The equation for the surface area of a wooden box is (2 x (AB+BC+AC)) where the box has sides of length A, B, and C.
Who cares? You do, if you want to make more money from your website.
You don’t have to understand the equation, pass a test on it, or even run it through a spreadsheet…
What you DO need to trust me about is, if you take the same box and cut it in three pieces, the overall surface area goes UP. Cut it in ten, and it goes up more. Cut it in a thousand pieces, and you get a LOT more surface area.
Cut it in a million pieces and you’ve got saw dust with unimaginable surface area as compared to the original, so much so that a match lit anywhere near it instantly sets it aflame. (You’d have to sit for a lot longer with the match under the original box before it caught fire).
The point is, if you’re trying to light a fire, you break your box in pieces.
The classic formula for website profits is T x C x D. (Traffic x Conversion x Dollars of profit per sale)
Now, here’s a little secret to bring this to life.
When I first launched my guinea pig site 5 years ago it barely made $250/mo and I was a little despondent because I was targeting $1,000 profit per niche site at the time. (Please Note: I no longer recommend multiple micro niches as a business strategy, both because it’s harder to launch profitable niches these days, but also because the REAL money is in building a BUSINESS where you can go deep with back ends, cultivate customers, etc).
I asked Jonathan Mizel for advice. He said:
“Glenn, if you double your traffic AND double your conversion you’ll be at $1,000”
It sounds obvious, but at the time I was stuck thinking about the overall profit level, and quadrupling it seemed an extremely daunting task. I actually went to work doubling the conversion (mostly I wrote more follow ups and added pictures) and doubling the traffic. It worked, and I’ve sold over 10,000 copies of that book to date.
Now here’s where this gets interesting…
Just like you can bust up a wooden box into more pieces to make it more combustible, if you want your website to “catch fire”, you can do the very same thing with your entire sales system!
For example:
– In Adwords itself, traffic = Impressions x Clickthrough Rate
– On your website, “Conversion” = the percent of people who Opt In x the percent who Add to Cart (click the order button) x the percent of people who Complete the Order
So the formula really isn’t just T x C x D. It’s Impressions x CTR x Opt In Rate x Add to Card x Complete Order. (Five factors)
Now, here’s where you can see the “combustibility” factor of breaking down the dollar generating process on your website…
If you think of your profits in terms of only Traffic x Conversion you still have to achieve monumental increases in each factor in order to double your profits BUT…
When you “bust up” your profit generation into 5 pieces, a mere 14% improvement in each piece DOUBLES your profit!
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I don’t know about you, but finding 14% more impressions in Adwords doesn’t seem so daunting. Nor does increasing my CTR from 1% to 1.14%, my opt in from 15% to 17.1%, increasing order button clicks from 10% to 11.4%, or reducing shopping cart abandonment from 75% to 71.5%.
In fact, they all sound rather easy if I just focus and test and tweak a bit.
But when you take them together, you IGNITE the business and DOUBLE the profits. (This is what Jay Abraham used to call working on the “geometry” of your business, just taken to a new level online)
You can go even further with this, of course, because you can bust-up ANY piece of your sales machine and make it more combustible. For example, you could view and measure your salesletter conversion as Views x Percent Who Scroll Past First Screen x Order Button Clicks x Order Completion. Or you could break up your opt in process into two steps as I’ve been consistently recommending.
It’s just a matter of conceptualizing the pieces, installing the tracking, and then working on one piece at a time.
The take-a-way?
If you want your site to make more money, break it into pieces and light it on fire!
Hope it helps,
Dr. G 🙂
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PS – Are you reasonably new to the internet, or have you had trouble making even one site profitable? Most people don’t know I created an entire A to Z Blueprint for Beginners.
It comes with simple one page cheat sheets which tell you the least you need to know about traffic, conversion, social media, web development, copywriting, and everything else you need to know to get up to speed quickly. (It includes Terry Dean, Fred Gleeck, and others, so I actually often refer to it myself when I’m working in one of their areas of expertise, like SEO Blogging or Professional Speaking)
I really wish something like this was available when I started! A to Z Blueprint for beginners
PPS – As compared to the above, The Hyper Responsive Club is where I present all my best thinking about how to establish a Center of Gravity online which you understand and sell to better than anyone else.
Whereas the Blueprint product above is intended to get everyone up to speed with the basics of internet marketing as I see it (and to steer them away from the 99% of false prophets and scamsters) the Hyper Responsive Club is where you can leverage my unique and powerful experience as both a Fortune 500 researcher and a consumer psychologist. Everyone should join the club, but only people who haven’t yet made a profit online should purchase the Blue Print product.
I hope that clarifies things (we’ve been getting a lot of questions)
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