one of them will take off and go viral but the odds are against it in most cases.

I’d normally recommend buying traffic. I’m a fan. It’s quick and you can switch it on and off at the drop of a hat. However I’ve noticed  some people getting some really good results ranking inside of Google recently and the changes that Google have made recently that so many people complained about seems to be actually helping some businesses.

You can use software like magic submitter which automates huge amounts of submission and backlinking work which reduced the hours spent on getting your website ranked down to maybe 30 mins a week. In fact you can automate certain processes inside of this ranking software so that it will run for a few weeks working to rank your website on complete autopilot.

You can see how effective this automated process is here

Of course you still need to work on getting your sales pitch right and making sure you offer is one that people will respond to and for this Google provide a free tool called Google content experiments which allows you to show several versions of your offer page to different visitors so you can see which one gets the most response.

You need to have the traffic to your website before you can test anything though and the reason I had to sit up and pay attention last week was that a friend of mine was able to rank in the first page of Google in just over a week using that submission software and a few articles he had written…

Needless to say, I was very impressed.

Whichever way you go you need to make sure you have this handled. If no one sees your website or your offer then your online business will be dead in the water. In many cases I would even suggest getting the ball rolling on this even before your website is ready.

If you wanted to be really efficient you could set up a simple landing page that asks people for their name and email address in exchange for a free report etc and delivers it even before your website is finished – then go hard on getting traffic to that page. When your page is finally launched you can at least email those people and drive an instant amount of traffic to your offer from the people on your list.

Jon Giaan
http://internetphenomenon.com

Simple Scalable Business Model

3 Success Factors And How You Can Apply Them To A Simple Scalable Business Model

I don’t know when making money online shifted from the realm of skinny, geeky, computer heads and into the realm of the “mom and pop” type kitchen table business, but it well and truly has.

There was a time when electronic gadgets were only bought by socially uncomfortable computer
science students and inspired looks of awe from no-one.

Somewhere along the way gadgets became ‘chic’, nerds became the new cool kids and the internet became the fastest way to make it rich that the world has ever seen.

People have become hungry for the latest gadget that can get them onto the internet so that they can go shopping online.

Even in the face of the ‘recession’ or the GFC and businesses were shutting their doors all over the place there was barely any change in online spending, and certainly no shortage of spending on the latest gadget…

Now I always encourage people to look at any situation with an ‘entrepreneurs eyes’… to look for the opportunity in any situation – especially in the case of a recession which quite often means that there is huge amounts of money to be made by those who can see the opportunities.

When I look at the those who are creating success online there seems to be 3 factors that they have in spades:

1. Massive action seems to be a common factor of success online and …

2. Speed of implementation is all important. There are waves to be caught and if you can get in front of the right people at the right time then making sales can be easy.

3. Education – people who invest in themselves and in their education always seems to do better than those who penny pinch everything.

As I always say ‘more education is can only improve your chances of success’

Massive action can be an issue for some lazy people but when you are properly motivated then anyone can muster up a head of steam and achieve huge things.

The biggest stumbling block I think is ‘Speed of Implementation’…

How quickly you get build a product, a website, an ad campaign and then launch to market is a huge factor. Creating the product is just downright time consuming and it really can slow down your ability to get your ideas to market and making money.

There are two main ways you can get around this…

1. You can find faster ways to create products. You can outsource your ideas and get others to make your products for you (while you focus on other things that need doing). Or you can use techniques like screen capture video – this can be a very fast way to make an info product. (I often use Snagit or Camtasia to make this kind of product. – it’s fast and has good perceived value)

or

2. You can focus on selling other people’s products. This means that you find the products online and then you find the appropriate audience and you match the two and collect commissions.

The advantage of the first option is that you own the assets and can sell them over and over however

they still take time to make and sell.

The second option’s big advantage is that you can scale up your business very quickly.

Imagine this:

You find a single product which you like the look of and you decide to market it. After a short time you get your campaigns to work and you make profit from it… Once you have got to this stage it is very easy to scale up the traffic by buying more of it using your successful campaign.

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Once this is up and running it will continue to run on autopilot, leaving you to find the next product and repeat the process.

There can be some tricky aspects to this kind of marketing but if you have the time to put into it the rewards can pay off in spades, and the beauty of it is this:

Once you get a campaign up and running and making a small amount of money you can scale it up… I know I said that but this is what it really means…

It takes no more effort to have your campaign earn $30 a day than to make your campaign to make you $300 a day or even more. Traffic is virtually limitless so when once you have the right combination of ad, audience and offer working you can just click a few buttons and start expanding that success.

Try doing that with a job… Not possible…

…remember education and speed of implementation are the two most important factors (closely followed by massive action).

You know the old saying “great work if you can get it”?

Well, there’s really nothing stopping you but yourself.

Go Get It!