Category Archives: Traffic

The 8 Biggest Traffic Mistakes (Ever)

If you’re a marketing junkie like me, the word “Traffic” lights up your lizard brain brighter than a hydrogen bomb!  But did you know this can lead you far-astray from what you really want to accomplish?

It’s 100% true.

It’s been a little more than ten years since I first successfully drove traffic to a website and made more money than it cost to get it there.  Since then I’ve learned a LOT about traffic, much of which is counter-intuitive…

In fact, it took me more than ten years to put this together because it’s so counter-intuitive.   I didn’t want to know a lot of this.  I really wanted to believe otherwise.  And so does practically every other entrepreneur I’ve run into (at least at first.)  So even though these killer traffic insights were staring me in the face all these years, it’s only recently I was able to really put them together into a cohesive philosophy.

I was able to figure this all out only because I chose to teach, build an agency, etc.  Which not only put me in contact with some of the strongest internet marketers in the world, but gave me the opportunity to see the dollars-in-to-dollars-out results of dozens of traffic philosophies, strategies, and actions in hundreds of campaigns.  (And a recent interview I granted to Travis Cody, author of “Cure Overwhelm Now,” also helped me articulate them for myself)

So perhaps I can spare you some of the pain I went through and help you to leapfrog your way to a profitable flow of visitors?  But before we do, just a word of warning OK?  This is most definitely a “red pill vs. blue pill” situation:

“You take the blue pill, the story ends.  You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe.  You take the red pill, you stay in wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” – Morpheus to Neo in “The Matrix”

You choose the red pill?  Good for you.  OK, here goes:

THE EIGHT BIGGEST TRAFFIC MISTAKES (EVER)

TRAFFIC MISTAKE #1 – CHASING IT:  You may have heard me discuss this before but no treatment of traffic would be complete without the notion of traffic chasing as a sign of a fundamentally wrong marketing paradigm.  

That’s because there’s really no such thing as a traffic problem.  All traffic problems are really conversion problems in disguise.  If you can sell a higher percentage of visitors on not only a front end product, but a whole catalog of back end products and services, then you can afford to pay more than anyone else in the market for traffic.

Let’s say I net $3 per visitor because I’ve played “the long game” and thoroughly developed my funnel.  I convert better on the front end, have more immediate upsells in place, and more high-end back ends too.   But most of my competitors only net $1.   How much do you want to be a bunch of them would send ME their traffic if I offered them $1.50?  Even $2?

Not all of them would, of course.  But the traffic market would definitely start to tilt in my favor in this situation.  And I could afford to bid a LOT higher for paid traffic, buy more SEO services, hire more people to build my social media presence,

Then, with more traffic in hand, I could do more tests, build better converting back ends, and generally achieve escape velocity leaving my competitors in my dust.

Traffic is never a problem when you’ve build a marketing machine with superior conversion and back end economics!

MISTAKE #2 – SPREADING YOURSELF TOO THIN:  It might seem safer in theory to build “four pillars” of traffic underneath your business right away… but in practice I find this really isn’t the case.  Because it takes a LOT more time, energy, and resources to master one platform than everyone seems to think.  And the vast majority of marketers I’ve met who’ve built a 7 figure business did so by focusing on ONE traffic generation method for quite some time.  Perhaps they couldn’t scale to 7 figures on that one traffic source, but they got their system running profitably and maxed out what they could do on it first.

So yes, AdWords, Facebook PPC, Bing, SEO, etc could shut you down at any given time.  But you know what shuts you down faster?  Spreading your resources across them before any of them is reliably working for you.

This only makes sense… we live in a very competitive world.  You’ve got to establish and fortify a beachhead with the forces you have or else your competitors will take it from you.  Then grow from that one stronghold.

MISTAKE #3 – FOCUSING ON EFFICIENCY AT THE EXPENSE OF VOLUME:  After you’re firmly “in the stream”, you can usually get ahead faster by throttling the gas and accepting a certain amount of waste than trying to optimize your front end marketing.  There are four reasons for this:

  • You can generally add profit per visitor at a higher rate by focusing on back end products and services and/or taking better care of your existing customers than you can by optimizing your advertising spend and front end conversion rate…
  • Optimizing the front end beyond a certain point not only leads to a “point of diminishing returns” where it takes progressively more time, money, and effort to get progressively smaller gains…
  • The gains you DO make from front end efficiency work will often be made by convincing progressively less qualified people to purchase.  This, in turn, yields a lower upsell rate, more customer service expense, and a generally lower quality business experience…
  • Your front end is very visible, but your back end is not.  Your competitors will relentlessly copy any wins you make on the front end.  But it requires a LOT more time, money  and effort for them to spy on your back end…particularly if you build a complex system with many contingencies and payment gates.  So all but the most sophisticated competitor will generally leave your back end alone.  (Therefore, adding back ends provides you with progressively more competitive insulation)…

Despite this I find 95% of marketers get obsessed with front end efficiency.  They ask me endless questions about how to reduce their Adwords costs, for example, when what they should be asking me instead is how they could afford to spend more.

In a recent consultation I did for two friends, for example, I learned they had just gotten their first few sales of a $5,000 service in AdWords.  They spent a lot of the consultation asking me questions about broad match, geo-targeting, etc.  But when I looked at their total adspend of only $100 I said “Dudes… who cares if you make a $5,000 sale for $100 vs. $50.  Put the pedal to the metal and make twenty sales this month.  Even if it costs you $500 to make each sale, you’ll still have a lot more in your bank account and we can clean up the mess later!”

It admittedly takes time to understand this.  And it takes even more balls to implement it. Further, because most people are NOT in the fortunate situation my friends are in, it can be a frustrating experiencing working on all the pieces and parts of the complex system which make it possible to get there.

So let’s all please just make note of this advice while you’re here so you’ll recognize the situation when it occurs.

TRAFFIC MISTAKE #4: Taking Too Long to Delegate Traffic Management:   Most people have something like the following criteria in mind when it comes to hiring a traffic manager:  “Gee, I’ll have to add the management costs to my cost per lead or per sale, so I really can’t delegate this until I’m making the inflated lead or sales cost back.  Or, at the very least, until I’m sure the manager will be able to REDUCE my cost per lead or per sale by at least as much as I’m paying them.”

But this is a false economy, because it doesn’t include the opportunity cost of your time.   And in many situations, you can probably earn more than the additional management costs by focusing elsewhere in your business.  So if your manager can only hold the costs steady but free YOU to work elsewhere, you’re ahead of the game.

Plus, a smart manager is a good marketing strategist too.  So you’ll get an extra person for your team… another pair of eyes on your system, and another set of thoughts and strategies to consider as you go forward.

The question isn’t “How much is it going to cost me to work with a traffic manager”, the question is “how much is it costing me NOT to!”

Note: My point here isn’t that everyone should work with a manager, but rather that most businesses wait far too long and set the bar way too high for evaluating when it’s time to do so.  Please also note that as of the time of this publication I no longer represent any traffic management service, so this is simply good business advice from me to you!

TRAFFIC MISTAKE #5: SHORT TIME HORIZONS:   Playing with the big boys usually means you have to go negative for a few months, sometimes the better part of a year.  Get in the game and stay in the game until you figure it out.  Make money with back ends.  Be willing to use a loss leader.  Getting the customer is everything.  The name of the game is staying in the game until you win the game!

I can’t tell you how many businesses I’ve seen who could triple their size tomorrow if they just had the nerve to go to a bank to fund their cash flow curve.  Internet marketers don’t usually think like business people though.  We think we’ve got to make money right away.

Sure, keep working at that.  But if you’re getting customers and you’re breaking even four to six months down the line (I’ve gone as much as 10 to get things started) then consider more traditional routes to scale up.  With more volume, you can not only realize the profits sitting on the table (over time), but you can test more back ends and continue to improve the economics of the business overall.  And with this confidence you can also continue to work on ways to flatten the cash flow curve.

Does it kill your dream to have to go four months out to make your money back?  Get over it.  Welcome to the real world!

TRAFFIC MISTAKE #6: LACK OF FINANCIAL FORECASTING:  I find very few businesses have taken the time to put every last product, expense, and conversion rate into a big hairy spreadsheet.  And so they don’t even know WHEN they break even,  HOW MUCH cash it’s going to take to get there, and what their projected profits are actually likely to be.

Having such a spreadsheet (and staring at it while running what if scenarios until your eyes bleed) is a tremendous competitive advantage.   Because every piece and part of that sheet represents a LEVER you can adjust until the whole machine is humming like you need it to be.  What’s more, it gives you a clear and concise picture to compare to reality as you roll forward.  You can see exactly where you need to work.

And eventually you’ve got enough levers in place that you’re virtually invulnerable to things everyone else in your market freaks out about.

TRAFFIC MISTAKE #7: UNDER CAPITALIZATION IN BOTH TIME AND MONEY: I find very few businesses have seriously considered what it’s going to take to maintain the traffic they’ll require to reach their business goals.  As a result they charge into battle way under-capitalized and with a blind eye to how long it might take to really establish themselves.

In very competitive markets, it’s not unusual to take 18 months to work your way into a solid position.  Have you planned well enough to keep the ship floating during this protracted time period?  (You’ll need a good financial forecast to do this, of course!)

TRAFFIC MISTAKE #8: NOT PLANNING OUT AND IMPLEMENTING TESTS IN SETS: This is something I’ve only recently realized.  I used to just always ask myself (or my mastermind buddies) “what’s the next test I should do?”

But the truth is, in order to figure out what works in a market you really have to “carry the torch” through a whole series of tests.

For example, maybe you don’t know whether your front end should be a $7 ebook, a physical book at the same price, a $200 DVD set, a free consultation, a paid consultation, a free video, free whitepaper, etc.

It’s really only through a set of pre-planned and prioritized tests that you can figure this out.  Unless you’ve got so much traffic up front that you can rotate all of them at once… which is rarely the case if you’re operating on a budget and don’t have your back ends in place yet.

In the absence of this prioritized list, you have manic depressive episodes every time something goes right or wrong.  But when you’ve got the list in place, it’s just another test in the series.  And you’re just gathering information until you’ve got the intelligence you need to roll forward.

Think in “testing sets”, not individual tests.

OK, so there you have it.  The eight biggest traffic mistakes this old man has seen, and the best ways to combat them.

Now, if you ARE a marketing junkie like me but you haven’t yet found the right business of your own to apply it to, let me ask you a serious question:  Is it possible that the business you need to be in is business itself?  Because Terry Dean and I are about to launch an incredible new certification program for Business Coaches…

And that might be the fastest way for you to turn your passion for marketing and business in to a lucrative, fun, and meaningful career!

Sound like you?  If so you’ll want to do two things:

  1. Get on the priority notifications list.  We’re taking a very small founder’s group at a very significant discount in just a week or two, and it is likely to sell out very fast.  This list will give you notice a full hour before the rest of our audience.
  2. Watch your email for the free videos.  (You can see the first one here.  It’s about the Golden Glove, which many of you probably are already familiar with.  But take this refresher anyway because it is the foundation of free video #2, to be released tomorrow, which will show you a proven system for attracting dream clients)

Onwards and Upwards,

The Very Good Dr. G 🙂

PS – Turn Your Passion for Marketing and Business into a Lucrative, Rewarding, and Fun Career…Using Our Turnkey-Systems to Create Instant Credibility, Attract Dream Clients, Multiply Their Profits, and Live the Lifestyle You Desire!

 

Want Traffic? Choose Your Poison!

Want traffic?  Choose your poison!

You can get your traffic from big aggregators like Google and Facebook (or even ClickBank and Bing)… but because these big services are scrutinized very closely by regulatory agencies, they’re FORCED to develop a very strict set of compliance rules and regulations. Otherwise they risk hundred million dollar fines.  It’s MUCH easier for the regulatory agencies to focus their limited resources on the BIG players, so the convenience of “one stop shopping” for your traffic comes with a heavy compliance price tag…

OR…you can get your traffic from smaller networks, individual site buys, banners, email buys, etc. in an environment which is still a little bit like the unregulated Wild West, where the self-serve platforms are much more crude and underdeveloped, where you often need to spend more time talking to (and negotiating with) advertising reps, and where you’ve got to patch quite a few different sources together to get traffic in volume.

Put simply, you can go to the Big Traffic Cities and deal with the cops, or you can go to the Wild Traffic West and deal with the outlaws…

But one way or the other IF you want traffic you’re gonna have to choose your poison!

(SEO has somewhat fewer cops at present, but believe me, they’re coming!)

One way or the other, traffic is going to cost you time, money, or resources.  Which means you’d better be sure your site CONVERTS so you make the most out of the traffic you gave your sweat, blood, and tears to get!

This might seem like a bit of a downer message, but the truth is it’s really very liberating.  Because when you let go of the fantasy that your fairy god-mother’s going to someday give you a big load of free, high quality, easy-to-come-by traffic, you no longer have blinders on and CAN navigate the stormy seas to your destination.  (How’s that for a mixed metaphor!?)

It’s just how it is… don’t shoot the messenger!

Onwards,

Dr. G 🙂

www.HyperResponsiveMarketingSecrets.com

 

PS – I’ve replaced the annoying CAPTCHA form for comments with a Facebook Comments plugin.  Please feel free to use it… I want to hear from you!

All My Free Cheat Sheets, Mp3s, and Videos

Been cataloging and organizing the last 5 years of MP3 interviews, PDF Cheat Sheets, and Conversion Videos…

Thought I might as well give you the benefits of that too 🙂

Right click the image above and you’ll get a PDF full of links to my BEST Cheat Sheets, Interviews, and Conversion Videos…

It’s all my best stuff, all in one place!

(Don’t say I never gave you anything)

Now go turn some visitors into buyers, would you?

Dr. G 🙂

PS – If you haven’t already joined the LIVE CONVERSION WEBINARS club, you should do so now.  If for no other reason than (a) the “best conversion secrets of 2012” video is about to scroll out of the archived club recordings and become a $67 product in it’s own right; (b) the “Persuasion Architecture” bonus audio contains the crowning jewel of all my work for the past 8 years and (c) today you can still download both of these for less than five dollars

PPS – If you’ve been through the hyper-responsive club but never got around to implementing the work (or not quite as thoroughly as you wanted to)–OR–if you’re servicing clients and think whitelabeling Glenn’s hyper-responsive bulls eye research behind you might make you look stronger to your client… get your tuchas over to BullsEyeMaster.com

PPPS – If you’re spending more than $20K/month in paid advertising and would like my team to start optimizing your landing pages and conversion funnel FOR you, well, you may be in luck!

PPPPS – If you’ve got a system that converts really well online but you’ve got NO telephone follow up in place, you really ought to consider letting this funny looking phone genius do it for you on commission.

A ZILLION Ps S:  Would much appreciate you SHARING this page, posting it in your forums, passing around the PDF by email to ALL your contacts, and telling your mama’s how cool it is to have Dr. Glenn’s stuff. (Not particularly modest, but hey, I’m too old for that)

EBOOK – Unlimited Traffic Machine

Hi everyone… free mini-ebook today, and here’s the story:

The other day I released a video which goes into the nuances of the unlimited traffic technique.   Although it was meant for beginners, I mentioned (and still believe) it’s worthwhile for most marketers to review because it highlights the ultimate goal we’re all striving for, even if we perhaps never quite get there.

A few months back I ALSO discussed the reason most marketers have a difficult time achieving the unlimited traffic phenomenon.  (This was one of my more popular blog posts and DEFINITELY worth reading)

Anyway, as I’m putting the finishing touches on an opt in sequence for newbies, I wanted you all to have a copy of the free-mini-ebook I created to go along with the video above.

Enjoy,

Dr. G 🙂

Live Webinars |  Hyper-Responsive Marketing |  Testimonials That Sell

VIDEO: Unlimited Traffic, Fish Mongers, and Cheap Clicks


I’m busy developing a new opt in sequence all about how to create an “unlimited traffic machine.”

I’ve been thoroughly obsessed with the concept ever since I first heard of the Unlimited Traffic Technique from Jonathan Mizel back in 2003… I’ve seen it happen in my own systems, and thoroughly believe the CONCEPT outlines how we should all be thinking about traffic even if we never quite achieve the goal.

Anyway, even though I built this video for new prospects, I covered several very important nuances of the Unlimited Traffic concept and I think it’s worth watching, even for the most advanced marketers, if for no other reason than to keep us all on track.  (But I really did clarify certain elements and implications of the Unlimited Traffic Technique I’ll bet most of you haven’t thought of)

Enjoy!

Dr. G 🙂

PS – I will be shortly raising the price of the Make Them Buy Club for new members AGAIN. Most people who’ve been around Planet Glenn for a while know that I introduce products at a very low price to reward my most loyal members AND to gather market intelligence on what separates the buyers from non-buyers.  But I do raise them fairly quickly, so if you want to lock in your rate forever, jump on board now please.  (The first month’s only $4.95 in any case, what have you got to lose?)

PPS – Due to time constraints and over-booking, I unfortunately will need to close the personal coaching board to new members and it will not open again until 2014 at the earliest (if ever). As a courtesy to anyone who’s been sitting on the fence, I will leave it open through Monday, but in the event too many people sign up this week I reserve the right to withdraw these openings.  I hope you’ll understand.

PPPS – Trademarks on this page are the properties of their respective owners unless otherwise noted.  The Unlimited Traffic Machine(tm) was inspired by Jonathan Mizel’s “Unlimited Traffic Technique”.  (The latter quoted by Cyberwave Media, Inc.)

The Strangest PPC Secret

OK, so here’s the strangest clickthrough secret I’ve come across in my years…

Something which has the capacity to take your prospect OUT of a competitive environment and position you as the obvious solution to their problem…

And something largely counter-intuitive, so I need you to stay with me please.

Here’s the secret…

When you’re in a high volume traffic stream, advertising to a specific demographic segment of the market can actual increase your volume of sales and overall profits, even–and sometimes especially–when that segment represents a smaller proportion of people searching.

For example, let’s suppose you’re selling a solution to stop excessive barking in dogs.  Let’s call it the “Shut Up Machine” OK?

OK.  And suppose we’re paying $1 per click for our best performing ad on “stop barking” for this ad:

CTR = 1%  Conversion = 1%
Cost Per Conversion = $100
Conversions Per 1,000 Visitors = 10

Now, let’s further suppose–and these are just wild assumptions since I haven’t actually researched this market–that the search volume in this market breaks down as follows:

  • Women Under 40 = 35%
  • Women over 40 = 30%
  • Men Under 40 = 15%
  • Men Over 40 = 20%

Common sense might suggest you’d need to keep the generic ad, because there’s no demographic which makes up the overwhelming majority of the market.  (So one might think that advertising to women only, for example, would drop our clickthrough by 35%, since women represent 65% of the search volume).

But in many cases I’ve seen this just isn’t true.    Especially if you’ve analyzed your BUYERS and found a bias therein.

For example, suppose ShutUpMachine.com’s buyers were 50/50 men and women, despite the fact women outnumber men 2 to 1 in search.  What this says is, men are disproportionately responsive.

Now suppose we dig even further (by surveying our buyers) and discover that 80% of our male buyers are over 40. (We’d expect only a slight bias towards the over 40 range given the search volume breakdown above) .

This tells us that men over 40 are especially responsive to our offer.  Indeed, 40% of all our customers are men over forty  in this scenario (50% of all customers are men x 80% of male customers over forty = 40% of all customers) , even though this demographic represents just 20% of the search volume.

In other words, men over 40 are twice as responsive to the generic offer.

Can you imagine what would happen to the system if you optimized it for them?

Here’s what I’d do in that situation…

I’d aggressively test optimizing a WHOLE PATHWAY for men over 40.

So we might write an ad like this:

And then we’d land them on a page with a story from a man in his 40s who wants nothing but some peace and quiet when he comes home from a hard day, finally finishes taking care of wife and kids, and just wants to relax.

We’d paint a before and after picture with that story…

And because we’d knock our visitor out with the “Holy Crap!  This is exactly for me!” experience, we’d probably get an even higher conversion rate on the landing page.  Let’s assume 50% higher.

What might the numbers look like?

This is the strangest secret…

Because often when you’ve done this kind of analysis of your buyers to isolate the most responsive demographic, you can create a situation where the CTR doesn’t drop at all.

In other words, you might be targeting a much smaller percentage of the market, but their click responsiveness makes up for their lack of presence in the market as a whole. (And even when that’s not the case, you can often make up for it with increased landing page conversion)

For example, you might see something like this:

A few important things to note:

  • Even though the CTR is the same from the PPC engine’s perspective, the truth is you’re getting a 5% clickthrough from your target audience.  You just can’t SEE that because you can’t restrict the exposure to the rest of the audience in general PPC advertising. (Sometimes you CAN do this with email buys and banner advertising, but you’ve gotta be very, very careful because advertising vendors will often jack up the price for these kind of “selects” more than the increase in responsiveness warrants.  Run your spreadsheets and know your numbers before testing this!)
  • Even though the price per click is the same, we get a bump in conversion by taking the prospect OUT of the competitive environment and re-assuring them we are the ONLY vendor positioned to meet their unique needs
  • As with so many other things in marketing, going after a “higher percentage of a smaller percentage” is so often the answer
  • There’s nothing to stop you from developing ANOTHER site for women over and under 40, etc.  in order to look for more volume with additional conversion bumps.  However, by rank ordering your customer demographics in terms of responsiveness you’ll be able to estimate the effectiveness of these efforts as compared to the time and money you need to allocate to accomplish them.  (In the example above, we found women were modestly less responsive than men as a whole.  Still, you should expect SOME increase in conversion due to the demographic segmentation (assuming you’ve studied how the product plays out differently in their lives), so it’s just a matter of math to guestimate which segments are worthwhile to pursue as such, and in what order.
  • There’s also nothing that stops you from ALSO running the generic ad if it’s profitable.  (You should test  running both a generic and a segmented ad vs. running only the segmented ad)

If any of this math was hard to follow, let me restate it in simple English…

  • If you survey your customer database, you might find you’ve got more women than men, more young people than older people, etc.
  • Compare the percentages you find in your customers to what Quantcast.com and/or Alexa.com says about the demographic breakdown for search volume in your market.  (Enter a few of the top search engine ranked websites to find out)
  • If you DO find your percentages are different than what you see in Quantcast, etc, that probably means there’s a demographic group that’s MORE responsive to your offer than average…
  • Test targeting a teaser ad and landing page to THAT unique demographic and see what happens

Yah?

Got get’m!

Onwards and Upwards My Fine Marketing Friends…

You can clear away SO much confusion if you’ll just take the time to master a few fundamental conversion principles.  And now you can watch me do it LIVE on site after site.  (Get started as of the time of this post for less than $5)

Dr. Glenn :-)

Your “Web Sales Hero(tm)”

PPS – Want a simpler way to increase your conversions?   Put evangelistic audio testimonials  on your site. Listen, testimonials sell, but they’ve got to be done right.   You want to support the specific claims you make in your USP with specific results obtained.  And you need to get the customer to describe their results in contagious, emotionally compelling language that BRINGS THE TESTIMONIAL TO LIFE.   (Do It Yourself |   Let Us Do It For You)

PPPS – The above example is hypothetical.  Please don’t attempt to advertise with these specific ads.


Make More Money By Turning OFF Your Advertising

If the escalating expense, difficulty, and time to generate a high volume of profitable internet sales is crippling your growth–or crushing  your morale–I’ve got a very important audio for you to hear today…

Because it’s entirely possible that…

“You Can Make More Money by Turning Off Your Time Killing, Morale Crushing, Migraine Inducing, Pain-in-the-Ass Advertising System!”

Listen to this interview with Ryan Levesque, my partner in an extremely weird new marketing experiment which just might be your saving grace 🙂

My 2nd Best Email Subject Line Ever

I’ve sent 419 broadcasts to my entrepreneurial list in the past four and a half years.

The other day, Terry Dean asked me to identify the best 25 or so for us to include in The Total Conversion Code.  (Shameless plug).  So I analyzed all 419 … actually it was 417 at the time… all 417 subject lines and click through rates, looking for patterns.

Anyone have a guess which subject line got the second highest  click through rate EVER?

I’ll give you a hint, it was NOT “Disturbed Emotional Copywriting”… that one was just a little above average, despite my best hopes.  (A killer interview with Ben Settle by the way)

It also was NOT “I’m so ugly, so very very ugly” –> just average there too,  but I particularly enjoyed writing that one!

“Time is running out” was one of the lowest of the losers… if subject lines were like kids in grade school, this one definitely had koodies!  (How the hell do you spell Koodies by the way… anyone know the official word on that?)

OK… know what it WAS?

“all my audios are now on iTunes” (they ARE by the way – Glenn Livingston Mp3s)

The CTR on this was over 400% higher than the average, only beaten by ONE other message in over four years.

Why do you think this was?

I’ll tell you.

It’s the “no brainer” principle.

Establish valuable FREE  content that sells… then tell people where they can get more.

They’ve already consumed the value… so you’ve got all the PROOF you need in the subject line because they’ve already EXPERIENCED it.  (“Who wants more cookies and milk?”  DUH!)   (By the way, you can use this same proof principle to establish proof for your physical products by simply using a nice product demonstration on video)

They already associate me with solving DESPERATE PROBLEMS (figuring out how to get prospects to buy, and customers to buy more)

And it’s a unique offer… right there in that puny subject line… “ALL the cookies and milk you missed!”

Desperate problem, unique offer, and overwhelming proof.

Establish valuable free content that sells, then tell people where they can get more.

Of course “that sells” is the kicker.

Know how to do that?

I’ll spare you the usual rhetoric about having to know your market cold, etc.

Let’s assume you do.

How do you define the “free line?”

The best phrase to write on the inside of your eyelids is “Useful but Incomplete”

Like, for example, giving people your SECOND best click through generating email.

Or creating amazing cheat sheets, and sharing genuinely valuable methods and tips, but not putting the whole SYSTEM together step by step for everyone until they’re convinced and willing to pay you.

Useful but incomplete.

Someone send me a t-shirt with that on it please.  Or a bumper sticker.

(I know… my wife is chuckling now saying that’s kind of how she thinks of ME… “Useful but Incomplete”… oh well!)

Here’s another one of my best (but not my absolute best) tips.

Almost NO ONE bothers TAGUCHI TESTING their email subject lines.  But 90% of click through variance is all about the subject.   And if you’re generating traffic from your subject lines, you could be generating twice as much with better subject lines!

Food for thought,

G 🙂

PS – Have you see the new Guaranteed Video Traffic Service yet?   We’ll be ceasing the case study discounts shortly (we’ve almost chosen our lot)

Important Split Testing Innovation

Like everyone else in direct marketing, I spend a lot of time extolling the virtues of split testing.  As well I should, because with ongoing, small improvements, implemented like a bull dog, you can radically change the performance of your whole sales systems.

Unlike everyone else, I urge people to have the patience to do their research and competitive intelligence thoroughly and precisely, so they’ll have the RIGHT INPUTS for their tests, to maximize the probability of results.

But here’s something I haven’t talked much about, which I really should (but Howie beat me to the punch)…

“Testing Juice” is a limited resource.  We only have so much traffic and money to pay for it, and every test we do eats some of it for a while.    Accordingly, it’s vitally important to PRIORITIZE your tests correctly.

Howie Jacobson, author of Adwords for Dummies, has developed an excellent paradigm for doing just that.  In this MP3 interview (and accompanying slides) you’ll hear him walk you through it.

Of course, I won’t hide the fact that this is also a blatant attempt to get you to attend Camp Checkmate via my affiliate link (which entitles you to the EARLY BIRD pricing if you order soon, even though the deadline’s passed). But as always, both Howie and I took extra special care to ensure the content itself should be immediately valuable to you.

Enjoy!

Dr. G 🙂