So far I have covered how to get your first product and massive amounts of traffic to your site. There is only one other factor that means a hill of beans to the success of your business. Many call it “copywriting.” Others call it “message” or “advertisement” or “offer.”
So far (if you have followed the directions in the prior chapters), you have at least one product. If you bought a franchise, you will have several products created over the next few months. If you purchased rights to my DVD on how to create DVDs, then you have that product you can sell as your own. If you bought a single copy of that product for your own use, you can watch it and then crank out a new product every single day if you wish.
I also covered getting traffic by hiring people. I know this might now sound intuitive, but it works. When a new McDonald’s comes to town or a new Target store in built, they rarely advertise the new store… instead they advertise that they have jobs available. It’s actually more important to get those jobs filled than it is to get the word out to others.
Oddly, nearly everyone says they want a J.O.B. It’s odd because nearly everyone hates their J.O.B. once they have it, but offering a J.O.B. at decent wages is a HUGE draw. I have run ads in the local paper for an administrative position for $12 and received over 1,000 responses. At first, I would weed through the resumes and narrow it down to the best 10 and schedule interviews.
That didn’t work. Why? Because people SAY they want a J.O.B., but they really don’t. If you narrow it down to just 10 resumes, you might get one of those to show up for an interview. If you offer them the J.O.B., they will more than likely decline the offer for some strange reason they make up on the spot when they unexpectantly actually receive a J.O.B. offer.
Do you know what percentage of respondants actually complete a day of actual work in most of my businesses? Of those I offered the J.O.B. and gave them an application form… only 0.4% actually completed their first day of work.
That might seem discouraging at first, but think about it this way: To hire a single good new employee, how many people have to learn about your business? That’s right. Two hundred and fifty people have to learn quite a bit about your business and get to the application form part of the hiring process before you can hire even one new employee.
What if you are hiring 8 new employees? Or for an average new McDonalds… what about 20 new employees? That’s 5,000 people who have to visit your site to learn about your company just to hire 20 people.
How many of those 5,000 are too lazy (or whatever the reason is) to actually accept the J.O.B. and do some work… but aren’t too lazy to order a Big Mac and supersize it? How many will tell their friends about this great new job they just turned down because _______? A lot. That’s traffic. If you want that kind of traffic, I recommend you check out my franchise program here:
http://www.DiegoNorte.com/services/Franchise/
Feel free to check out my own traffic stats on your favorite third-party tool.
But this chapter isn’t about product or traffic. Let’s pretend you have done that (even though 98% of you haven’t… I have no idea how you think you are gonna get rich by reading this stuff and not taking any action… but that’s a fact).
Let’s use an easier example a business to illustrate the importance of this third element of any successful business. The third element is “copywriting” or the message about your product.
Let’s use the example of a lemonade stand. You have the lemonade. Your mommy made it for you and your daddy built the lemonade stand. You set it up at a busy intersection, so you have the traffic. Now what?
Well… there is an implied message. Some people will look over and see your pitcher of lemonade and figure out the message themselves. Very, very few will do that though. Those who do figure out the message won’t know the price nor any qualities about your special lemonade. That may lead them to drive on without asking.
Instead, let’s say we make a sign that says:
10 Cent Lemonade
Lots more people will stop and buy a glass. You have actually made an offer. That’s how simple copywriting can be.
Let’s say 1% of those driving by stop and buy a glass of lemonade. In the hour you are at the corner there are 1,000 cars passing by that busy intersection. That means you sold 10 glasses of lemonade for a total of $1.
How can you improve your profit?
There are three ways:
1. Increase the number of products you are selling.
2. Increase the traffic that sees your offer.
3. Change your offer.
Those three are multiplicative. If you change your offer so that it attracts 2% and you move to a corner with 2,000 cars going by in an hour, then you have just quadrupled your profit! If you also add fruit punch and a similar percentage of people are interested in fruit punch as lemonade, then you have just made eight times as much profit.
I hope you can see that you should constantly be improving all three areas of your business.
I hope you also see that you need to get others working for you on other lemonade stands because that’s yet a fourth multiplier.
But we’ve talked about the other three multipliers. Let’s talk about copywriting for a bit.
How can you improve your offer? Currently it is just a sign that says:
10 Cent Lemonade
It converts pass by traffic into sales at a rate of 1%. What happens if you change your sign to:
Lemonade 10 Cents
You might think that’s a bit goofy. It says the same thing; right? It’s going to convert at exactly the same rate; right?
WRONG!
It is amazing the subtle little things that cause conversion rate (the rate that people exposed to a message take action on that message).
You must be testing to find out which sign works better. It’s as simple as that.
You could put up one sign for an hour and then put up the other sign for an hour.
That has some problems. What if the traffic during the first hour was rush hour traffic and the traffic during the 2nd hour was more relaxed? Maybe those more relaxed would purchase more for that reason instead of the difference in the sign.
How can you correct for that?
One way is to switch your signs more rapidly. Maybe you switch signs every two minutes instead of every hour. That would help. But some people would see you switching signs. The motion would attract their attention and they might purchase just because of the motion.
Of course both signs have to be moved to switch them, so it would even out after awhile. We call the amount of time that it takes to get accurate data that isn’t biased the “statistically significant” amount of data.
You could use the first scenario and switch hourly, but the next day switch at the opposite hours. Then you have errors based on the day of the week. Enough testing though will tend to equalize all of those seemingly random factors and get you some statistically significant data.
Even if you conciously try to eliminate all of those error biases, you will still have to deal with randomness. Some percentage of the time, you can flip a coin four times in a row and it will always land on heads. That’s just randomness. Most of statistics is related to eliminating all of those biases and then getting enough data to ensure that you aren’t just seeing a random result of four heads in a row.
How does this relate to your Internet business?
First of all, you probably can’t sell your DVD with just a sign that says:
DVD $10
You need to tell a bit about the DVD. We call the document that you use to do that a “sales letter.” That term comes from the mail order days, but basically a web page that sells something follows the same general format the mail order folks used.
There are sections that are known to be useful. They include:
1. A headline. Catch their attention with the first line of the sales letter.
2. A product picture. A picture tells a thousand words.
3. A product description. This is where you tell about the product and it’s benefits for the potential customer.
4. A guarantee. People want to know what they can do if they purchase the product and don’t like it.
5. Testimonials. People want to know what others think about your product.
6. A “call to action.” If you tell people what you want them to do, they are much more likely to do it.
7. An order button/link/form, etc. After you tell them what you want them to do… give them an easy way to do it.
All of those sections can be done in multiple different ways. Each one is at least as complicated as the above sign that says “Lemonade 10 Cents.”
How can you possibly test them all? There must be millions of combinations for any particular sales letter.
There can be.
Fortunately, you have decided to have an Internet business. That means you have the ability to have software that automatically figures out all of those combinations and tracks the actions (ie: sales) for each combination and automatically shows the most profitable sales letter.
I sell that software. It is called “MuVar” which is short for “Multi Variate” testing software. That’s the science we are talking about to improve your conversion ratio. It’s called Multivariate testing.
There are lots of competitors out there. MuVar is simply the best of them all though. It uses the most advanced techniques to get your more sales faster than any of the competitors I have tested it against. It is simply years ahead in pure technology.
It also happens to be one of the least expensive and IS the easiest to use. It is the only “set it and forget” it software of it’s type that I know of and I’ve searched the market far and wide to check out every single competitor.
You can get your copy of MuVar here:
You need it for your business. It’s one of the three basic elements of any successful Internet business. It takes care of constantly testing and improving your copywriting.
BTW, if you own a franchise of mine, you don’t need this. You will receive a free copy in the mail within a couple weeks of purchasing your franchise.
If you really want the full system instead of piecing together all of these pieces on your own, that’s what you need to be doing as well. Get a franchise of my proven business system. Here’s the URL for that again:
http://www.DiegoNorte.com/services/Franchise