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Internet Marketing Lesson: A Sheep, A Duck, And A Rooster

by on June 16, 2010 in A/B Split Testing, Copywriting, Email Marketing, Internet Marketing

A little story for you, which may not seem related to Internet marketing right away. I promise to bring it all home for you in the end.

If I were to say “Montgolfier”, most people would answer that that name belonged to the two brothers who flew the first ever hot air balloon…  and they would be close but not quite correct.

See, Montgolfier did invent the balloon and were the first to build one. However, they weren’t the first passengers on board their invention.

Since up to that point, human beings had never had a chance to become airborne, the effect of the air flight on a living organism was unknown. The Montgolfier were offered criminals as their guinea pigs. They declined. Instead, they picked a sheep, a duck, and a rooster.

Obviously, that story has a happy end. Nowadays, thousands of people get up in the air in airplanes, helicopters, gliders and, of course, hot air balloons. They don’t think twice about it and obviously don’t remember the three little creatures that paved the way to human flight.

What’s the moral of the story, you may ask? And what does it have to do with Internet marketing?

Well, imagine you are creating a new product. You’re excited. You’re so sure it’s going to be a smashing success. The website it up, the shopping cart is ready to take orders. You go ahead and spend a small fortune on the traffic and, to top it off, line up a bunch of JV partners.

The big day arrives. The traffic comes in fast and furious and…

… nothing! Your squeeze page didn’t squeeze and your sales copy didn’t sell. At least not to the extent that would be considered “reasonable”.

The money spent on advertising is gone forever. And so are the partners who vouch to never participate in your lame launches again.

That’s one possible scenario.

Now imagine doing things a bit differently.

You create a product and put together two different versions of the same squeeze page. You set up an A/B Split test and send the traffic to these squeeze pages through a link rotator, which you then promote to a relatively small in-house list (the online equivalent of the Montgolfier’s sheep, duck, and rooster.)

You generate a bunch of clicks, just enough to tell which squeeze page works better (and if it works at all). You pick the better version (“control”) and send it out to all the lists you can get your hands on.

Your affiliate partners come in and start promoting your product too. This time, the conversions are high. Everybody is making money on the upsells and everyone’s happy.

What was the difference?

It’s easy to see: Instead of trying to predict how your squeeze page would weather out in the marketplace, you did a limited test before opening the floodgates to major traffic. A small extra step in planning and testing your campaign can mean the difference between making it and not making it in Internet marketing.

In a few days, one of my JV partners will be sending out my offer to his super-big list. So guess what I’m working on now? Exactly: I’m setting up an A/B Split test for my pages that I will promote to one of my own list. And when the big traffic hits my squeeze page, I will put my best foot forward because I will know which one is, in fact, the best.

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The Easiest, Fastest, Most Overlooked Way To Double Your Pay As an Internet Marketer

by on June 14, 2010 in A/B Split Testing, Copywriting, Internet Marketing

This short article may read like a math lesson. However, its purpose is to simply show you the revenue mechanics of your Internet marketing business and help you get that “pay raise” you’ve been working so hard on for so long.

Every successful Internet marketing business has a way of collecting people’s contact details and adding them to a database. That is usually accomplished with a squeeze page.

I think it is safe to say that having a good squeeze page is critical to “making it” in Internet marketing.

Yet a lot of people don’t test their squeeze pages. They don’t tweak them to squeeze more juice out of the traffic they are getting. They don’t look at their conversion rates.

If you happen to be in that number, I hope to give you enough evidence to make testing your squeeze page a priority.

So let’s begin.

Let’s imagine that your squeeze page is converting at a very respectable 35%. You decide to conduct an experiment and test several headlines. After a series of A/B Split tests you end up with a headline that improves the conversion rate for your squeeze page by 2%.

Next, you change the graphics and the location of your opt in box that results in another improvement of 5%.

You don’t stop there and continue testing. Adding the privacy statement results in another 3% bump.

Excited, you add a testimonial. The one from a male client doesn’t seem to help that much. However, the female version results in another 3% improvement.

These numbers may seem small and insignificant. But let’s add them up.

2% + 5% + 3% + 3% = 13%

(Actually, adding the percentages here is not mathematically correct. I will spare you the calculations but if you were to do the math right you’d end up with 13.62% improvement. Think “compound interest”.)

A 13% improvement may not seem like much. However, let’s look at what’s going on. You page is now converting at (35% + 13%) = 48%. So basically if in the past your squeeze was  converting approximately one out of three clicks into a subscriber, now it converts one out of two.

This additional 13% is in reality a (13 / 35) = 37.14% improvement to your conversions.

Let’s see how this improvement may help your bank account.

With the new squeeze page, every dollar you invest in the advertising of your business goes a whole 37 cents further. You also get 37% more leads from every joint venture. Now the campaigns that were dogs are starting to make you money, while the rest have gone from mildly profitable to wildly lucrative.

Bear with me for a little bit. We are not quite done yet.

Every business operates at a certain profit margin. Traditional “brick-and-mortar” companies may have a profit margin of 3-15%. An Internet business can, in fact, enjoy a much higher one.

Let’s say your profit margin was at 30% before all the testing and the tweaking you’ve done. Now you have just expanded the number of leads, and hence the amount of sales, by 37%.

And the best part, it didn’t cost you anything at all, other that some time, to do that! It is all pure profit.

There is a moral to this story. Here it is:

Every time you don’t find the time to properly test your squeeze page, remember that by taking the shortcut you are accepting a cut in your pay check. And while there is always something to pin your lackluster sales to — bad economy, changing search engine algorithms, too many product launches going on at the same time, or your customers “not spending” — deep down inside, you know that it only takes a quick glance in the mirror to know the real reason.

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