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by Robert W. Bly
31 Cheyenne Drive, Montville, NJ 07045
(973) 263-0562, Fax (973) 263-0613
e-mail: [email protected], web: www.bly.com
Table of Contents
Section 1 The Secret of Making Hype in Marketing Work for You ..................3
Section 2 The Easiest Way to Write Great Bullets .................................................5
Section 3 What the National Enquirer Can Teach You About Selling
Information on the Internet .....................................................................8
Section 4 Give Your SelfāPublished Book the āLooseāleaf Testā ......................11
Section 5 3 Steps to the Perfect Elevator Pitch ....................................................14
Section 6 A NonāObvious Way to Build Your EāList .........................................16
Section 7 A LowāTech Way to Prevent Customers from Illegally Copying
Your Information Products...................................................................19
Section 8 Avoid This Common Mistake When Creating
Information Products ............................................................................22
Section 9 Selling Information Product āBy the Poundā ....................................25
Section 10 What? No EāNewsletter? .....................................................................28
Section 11 5 Steps to the Perfect Guarantee.........................................................31
Section 12 5 Steps to Building a Large and Responsive OptāIn EāList of
Qualified B2B Prospects ......................................................................35
Section 13 10 Tips for Increasing Landing Page Conversion Rates .................39
Section 14 Playing the Slots ...................................................................................44
Section 15 What Web Metrics Should You Measure? ........................................47
Section 16 EāMail Marketing: How Much Is Too Much? ..................................50
Section 17 Double or Triple Your Landing Page Conversion Rates with
Taguchi Testing ....................................................................................54
1
Section 18 5 Ways to Capture Eāmail Addresses of
Landing Page Visitors .........................................................................57
About the Author ......................................................................................................61
2
Section 1
The Secret of Making Hype in Marketing Work for You
I recently read an online promotion from one of the big Internet marketing
gurus.
In it, this gentlemanāwhom I consider a personal friendāstated that
āAnything is possible.ā
He also said he had a new Website that would help you āfind your super
powers.ā
Thatās hype to a high degree.
And frankly, I donāt believe it.
I could never write something like that for one of my own products and
still sleep at night.
Yet I donāt have a problem with this guy, what he is selling, or how he is
selling it.
Why not?
Because he believes in what he is saying and sellingāeven if I do not.
And thatās the key to making hype work in your copy today: believing in
what you say.
There are a lot of complaints today about the incredible level of hype in
copy, particularly online.
As an example, take a look at: www.thecopygod.comāa humorous spoof
site that pokes gentle fun at the hype style of copywriting.
A lot of copywriters and marketers see hypeāfilled promotions and have
one of two reactions.
3
Either they hate it and make a deliberate decision to avoid it in their own
copyā¦probably a good decision for them.
Or they think, āThese guys wouldnāt write all this hype if it wasnāt
workingāāand emulate it in their own promotions, usually with disastrous
results.
You see, a key to writing successful copyācopy that fills your mail box or
shopping cart with ordersāis enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm for the ideasā¦enthusiasm for the productā¦enthusiasm for
what you are writing aboutā¦enthusiasm for the wonderful ways in which the
product will improve their lives.
The masters of hype can be genuinely sincere and enthusiastic in their
hyperbolic copy, because they absolutely believe 100% in what they are saying
and selling.
Therefore, if you too believe in something outrageous or seemingly
impossibleā¦and are sincerely convinced it can help othersā¦you can write hype
copy that comes across as energetic, enthusiastic, positive, and even sincere!
On the other hand, if you donāt believe the superlatives and outrageous
claims you are making in your copy, the hype will backfire on you.
Your copy will have all the sincerity of a threeādollar billāand readers will
be able to sense your disingenuousness and B.S. a mile away.
Result: your copy will fall flatā¦and your promotion will generate minimal
orders and revenues.
āHow can some of these hardāsell marketers believe the hype they write,
particularly about money making, business opportunities, investments, self help,
and alternative medicine?ā I have been asked many times.
Itās simple: each of us has different experiences and belief systems.
4
What sounds like baloney to you and me may be absolute gospel to our
colleagues and competitors.
A year or so ago, two wellāknown direct mail copywriters, DH and PL, got
into an argument in print about the ethics of writing for nutritional supplements.
DH called dietary supplements āsnake oil.ā PL countered that the pill he
was promoting in his copy had worked wonders for those who had taken it.
The bottom line is: market and write about only those products, services,
and ideas you think deliver an honest and fair value to the consumer.
Another copywriting friend, TN, often said he would work on any offer
that wasnāt āillegal, immoral, or fattening.ā
Good advice, but I also think you should avoid working on any product
you donāt believe in and arenāt enthusiastic about.
After all, if you arenāt enthusiastic about the product when you write your
copy, the prospect is likely to be equally unenthusiastic when he reads it.
Section 2
The Easiest Way to Write Great Bullets
Most ETR readers know that a successful copywriting technique is to use
lots of ābulletsā in your copyāshort sales points presented in bulleted lists.
But have you ever sat down to write copy for one of your products, only to
find it difficult to pull out of the product the salient sales points you need to write
strong bullets?
If youāre a marketer, thereās an easy way to avoid this problemā¦and write
kickābutt bullets that generate more orders and sales from every promotion you
mail or eāmail.
5
And it starts way before you write a word of your copy. In fact, for
maximum results, this step should be performed during creation of the actual
product itself.
The method is to ābuild bulletsā into your product. By that, I mean come
up with a list of features you think would really convince your prospects to buy
the product.
Or write a list of bullets youād love to be able to use in your copy. And then,
design all those features and bullets into the product as you are developing them.
Letās say you are hiring a writer to create a howāto eābook you want to sell
on the Internet on growing a vegetable garden in your back yard.
You have a section on growing bigger tomatoes. Make a list of the specific
steps you take to make your tomatoes large and juicy. If the list is five items, give
it to your writer so he can write a few paragraphs on each.
Now, when you write the sales copy for the eābook, you know you can
write a bullet that says, ā5 ways to grow tomatoes so big, you can make a dinner
out of them.ā
I had a client who was an industrial manufacturer who used this technique
with great success. They manufactured āspectrophotometers,ā which are
instruments used to measure color.
Their competitors had all come out with a new generation of instruments,
and my client was late to the game. But they used this to their advantage.
They carefully studied the other brands, made a list of flaws, and designed
their new spectrophotometer to provide superior performance in each area where
their competitors were weak.
In their product launch, they showed a picture of their new instrument.
Callāouts highlighted every feature that made their device superior to their
competition.
6
The launch was their most successful ever, because the ābulletsā for their
sales copy had been carefully built into the product. And they clearly
distinguished the companyās products as superior in many ways to all others in
that field.
As a copywriter you rarely have any control, but as a marketer, you often
do. If you are an information marketer, itās easy to design products with great
sales bullets built in.
Just make the list of bullets your table of contents, and write or record an
info product that covers all the points listed there. The more transparent the sales
points in the product, the happier the buyer will be.
Avoid writing bullet points that sound great but arenāt really covered in the
product. Info product buyers often compare the product to the promotion. If they
canāt find content reflecting the bullets that caused them to buy, they will
complain or ask for a refund.
My mentor, the great copywriter Milt Pierce, tells the story of when he was
hired to write a direct mail package on a book on decorating by a famous author
in that field.
He brought in his copy. The publisher and author read it. When they were
finished, the publisher said to Milt, āThis is incredibly strong promotional copy.
The only problem is that itās not what is in the book.ā
Milt replied: āIt should be.ā And according to him, the author and
publisher agreed to rewrite the book so it reflected in the letter copy. When mailed,
the package worked like gangbusters and the book sold like hotcakes.
The oldātime mail order guru Melvin Powers did it a better way: when he
wanted to publish a new book, he would write and run the ad first.
Of course, he wrote the strongest ad possible. If it pulled, he then quickly
wrote and printed a book that delivered all the content promised in the ad copy. If
7
the ad bombed, he never wrote the book and just refunded the money to those few
readers who had ordered.
Section 3
What the National Enquirer Can Teach You About Selling Information on the Internet
AWAI coāfounder Don Mahoney recently eāmailed me an article about the
National Enquirer.
In that article, EditorāināChief David Perel revealed the secret of the
tabloidās outrageous success:
āThe big news organizations tell people what they think they should be
interested in, whereas we try to give them stories that they are interested in.ā
I think Perel has hit upon a key principle that applies to all writing, not just
newspaper publishing.
And it is especially relevant to information marketing.
Namely, that your sales will be many times greater when you offer your
customers information they want to read and learnā¦instead of information you
think they should read.
The late Gary Halbert went even further, advising marketers to sell
exclusively to what he called a āstarving crowd.ā
A starving crowd not only wants what you are sellingābut has an
insatiable appetite for it.
Therefore, even if there are a lot of players in that market, they can all do
well, because the marketās demand is a bottomless pit.
8
In particular, there are three āstarving crowdā markets that have an
especially consistent and unending demand for information:
Ā» Hobbyistsāhobbyists read about antique collecting or quilting not
because they have to, but because they want to.
Those who are heavily āintoā the hobby, whether that hobby is calligraphy
or macramĆ©, canāt get enough of it.
In these niches, a lot of competition is a good sign, not a negative sign, for
two reasons.
First, it proves the niche is viable. If others are making money selling
information online to this market, you can too.
Second, you can make joint venture deals with these other marketers to sell
your products to their lists and vice versa.
Ā» Business opportunity seekersāthere is an insatiable appetite for
information on how to make money in your spare time, start a homeābased
business, change careers, or earn a living without a job.
I believe these business opportunity seekers can be divided into two groups.
The first group is doers. These doers are serious about changing their lives,
and they actually pursue the course of action you recommend.
The second group is dreamers. The dreamers enjoy learning about small
business, yet take no action beyond buying and reading howāto information
products.
You canāt usually distinguish between these segments when marketing. But
you really donāt have to, because both consume an unending stream of info
products purchased online.
Ā» Money making and investingāit is a nearly universal desire to make
more money and increase oneās wealth.
9
If you sell information that helps people get greater returns from their
investments with less riskā¦or accumulate a sevenāfigure net worthā¦or become
financially independentā¦you will never run out of eager buyers.
Of course, there are other starvingācrowd niches for information marketers,
including: selfāhelpā¦relationshipsā¦sexā¦healthā¦beautyā¦fashionā¦fitnessā¦and
weight loss.
But the three aboveāhobbies, business opportunities, investingāare by far
the largest and most active.
One of the biggest mistakes beginning information marketers make is
choosing, as their primary niche, a market that is not a starving crowd.
Reason: without a starving crowd of buyers, you will always be fighting an
uphill battle to peddle your info products.
And you will be forever frustrated that your prospects arenāt buying your
valuable information when you know itās stuff they absolutely should have.
But people donāt readily do what they should doāor what you think is
good for them.
They are much more easily convinced to buy what they already
wantā¦rather than what you think they need.
And when you select as your primary niche in information marketing a
starving crowdā¦like hobbyists, business opportunity seekers, or wealth
seekersā¦you can sell your prospects the stuff they wantāover and over again.
10
Section 4
Give Your SelfāPublished Book the āLooseāleaf Testā
How do you ensure that the information products you sell give fair value to
your customers?
One way is to follow Internet marketing guru Fred Gleeckās ā10 timesā rule.
Fred says that the information products you sell should be worth at least 10
times the price you charge for them.
Alex Mendossian and I were discussing this in a recent ETR teleāseminarā
and looking for a way to determine whether your product and pricing meet
Gleeckās criterion.
The solution we came up with is something I call the ālooseāleaf test.ā
Hereās how it worksā¦
Traditional nonfiction paperback books (around 200 pages) typically sell for
around $10 to $20 or so.
To determine whether your book is worth ten times that amountāGleeckās
ā10 timesā ruleāimagine printing out the book manuscript on 8 Ā½ by 11āinch
sheets of paper.
Now, threeāholeāpunch those pagesā¦and put them in a threeāring
binderā¦and maybe even add tabbed dividers to separate the sections or chapters.
Information products in threeāring binders are typically dense in
contentā¦and consequently command much higher prices than bookstore books.
Itās not unusual for these ālooseāleaf servicesā to cost $100 to $200 or more
per copy.
11
(One looseāleaf service for executives on how to write and give speeches,
American Speaker, sold for $297.)
Does your $20 paperback book contain enough valuable, inādepth content
that you could reprint the thing in a threeāring binderāand sell it for $200āto
customers who would feel they got fair value for their investmentā¦and not ask
for a refund?
If it does, then you can rest assured that the content you deliver in your
book is indeed worth at least 10 times more than the $20 you charged on it.
However, if you think customers who paid $200 for a looseāleaf version of
your book (remember: same content, just different packaging) would feel gypped
and ask for their money back, then your book doesnāt pass Gleeckās ā10 timesā test.
I increasingly see today nonfiction business books that are thin and light.
They present just one or two new ideas, often in a thin book of 150 pages or less.
If a reader buys such a book in a bookstore, they probably wonāt complain:
expectations for trade books are modest. If itās a good read, theyāll be satisfied
enough.
But your customers perceive information products published and sold
online as containing more specific and highly specialized content than a
ābookstore book.ā
So if you are an Internet information marketer, you have to deliver far more
value to your customers for their money than a bookstore.
Gleeckās ā10 timesā ruleāand the Bly/Mendossian āloose leaf testāāhelp
you ensure that you do just that.
I have discovered that, if the customer thinks your information product was
worth the $20 you charged but no more than that, they may be dissatisfiedāand
want a refund.
12
One customer, JB, recently asked for a refund on one of my eābooks. He
wrote: āYour eābook was certainly worth the $19 you charged me, but no more
than that. So please send my money back.ā
At first, I thought: how odd! JB says the product is worth what he paid for it.
So his desire for a refund made no sense to me.
But in Internet information marketing, we make big promises in our copy
to grab the readerās attentionāand make a sale.
(In a bookstore, by comparison, the only āsellingā is usually done by the
book and its cover.)
JB apparently felt that the book did not live up to the copy on my landing
page, and was disappointed on that basis.
The solution, of course, is either to charge less (not very desirable), write
weak copy (also not a good idea), or, preferably, to make the product stronger.
Add content until the product meets the Gleeck/Bly/Mendossian testāand
delivers content not just worth what you charged for itābut worth 10 TIMES
what you charged for it.
When you sell an item worth $200 for $20, customer satisfaction will soar,
and refunds will be minimal to nonexistent.
I canāt remember who said it or where, but a famous marketer once stated:
āIt is our goal not to give the customer her moneyās worth, but to give her MORE
than her moneyās worth!ā
Or more specifically, at least ten times her moneyās worthāor even more.
13
Section 5
3 Steps to the Perfect Elevator Pitch
An āelevator pitchā is a 30āsecond answer to the question, āWhat do you do?ā
You need an elevator pitch because the question āWhat do you do?ā is
usually asked by complete strangers in casual circumstances.
In these situations, you do not have a captive audience watching you go
through your PowerPoint sales presentation.
So your answer must be pithy and to the point.
Why does it matter how you answer the question āWhat do you do?ā when
speaking to someone you donāt know?
Because you never know when the person youāre speaking to is a potential
customer or referral source.
Most elevator pitches, unfortunately, donāt workābecause they are
straightforward descriptions of job functions and titles, generating not much else
aside from disinterest and a few yawns.
For example, a fellow I met at a party told me, āI am a certified financial
planner with more than 20 years experience working.ā
Yawn.
My friend sales trainer Paul Karasik has an antidote to the deadly dull
elevator pitch.
Karasikās threeāpart formula can enable you to quickly construct the perfect
elevator pitch.
14
By āperfect,ā I mean an elevator pitch that concisely communicates the
value your product or service offersāin a manner that engages rather than bores
the other person.
What is the formula?
The first part is to ask a question beginning with the words āDo you
know?ā
The question identifies the pain or need that your product or service
addresses.
For a financial planner who, say, works mostly with middleāaged women
who are separated, divorced, widowed, and possibly reāentering the workplace,
this question might be:
āDo you know how when women get divorced or reāenter the workforce
after many years of depending on a spouse, they are overwhelmed by all the
financial decisions they have to makeā?
The second part of the formula is a statement that begins with the words
āWhat I doā or āWhat we doāāfollowed by a clear description of the service you
deliver.
Continuing with our financial planner, she might say: āWhat we do is help
women gain control of their finances and achieve their personal financial and
investment goals.ā
The third part of the formula presents a big benefit and begins āso that.ā
Hereās what the whole thing sounds like:
āDo you know how when women get divorced or reāenter the workforce
after many years of depending on a spouse, they are overwhelmed by all the
financial decisions they have to make?
āWhat we do is help women gain control of their finances and achieve their
personal financial and investment goals, so that they can stay in the house they
15
have lived in all their lives, have enough income to enjoy a comfortable lifestyle,
and be free of money worries.ā
Action step: construct your elevator pitch today or tonight using Paul
Karasikās threeāpart formula.
Ā» First part: ask a question beginning with the words āDo you know?ā that
identifies the pain or need that your product or service addresses.
Ā» Second part: describe your service, beginning with the words āWhat I doā
or āWhat we do.ā
Ā» Third part: explain why your service is valuable by describing the benefits
it delivers, beginning with the words āSo that.ā
Section 6
A NonāObvious Way to Build Your EāList
Internet marketers are always looking for new ways to build their eālists
quickly and at an affordable cost.
Let me tell you about an underāused, nonāobvious technique for adding
new subscribers to your optāin list.
Using it, I added over 500 new subscribers to my eālist in just a few daysā
and these were buyers, not just prospects.
What I did is to create an eābook with broad appeal to my major markets,
which are copywriters and Internet marketers.
In case you are curious, the title of the eābook is āWriting EāBooks for Fun
and Profit,ā and you can see the landing page at www.myveryfirstebook.com.
I also priced it to sell. The cover price is $59. But for a limited time, it is
available from me for only $19āa discount of $40 off the regular rate.
16
Then I approached my affiliate with the biggest list and asked if they
wanted to offer my new eābook to their subscribers.
Hereās the twist: instead of offering them the usual 50% commission, I told
them they would get 100% commission.
Thatās right. Theyād keep all the money.
It worked like a charm.
My affiliate thought the eābook would appeal to their list, which makes
sense, because they target some of the same markets (copywriters, Internet
marketers) I do.
And with a 100% commission, they had a biggerāthanāusual financial
incentive to offer my eābook to their list.
So they send a solo eāmail blast to their subscribers on a Thursday.
The eāmail they sent had a hyperlink that goes to my landing page for the
product.
Itās a special affiliate hyperlink so we can track the source of the orders.
So what happened?
Four days later, by Monday, we had over 500 orders.
The affiliate is happy because they made over $10,000 on the deal.
(The orders were placed on my landing page using my shopping cart, so
later this month, I will write them a check for that amount.)
Their subscribers are happy because they got a great eābook worth $59 for
only $19.
And how do I win?
Since their subscribers bought the eābook directly from me, I just added 500
new subscribers to my online list.
You could argue that by not collecting my usual 50% of the sale, I gave up
$5,000 in profits.
17
But not really, because if I had not given 100% commission as an incentive,
this affiliate, who owns a big and profitable list, would not have sent an eāmail
promoting my product to their readers.
My outāofāpocket cost to fulfill these 500 orders is virtually zero, because
the product is a downloadable PDF file.
Best of all, these are top quality subscribers I am adding to my list.
Unlike most listābuilding techniques, which add names to your list through
free offers, here all the new names added to my list are buyers, not prospectsā
theyāve already spent $19 with me.
And buyers are always better than inquirers (those who join as a result of a
free offer).
The lesson is threefold.
First, if you want affiliates and other online marketers to promote you to
their lists, you have to make it financially worth their while to do so.
For a $19 product, a 50% commission means the affiliate gets only $9.50 per
order.
Thatās just too little to compensate them for the slot in their eāmail schedule
you are asking them to give up to promote your product.
However, a 100% commission on a $19 product is equivalent to the
standard 50% commission on a $38 product.
Thatās still a relatively modest profit per order. But apparently, it was
sufficient to get my affiliate to go forward with the promotion.
Second, price the product low. If you attempt this technique with a highā
end product, youāll get few ordersāand add few new names to your eālist.
Third, create a product with broad appeal for this 100% commission
affiliate deal.
18
That way, you capture the maximum number of new names from each
affiliateās mailing list.
Why is this technique of offering affiliates 100% of the sale used so
infrequently by Internet marketers?
Itās psychological: even though you know it makes sense, writing that big
commission check to your affiliate is painful.
But it really shouldnāt be. It costs you nothing out of pocketārevenues
from product sales cover it 100%. And you added all those new subscribers
without paying a dime for online advertising.
One other tip: on the landing page for the product, state clearly that $19 is a
special timeālimited offer, and that once it expires, the price will go up.
This gives visitors an incentive to buy now and not put it off, maximizing
your conversion rates.
Section 7
A LowāTech Way to Prevent Customers from Illegally Copying Your Information Products
There are all kinds of highātech systems and devices for foiling consumers
who attempt to create bootleg copies of contentāfrom music and movies to
software and information products.
And eventually, all of them are defeated by hackers.
But an easier way to prevent your customers from illegally copying your eā
books, audio CDs, and DVD information products is to ask what motivates them
to steal your content in the first place.
19
Answer: aside from the Internet making it easy to duplicate and distribute
content freely, the main reason a consumer illegally copies any information
product has to do with price and value of that product.
By that, I mean that consumers are less motivated to pirate content that is (a)
reasonably priced and (b) gives a fair value for its cost.
For instance, if your 50āpage eābook on starting a small business is only $29,
your customersāif they like itāwill just recommend it to their friends. āYou
should buy it here,ā theyāll say, pointing others to your Website.
However, had you priced the same eābook at $299, your customers might
feel that your pricing is too expensive.
So after they print out your eābook, they pass on the PDF to a few friendsā
illegally, of course.
Even when the price is high, you can still reduce illegal copying by giving
great value for that price.
Say that 50āpage eābook contained dozens of forms needed to start a
businessā¦forms a lawyer might charge thousands of dollars to create or review.
In that case, $299 would be a reasonable price to pay. The customer would
feel he is getting a fair value, and therefore would not want to rip you off.
On the other hand, if your 50āpage eābook was just general advice on small
business, $299 would be an excessive price for that kind of content.
In this instance, the customer could think you are ripping him off. He might
choose to get back at you by freelyāand yes, illegallyāsharing the eābook with
many other people.
So really, the best way to prevent customers from illegally copying and
sharing your content is to create information products that are reasonably
pricedāand give the buyer more than his moneyās worth.
20
To further discourage bootleggers, my eābooks now carry this warning on
the title page:
āāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāā
This is NOT a free e-book!
Purchase of this e-book entitles the buyer to keep one copy on his or her
computer and to print out one copy only.
Printing out more than one copyāor distributing it electronicallyāis
prohibited by international and U.S.A. copyright laws and treaties, and would
subject the purchased to penalties of up to $100,000 PER COPY distributed.
āāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāāā
However, donāt be too much of a hard case enforcing this policy.
If a customer calls and wants to print an extra copy for his business partner,
brother, or friend, let him.
The main reason to put the warning on the eābook is not to frustrate the
buyer who wants to print out a few extra copies. I say let him.
The warning is designed to discourage unscrupulous online operators from
taking your eābook and selling itāor giving it awayāto his customers.
An even better idea is to make sure you profit from your eābook or other
information product even if pirated copies do make the rounds.
How do you do this?
In your information product, put plenty of links to the microāsites for your
other products.
That way, the more your eābook is passed around, the more clicks you get
on those linksāand the more additional sales you make.
One other ideaā¦
My colleague FG puts a boxed notice in his eābooks.
21
It says that the reader can go to a special URL and claim a valuable FREE
bonus gift.
The only catch is: he has to be a registered owner of the eābook to do it.
FG says that people are so intrigued by the free bonus, those who already
have a pirated copy of his eābook will go online and buy itājust to qualify for the
free bonus.
Section 8
Avoid This Common Mistake When Creating Information Products
As we discussed in my last ETR article, the best way to prevent customers
from illegally copying and sharing your content is to create information products
that give the buyer more than his moneyās worth.
Creating great information products gives you several other advantages.
For one thing, it minimizes refund requests.
It also creates loyal fans. These fans keep buying other information
products from you and recommending your products to others.
However, many information product marketers make a serious mistake
that results in less qualityāand lower customer satisfaction. Let me explainā¦
What your customers want is solid howāto information that tells them how
to do something, whether itās saving money on a new car or becoming a freelance
copywriter.
The mistake many info marketers make is that they have written a āwhat
toā product instead of the āhowātoā information product the buyer wants.
22
To live up to the customerās expectation of getting great howāto information,
your product really has to tell the customer how to do the thing you are writing
about.
That means specific stepābyāstep instructionsā¦recommended tools and
resourcesā¦and strategies, tips, and techniques for doing the thing better and
faster.
But too many info products I see tell the reader what to doābut not how to
do it.
For instance, one small business advertising guide recommended
advertising on billboards.
Thatās advice on what to do, which is fine as it goes, but not enough.
When a reader buys your specialized information product, he also wants
you to tell him HOW to advertise on billboards.
What are the dimensions of a typical billboard? Whatās the most effective
word length for billboard copy? The recommended size of the letters painted on
the board to for maximum readability?
How can I find the billboards in my area where I can advertise? Who do I
contact about renting them? Whatās a reasonable cost I can expect to pay? Can that
be negotiated?
Why do so many information product writers produce āwhat to doā
instead of āhow to do itā eābooks and reports?
Itās because āwhatātoādoā is easy to write, because you present only the big
picture (what to do), and not the niggling details (how to do it).
But it cheats the reader. In most instances, the reader already has some idea
of what to do.
He is buying your specialized information product on the Internetāoften at
a premium price compared to books available in bookstores on similar topics.
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Why is he willing to pay you more? Because he expects you to go into
depth he doesnāt get from ābookstore books.ā
I hire a lot of freelance writers to write eābooks and reports for my small
online publishing business, CTC Publishing.
One of my pet peevesāand a classic example of whatāto instead of howā
toāis when I read in a first draft a sentence that says, āFor more information on X,
just search the keyword X on Google.ā
I tell the writer: the reason the reader is paying for our eābook is because he
expects us to have done the research and present the results.
Telling your reader ālook it up on Googleā is the sign of a lazy writer who
has not done his homeworkāand a sin I will always ask my writers to correct.
One more pointā¦
Even though information products buyers want āhow toā instead of āwhat
to do,ā you can often take the quality of your content to an even higher level.
You do this when, instead (or in addition to) telling the reader what to do,
you actually DO IT FOR HIM.
For instance, instead of saying āhere are some points to keep in mind when
writing a collection letter to a customer who owes you money,ā you actually
include sample collection letters in your product.
Listen: everyone is lazy. Me. You. Your customers. And your writers,
editors, and authors.
But the information product buyer has paid us to provide him with
shortcuts. As the customer, he has the right to be lazy.
As the seller in this transaction of information publishing, weāthe
information product marketersāgive up the right to be lazy.
Our customer expects us to do the work, so he doesnāt have to.
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If we donāt, we are of little value to him. And he will let us know this by
asking for his money back.
Action step: read the latest information product you wrote or
publishedā¦or even better, the one you are working on right now.
Ask yourself on every page: āIs this text telling the reader merely what to
do, or am I actually showing him HOW to do it?ā
If you are merely saying what to do instead of how to do it, rewrite to
correct the oversight.
The result: top quality information products worth the premium price you
charge.
Section 9
Selling Information Product āBy the Poundā
I frequently hire freelance writers to write eābooks and other information
products for my small online publishing business.
Recently RH, a potential author, was taken aback when I told him I wanted
a 15,000āword eābook from him.
āHow did you come up with 15,000 words as the desired length?ā he asked
me, hinting that it was unwise of me to demand such a huge number of words.
āIn this age of hyperāinformation overloading, shouldnāt a document be
more like the ladyās skirtāshort enough to be interesting and just long enough to
cover the subject?ā he suggested.
RHās question seems sensible enough on the surface.
But his conclusion that when it comes to writing and reading shorter is
universally preferable to longer is not true.
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May I explain why?
To begin with, RH is theoretically correct when he suggests that readers are
busy, have too much to read, and not enough time to read it.
Despite this, however, people who buy information productsāespecially
onlineāhave a slightly different perspective than ordinary readers.
Info products buyers do, to some extent, buy their information ābuy the
pound.ā
If they pay a high price, they expect a lot for their money. Not just great
content, but plenty of it.
We call this demand for quantity the āthudā factor. When a customer
orders a $50 info product, the material should make a nice āthudā when he drops
it on his desk.
For eābooks selling in the $19 to $79 range, I find that the customer is
satisfied with a thicker, heftier eābookāat least 50 pagesāwhen he prints it out
and holds it in his hands.
With approximately 300 words per page, a 50āpage eābook is 15,000 words,
which is the word count requirement I gave RH.
RH, in turn, suggested that we could make a more valuable product by
covering the topic in a single page, which he said he could do.
Well, let me warn you now. If you sell a $29 eābook, and deliver to your
customers a oneāpage PDF document on the topic, your refund rate will be huge.
Those customers will feel ripped off and not buy from you again.
Even if that one page has great content, it is not enough. It does not meet
the āthud factorā requirement.
The reason for RHās erroneous assumptions on word length is that he is
applying the same rule of modern writingāthat brevity is the chief virtue of good
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writingāequally to information the reader wants as well as information he
doesnāt want.
I agree with RH that in correspondence and other documents the prospect
doesnāt really want or care about, you want to get to the point as quickly as
possibleāand keep it short and simple.
But when you sell a customer an eābook or special report, you are sending
him writing that he actually wants to read.
Remember, he ordered it. He even paid you for it. He didnāt have to buy.
But he did.
That means your customer is sufficiently interested in the topic to educate
himself on it at his own expense.
He is reading your eābook for his own benefit and perhaps for his own
enjoyment. It is not a chore. Or if it is a chore, it is one he has volunteered for.
Strangely, RH didnāt complain to me that books he buys on Amazon.com or
in Barnes & Noble have ātoo many words.ā
Yet the average 200āpage nonfiction trade paperback book contains 80,000
wordsā5 times the length of my average eābook!
Are you, like RH, afraid your copyāwhether you are writing a sales letter,
a landing page, an article, a special report, or a print or electronic bookāis too
long?
If so, the reason might be any of the following defectsā¦all of which can and
should be corrected:
Ā» Too much fluffāto meet the required word length, you have padded
your copy, making it dull and flabby. You are wasting the readerās time saying the
same thing over and over in different ways.
Ā» Lack of contentāyou havenāt done your homework, so you donāt have a
rich body of facts to illustrate your points and support your claims. Given the
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existence of the Internet and Google, there is no excuse for such inadequate
research.
Ā» Lack of authorityāyou sound like you donāt really understand your
subject in depth, and the reason is you probably donāt. You need to either become
an expert or interview an expert (or two).
Ā» Boring copyāyou donāt really care about the topic or the project, and it
comes across in your copy. Solution: write only on subjects you are interested in
and care about.
Section 10
What? No EāNewsletter?
There are a number of different business models for making money on the
Internet.
Of these, my favoriteāand the one I recommend to those who want to sell
information products, dietary supplements, or just about any other product online
todayāis the āAgora Model.ā
The Agora Model is an online marketing methodology pioneered by Agora
Publishing.
In a nutshell, the Agora Model says you should offer a free eānewsletter and
build up a large subscriber base.
Then, you make money by eāmailing promotions to your online subscriber
list.
Agora and others are making hundreds of millions of dollars in sales online
with the Agora Model.
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Yet when I recommend it to marketersāboth experienced and novice
alikeāthey are immediately and strongly resistant to the idea.
Why?
One reason for their reluctance is that they have read an article by some soā
called Internet marketing guru telling them that eāmail marketing is dead, passĆ©,
old hat.
And that they should be focusing instead on blogging, Twitter, Facebook,
LinkedIn, online video, mobile marketing, or whatever the fad flavor of the month is.
The other reason marketers are reluctant to launch a new eānewsletter is a
fearāreasonable but not trueāthat the eāzine āspaceā is too overcrowded.
āThere are so many eāzines out there, and everyone I know says they
already get too many,ā an attendee at the ETR Internet Marketing Conference told
me. āIt seems impossible that I could be successful by publishing yet another.ā
If you believe this to be true, slap yourselfāand listen to me as I tell you
what really works in Internet marketing todayā¦.
The Agora Model really works. I use it myself to earn a midāsixāfigure
income onlineāāworkingā on my Internet business only a couple of hours a day.
All the components of the Agora Modelāeānewsletters, eāmail marketing,
online adsāalso still work. Like gangbusters.
As an article in DM News (11/10/08, p. 2) reports: āWhile social media and
mobile marketing continue to be hot topics, marketers are still finding eāmail
newsletters relevant.ā
One of the neatest things about the Agora Model is that eānewsletter
subscribers are more loyal readersābecause they choose to opt into your listā
instead of you gathering their names and compiling your own eālist.
And despite the glut of eāmail in your prospectās inābox, sending an eāmail
is still an effective way to gain the readerās attention:
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Ā» A study at Loughorough University found that users take action, on
average, in less than two minutes upon being notified that a new eāmail is waiting
for them.
Ā» According to a report by Forrester Research, optāin lists (such as eā
newsletter subscriber lists) retain 49% of their subscribers over timeānearly
double the retention rate of compiled eālists.
Ā» A study from ClearContext, an eāmail management tools vendor, found that
over half of users surveyed spend more than 2 hours a day in their eāmail inābox.
Another reason why marketers hesitate to launch an eānewsletter is the
mistaken belief that it is time and laborāintensive to produce.
Thatās not true either.
In fact, your eānewsletter doesnāt have to be elaborate, lengthy, complex, or
fancy.
But it does have to deliver useful content to your subscribersāand do so on
a consistent basis.
Publishing your own eānewsletter gives you three essential advantages
when it comes to making money onlineā¦.
First, the best way to get people to opt into your eālist is by offering them
free content.
When you publish an eānewsletter, you always have new free content (your
eānewsletter) to offer.
Second, a monthly eānewsletter ensures that your prospects hear from
youāon a regular basisāat least 12 times a year.
Assuming they find your content valuable, this consistent communications
helps build a relationship with your online readers.
Third, when people subscriber to an online newsletter, they give you
permission to eāmail them.
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That means you can send them eāmail marketing messagesāwith product
offersāwhenever you wish, at minimal cost.
Repeated exposure to your eānewsletter and solo eāmail promotions gets
subscribers to trust you enough to start buying products you sell or recommend.
And before you know it, youāre making money selling information or
merchandise on the Internet!
In my next column, Iāll show you a quick and easy formula for writing,
designing, and distributing your eānewsletter in about an hour a month.
Section 11
5 Steps to the Perfect Guarantee
āUse a strong guaranteeā is standard advice in direct marketing.
Without a strong guarantee, your sales will slow to a trickleāsince buyers
are loathe to buy products over the Internet, phone, or by mail sight unseen.
But what exactly makes for a āstrongā guarantee?
A strong guarantee has 5 defining characteristicsāand your guarantee
should possess these qualities, too.
Ā» First, length: as a rule of thumb, the longer the guarantee, the better.
Typical guarantee periods are 10, 14, 30, 60, 90, 180, and 365 days.
Of these, 10 days is the weakest, because it requires the prospect to act too
quickly for comfort.
The buyer is afraid that, if he puts the product aside, the guarantee
coverage will expire, and heāll be stuck with a product he canāt return.
And so he doesnāt order in the first place.
Thirty days is a standard guarantee period, and certainly adequate.
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Sixty and 90 days are betterāall the information products I publish and sell
online are guaranteed for 90 days.
I donāt like lifetime guarantees, because it creates a financial liability on the
books that may be problematic when itās time to sell your business.
Sixāmonth and 12āmonth guarantees may be worth testing, but wonāt work
for some productsāfor instance, a oneāyear guarantee doesnāt make sense for an
annual directory.
Ā» The second consideration is the conditionality of the guarantee.
Meaning: are there strings attached? Or is it unconditional?
A conditional guarantee might say: return the product in saleable condition
for your money back.
The buyer is concerned that you will quibble with him over āsaleable
condition.ā
That is, you will refuse to issue a refund for a book he returned because, say,
the dust jacket has a smudge on it.
Another conditional guarantee is the one used by many sellers of small
business and investment home study programs.
The say: if you are not satisfied, send back the course for a refund; just
āprove to us that you made some effort to follow our system.ā
When you ask for a refund, they ask for more and more proofāand
whatever you send, the sellers counters that āyou didnāt do what we saidā (or do
enough of it)āand denies your refund on that basis.
Much better is to offer an unconditional guarantee. Tell the customer all he
has to do is return the product for a full refundāno ifs, ands, or butsāwithout
question or quibble.
Ā» The third quality of a strong guarantee is that everything is clearly stated
and spelled out.
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Be careful about wording that the consumer can misinterpret.
For instance, a performanceābased guaranteeāāIf you do not earn extra
money trading options with our program, return it for a refundāāsounds good
but contains a potential concernā¦
Does it mean that if I DO make some extra money with the product, I canāt
return it? Even if I only made ten bucks?
Rewrite the guarantee so there is no condition or ambiguity stated or
implied:
āIf you do not make extra money trading options with our program, or you
are not 100% satisfied for any other reasonāor for no reasonājust return the
program within 90 days for a full refund.ā
Ā» Fourth, the guarantee should be graphically emphasized within the
promotion.
Donāt bury it in body copy or put it in an asterisked footnote in 8āpoint type.
Print the guarantee in 12āpoint copy with a large, bold headline. Put a box
or even a certificateāstyle border around it to make the guarantee stand out.
Ā» Fifth, how generous is the guarantee?
The best guarantees are unfairābut unfair in favor of the buyer, not the
seller.
That means if the customer takes advantage of the guarantee, the seller is,
in a sense, getting ripped off.
Example: for regular books sold via mail order, the guarantee is simple:
return the book and we will send you your money back.
But think about the same guarantee for eābooksā¦
Can the customer really send you the eābook back?
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Do you expect them to send back the copy they printed outā¦or sign an
affidavit that they erased the eābook from their hard driveā¦or shredded the printā
out? (Some online marketers have done just that!)
Most information marketers skirt the issue of returning eābooks in their
guarantees.
They say: if you are not 100% satisfied, let us know within 90 days for a full
refund.
No discussion about returning or erasing or not using the eābook takes place.
In the landing pages I write to sell the eābooks I publish (see for example
www.myveryfirstebook.com), I go a step further:
I turn the fact that the customer does not have to return the eābook to me
into a benefit.
I say: āIf you are not 100% satisfied, let us know within 90 days for a full
refund.
āAnd keep the eābook free, with my compliments. That way, you risk
nothing.ā
I always suspected that this overly generous offer boosted my sales, but
never split tested it.
In a recent Internet marketing seminar, DP, who heard me talk about this
point in my presentation, said that he too tells his customers to keep the eābook
even if they ask for a refund.
But DP has splitātested it. And he swears that ākeep the eābook freeā
increased his conversion rates on average by 21%.
The bottom line: when writing copy, make sure your guarantee is:
Ā» Longā90 days is ideal for most offers.
Ā» Unconditionalāno strings attached.
Ā» Clearly stated with no ambiguity or possibility of misunderstanding.
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Ā» Highlighted with bold typography, color, and graphics so it really stands
out on the screen or page.
Ā» Overly generousāso that if the consumer exercises the guarantee, he is
essentially taking almost unfair advantage of you, the seller.
The overriding principle of a strong guarantee is to take all the risk off the
buyerās shoulders and place it on the sellerās shouldersāas it should be.
Section 12
5 Steps to Building a Large and Responsive OptāIn EāList of Qualified B2B Prospects
Many B2B marketers want to cut marketing costs by shifting more of their
marcom budgets from traditional direct mail and paper newsletters to eāmail
marketing and eānewsletters. But if you want to ramp up your online marketing
program, you should start building a large optāin eālist of customers and prospects
now.
Why? Because without a significant online āhouse fileā (list of optāin
subscribers), you can only reach prospects in your niche by renting other
marketersā optāin eālists, which is hardly costāeffective: each time you want to send
another message to your industry, you have to rent the list againāat a cost that
can easily reach into the hundreds of dollars per thousand names.
Some marketers buy databases containing eāmail addresses of business
prospects in their niche market. This can work if you are sending highly targeted
eāmails on extremely relevant topics and offers to narrow vertical eālists.
But when you send eāmail messages to non optāin lists, you are mostly
asking for trouble. CAN/SPAM does not prohibit eāmailing to people who have
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not opted in. But people on nonā optāin eālists are much more likely to register
SPAM complaints than those on legitimate optāin eālistsāand far less likely to buy
from you.
So the best online strategy for B2B marketers is to build your own optāin eā
list of subscribers. Doing so eliminates the cost of renting optāin lists while
preventing the spam complaints and lower response rates typical of non optāin
purchased or rented lists.
When you own an optāin eālist covering a sizeable percentage of your target
market, you can communicate with your prospects and customers as often as you
desire or think is appropriate at minimal cost. Being able to send an eāmail to your
target market with a few mouse clicks makes you less dependent on costly direct
mail, print newsletters, and other paper promotions.
By using a double optāin process that requires new subscribers to verify
their identity before being added to your eālist, you help minimize SPAM
complaints and bounceābacks. Owning a large optāin eālist of target prospects also
decreases marketing costs and improves lead flow and revenues.
So how do you build a large and profitable optāin eālist of qualified B2B
prospects in your field? Here are 5 ideas:
1āDedicate a portion of your online marketing budget exclusively to list building.
Most B2B marketers drive traffic either to their Website home page or landing
pages relating to specific offers (e.g., free webinar registration, free white paper
download, purchase a product). And a lot of the traffic they drive to these pages is
existing customers and prospects who are already on their eālist.
You should spend a minimum of 20% of your online marketing budget on
building your house optāin eālist. That means getting qualified prospects in your
industry that have not yet opted into your online subscriber list to do so.
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There are many online marketing options that work well for eālist building
programs. These include payāperāclick advertising, postcard marketing, banner
advertising, online ads in other marketerās eānewsletters, B2B coāregistration deals,
video marketing, viral marketing, editorial mentions in trade publications, online
article marketing, affiliate marketing, and social mediaāto name just a few.
2āCalculate your maximum acceptable cost per new subscriber. When
evaluating marketing methods for eālist building, you have to weigh the cost of
acquiring the new name vs. the value that new name has for your business.
To determine value, divide total annual revenues generated by your online
subscriber list by the number of names on that list. Example: If your 20,000 online
subscribers account for $600,000 in annual sales, your subscriber value is $30 per
name per year.
You decide how much you are willing to spend to acquire a subscriber
worth $30 per year. If uncertain, use this rule of thumb: list building campaigns
should ideally pay back their cost within three to six months. Therefore, if your
names are worth $30 per year each, you can afford to spend up to $15 per
subscriber to acquire new names.
Say you drive traffic to a landing page where people can sign up to your eā
list. The conversion rate is 50%, so for every two unique visitors you drive to your
registration page, you get one new optāin subscriber.
Using Google AdWords, you can drive traffic at a cost of $7 per click. Can
you afford that? Yes, because that means you get one new subscriber for every two
clicks you buy, which works out to $14 per subscriberāwithin your $15 per new
name limit.
Would it make more sense to base the allowable acquisition cost per new
name on the lifetime customer value (LCV) of online subscribers rather than just the
average oneāyear revenue per name? Theoretically, yes. But you can only do that if
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youāve been marketing online long enough to have reliable numbers on which to
base LCV estimates. Until you do, stick with the revenue per year per name figure
as the baseline.
3āPublish a free eānewsletter. The best way to build and regularly
communicate with an optāin list of B2B prospects is to publish and distribute a free
eānewsletter on a specialized topic related to your product line and of interest to
your target prospects.
Publishing a free eāzine gives you two important benefits for your online
marketing efforts. First, it gives you a standing free offerāa free subscription to
your eāletterāyou can use in your eālist building efforts. Second, having the eā
newsletter ensures that you communicate with your optāin subscribers on a
regular basis. This regular communication builds your relationship with your
online prospects while increasing the frequency of branding messages and online
marketing opportunities.
4āBuild a āfreeāonāfree name squeeze page.ā With a staggering number of free
eānewsletters on the Internet competing for attention, itās not enough to have a
simple signāup box on your home page for your free eānewsletter. You should
offer a bribe as an incentive for visitors to subscribe. The best bribe is a free special
report the visitor can download as a PDF file in exchange for opting in to your eā
list.
For instance, if you sell supply chain management software, and publish an
eāzine called āThe Strategic SCM Partner,ā offer a short bonus report ā7 Steps to
Improving Supply Chain Management in Your Enterpriseā as a premium for new
subscribers.
Drive traffic not to your home page or standard subscription form, but to a
special āfreeāonāfree name squeeze pageāāa landing page highlighting this offer.
We call it a āname squeeze pageā because it extracts or āsqueezesā new names for
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your list from Web traffic. āFreeāonāfreeā means you are offering free content (the
report) as a bribe to get the visitor to accept your primary free offer (the eā
newsletter subscription). For an example of a freeāonāfree squeeze page see:
www.bly.com/reports.
5āCapture the eāmail addresses of site visitors who do not buy, subscribe, or
register. Put in place one or more mechanisms for capturing the eāmail addresses of
site visitors who do not buy a product, download a demo, subscribe to your free
online newsletter, or take other actions that opt them into your eālist.
Going back to our example for supply chain management, when the visitor
attempts to leave the site without purchasing or registering, have a window popā
up to capture his eāmail address. The headline says, āWait! Donāt leave without
claiming your free special SCM report!ā
Short copy explains they can get a free copy of your special report ā7 Steps
to Improving Supply Chain Management in Your Enterpriseā by typing in their eā
mail address in the blank space and clicking submit. If you are not proactively
making an effort to capture eāmail addresses of site visitors who do not otherwise
register, you are leaving money on the table.
For more ideas on building your eālist and capturing the eāmail addresses
of site visitors, go to www.thelandingpageguru.com.
Section 13
10 Tips for Increasing Landing Page Conversion Rates
Thereās lots of buzz about blogging, viral marketing, social networking, and
other new methods of generating eyeballs and traffic online. But all that traffic
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wonāt make you any money unless you can convert those unique visitors to leads
or customers.
Depending on whether you are selling a product directly from your landing
page, asking visitors to download a free white paper, or promoting a Webinar or
demonstration, conversion rates can range from as low as 1% or less to as much as
50% or more. Here are 10 keys to writing landing pages that maximize online
conversion rates:
1āBuild credibility early. People have always been skeptical of advertising,
and with the proliferation of SPAM and shady operators, they are even more
skeptical of what they read online. Therefore, your landing page copy must
immediately overcome that skepticism.
One way to do that is to make sure one or more ācredibility buildersā is
clearly displayed on the first screen the visitor sees. In the banner at the top of the
page, use your logo and company name if you are well known; universities,
associations, and other institutions can place their official seal in the upper left of
the screen.
Within or immediately under the banner, put a strong testimonial or three
above the headline on the first screen. Consider adding a preāhead or subhead
which summarizes the companyās mission statement or credentials. At
www.bnasoftware.com, the positioning statement is: āThe nationās definitive
income tax management solution.ā
2āCapture the eāmail addresses of nonābuyers. There are a number of
mechanisms available for capturing the eāmail address of visitors who click on
your landing page but do not buy the product. One is to use a window with copy
offering a free report or eācourse in exchange for submitting eāmail address. This
window can be served to the visitor as a popāup (it appears when the visitor
arrives at the landing page) or a popāunder (a window that appears when the
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visitor attempts to leave the landing page without making an inquiry or purchase).
These are both blocked by popāup blockers. A āfloaterā is a window that slides
onto the screen from the side or top. Unlike the popāup and popāunder, the floater
is part of the Website HTML code, so it is not stopped by the popāup blocker.
3āUse lots of testimonials. Testimonials build credibility and overcome
skepticism, as do case studies and white papers posted on the Website. If you
invite customers to a live event, ask if they would be willing to give you a brief
testimonial recorded on video. Have a professional videographer tape it, get a
signed release from the customer, and post the testimonial on your Website as
streaming video. Require the customer to click a button to hear the testimonial,
rather than have the video play automatically when the visitor clicks on the page.
For written testimonials, customers may suggest that you write what you
want them to say and just run it by them for approval. Politely ask that they give
you their opinion of your product in their own words instead of having you do it.
Reason: what they come up with will likely be more specific, believable, and
detailed than your version, which might smack of puffery and promotion.
4āUse lots of bullets. Highlight key features and benefits in a list of short,
easyātoāread bulleted items. I often use a format where the first part of the bullet is
the feature, and after a dash comes the benefit; e.g., āQuickārelease adhesive
systemāyour graphics stay clean and donāt stick together.ā Online buyers like to
think they are getting a lot for their money, so when selling a product directly
from your landing page, be sure all major features and important benefits are
covered in a comprehensive bullet list appearing on your landing page.
When generating leads by giving away white papers, you donāt need a
huge list of bulleted features and benefits. But using bullets to describe the
contents of the paper and the benefits that information delivers can raise
conversion rates for download requests.
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5āArouse curiosity in the headline. The headline should arouse curiosity,
make a powerful promise, or otherwise grab the readerās attention so he has no
choice but to keep reading. The headline for a landing page selling a training
program on how to become a professional property locator makes a big promise:
āBecome a Property Locator Todayāand Make $100,000 a Year in the Greatest
Real Estate Career That Only a Few Insiders Know About.ā
6āUse a conversational copy style. Most corporate Websites are unemotional
and sterile: just āinformation.ā But a landing page is a letter from one human
being to another. Make it sound that way. Even if your product is highly technical
and you are selling it to techies, remember that they are still human beings, and
you cannot sell something by boring people to death.
7āIncorporate an emotional hook in the headline and lead paragraph. Logical
selling can work, but tapping into the prospectās emotions is much strongerā
especially when you correctly assess how the prospect is feeling about your
product or the problem is solves right now.
Another effective tactic for leadāgeneration landing pages is to stress your
free offer in the headline and lead. Example: Kaydonās landing page shows a
picture of its catalog with the bold heading above it reading, āFREE Ceramic
Bearings Product Selection Guide.ā
8āSolve the readerās problem. Once you hook the reader with emotional copy
dramatizing her problem or a powerful free offer, show how your productāor
your free informationācan help solve their problem. For example: āNow there is
a better, easier, and more effective solution to wobbly restaurant tables that can
irritate customers and ruin their dining experience: Table Shox, the worldās
smallest shock absorber.ā
To maximize landing page conversion rates, you have to convince the
visitor that the quickest route to solving his problem is taking the action indicated
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on the landing page, and notāas you might be tempted to let him doāsurfing
your site. Thatās why I prefer landing pages to appear with no navigation, so the
readerās only choice is to respond or not respond; thereās no menu of click buttons
and hyperlinks to other interesting pages to distract him.
9āMake it timely and current. The more your online copy ties in with current
events and news, the higher your response rates. This is especially critical when
selling financial and investment information as well as regulatory compliance
products in fields where laws and rules change frequently. Periodically update
your landing page copy to reflect current business and economic conditions,
challenges, and trends. This shows your visitor that your company is current with
and on top of whatās happening in your industry today.
10āStress the moneyāback guarantee or lack of commitment on the part of the user.
If you allow customers to order products directly from the landing page, make
sure you have a moneyāback guarantee clearly stated on that page. All your
competitors give strong moneyāback guarantees. So you canāt get away without
doing the same. If your product is good and your copy truthful, your refund rates
can be as low as 1% or even less.
If you are generating leads, stress that your offerāwhich might be a white
paper, online demonstration, or Webinarāis free. Say there is no obligation to buy
and that no salesperson will visit.
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Section 14
Playing the Slots
If you build an Internet marketing business, you will start to get frequent
requests from people asking you to promote something of theirs by sending an eā
mail to their list.
Or perhaps you are on the other end of that transaction, asking successful
Internet marketers to promote your book or event.
When they say no or ignore you, as most probably do, you become
dismayed or even angry.
In this article, I want to increase your chances of convincing other online
marketers to promote you or joint venture with you.
To begin with, you have to understand slotsāand their monetary value.
A āslotā in Internet marketing is one of the finite number of opportunities
during the year which the Internet marketer can send an eāmail to his list.
I say ālimited,ā because you canāt send too many eāmails to your
subscribers.
If you do, youāll annoy them. Theyāll unsubscribe, and your valuable eālist
will grow smaller.
For those of us who publish our free eāzines monthly, twice a week is about
the maximum eāmail frequency our subscribers tolerate from us.
With two slots a week, that means we have approximately 100 slots a year.
Letās say I gross $400,000 a year in my online marketing business.
That means each slot is worth $4,000 in revenue.
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If I take up one of those slots sending an eāmail promoting something of
yours for which I make no money (e.g., a free teleāseminar), it costs me $4,000 in
lost revenue.
Even if you offer me an affiliate commission to sell one of your paid
products to my list, I have to ask myself whether itās going to make the $4,000 I
need.
Often, the products people ask me to promote are priced too lowā¦and the
commission is too smallā¦for me to give up a slot.
And when I turn them down, they are disappointed or even offended.
TC sent me a review copy of his new book with a letter asking me to
promote it to my list.
Itās a paperback book with a $19.95 cover priceā¦and TC was offering me a
20% commission.
That means my commission on each book sold is about four bucks.
So Iād have to sell 1,000 for it to be worth taking up a slot for. And the
chances of me selling a thousand copies of someone elseās book are slim to
nonexistent.
OK. Letās say you want to convince meā¦or another Internet marketer with
a list you want to reachā¦to promote you to his subscribers.
Here are the questions I would ask youā¦and the answers that would get
me to consider.
First, who are you? How do I know you?
If you subscribe to my online newsletterā¦or read my booksā¦or we met at
a seminarā¦or have a mutual acquaintanceā¦say so.
This is important, as I generally promote products only from people I know
or have some connection with.
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Second, tell me how your product would benefit my subscribersāhow they
would profit from its content.
This requires a familiarity with my list, which you can easily get by
subscribing to my free eāzine at www.bly.com/reports.
Third, assuming I agree the product might interest my readers, I will ask
for a review copy.
This is mandatory. When I promote your product to my subscribers, I am
recommending it to my readers. And I canāt recommend something I havenāt seen.
Fourth, what is the product price and the affiliate commission?
If the price is too lowāless than $20āmy commission will be too low to
make any money from it.
I give a 50% affiliate commission on all my productsāand I look for a 50%
affiliate commission on products others ask me to promote.
The rule of thumb for pricing products sold via direct responseāonline and
offlineāis that the sales price should be at least eight times the cost of goods.
This formula allows you to give up 50% of the purchase price to an
affiliateā¦and still collect 4X your cost of goods on each unit sold.
On extremely highāpriced productsā¦say a thousand dollars or moreā¦an
affiliate commission of 25% is acceptable to most potential joint venture partners,
because it gives them $250 for each $1,000 unit sold.
As an entrepreneur looking for joint venture partners online, you need to
understand that for most Internet marketers, their eāmails are the primary way
they make money and put food on the table.
And the number of opportunities they have to make money by sending eā
mail offers to their list is limited.
For an Internet marketer with 100 slots a year, each slot represents 1% of his
gross annual income.
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Unless these online marketers are your best buddy, why would they give
up 1% of their total income for the year to promote your book, event, or news just
because you think their subscribers should know about it?
Internet marketing is a serious gameā¦and to get the players to joint
venture with you, you have to propose a deal thatās profitable and beneficial to
you both.
Section 15
What Web Metrics Should You Measure?
I may be wrong. I frequently am. But there are three Web metrics people
seem overly concerned with that I just donāt worry about.
The first is open rates. Since both my eāzine and eāmail marketing messages
are text, I canāt measure open rates.
I could convert my text eāmails to text in an HTML shell, which would
enable me to track open rates. But why? As long as an eāmail is profitable,
generating a lot of sales, what do I care how many people opened it? After all, in
direct mail, we only know how many people responded by returning the order
form with payment. We have no idea how many people opened the envelope or
whether they read the contents.
The second metric I donāt care about is page views: what pages of my
Website are visited most, how many minutes the average visitor spent on each
page, which pages people returned to, and so on.
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Again, my concern is whether the Web page can convince visitors to order
the productā¦or if they donāt order, at least get them to give me their eāmail
address and opt into my list.
The third thing I donāt care about is complaints. A reader recently asked me,
āHow many complaints do you get from AOL users?ā Why would I track AOL
users separately from the rest of my list?
Look. I donāt like complaints. If someone doesnāt like an eāmail I sent them,
I take it seriously and respond thoughtfully and politely. But it doesnāt keep me
up at night. Just as they can change the channel if they donāt like what they hear
on the radio, they can opt out of my list if they donāt like my contentāand they
should.
Okay. So what Web metrics do I, as a smallātime operator and Internet
entrepreneur, really care about?
There are five I watch like a hawk. More than that, I live and die by them. If
the numbers are good, I have a smile on my face all week. If they plummet, itās
like a black cloud over my head.
Here are the metrics I monitor:
1. Clickāthrough rates (CTR). When I send an eāmail to my subscriber list,
how many of the people on the list click on the URL link to the landing page? We
measure total clicks, unique visits to the landing page, and the CTR, which is a
percentage: if 800 people on my list of 40,000 clickāthrough, thatās a 2% CTR.
With eāmail marketing messages sent to your house eālist, CTR can range
from 1% or 2% on the low end, to 10% or even 15% on the high end. These CTRs
are for eāmails selling a product, not eāmails inviting the reader to get a free white
paper or other free offer.
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2. Conversion rates. Conversion means converting people who visit your
landing page into buyers. If you generate 1,000 clicks to your landing page, and
100 of those people place an order, your conversion rate is 10%.
Conversion rates can range from 1% or 2% on the low end, to 10% or more
on the high end. Inexpensive products generally have higher conversion rates,
while an eāmail promoting a bigāticket item can be profitable even with a
conversion rate below 1%.
Combined, the clickāthrough and conversion rates determine how many
units you sell. For instance, if you get a 3% CTR on a list of 40,000, you get 1,200
clicks to your landing page. If your conversion rate is 5%, the eāmail generates 60
orders.
3. Gross sales. This is the number of orders generated by the eāmail
multiplied by the selling price of the product. On the above example, 60 orders for
a $29 eābook generate gross revenues of only $1,740. But for a $249 product, 60
orders produce total sales of $14,940. In my little Internet business, the former
would send me into a deep funk, while the latter would have me popping the
champagne cork.
4. Optāout rates. Every time you eāmail to your list, a certain small number
of subscribers decide to optāout or āunsubscribeā from your eālist. Thatās a bad
thing, because unless you do something to generate new subscribers, your list will
gradually dwindle to nothing.
What is an acceptable optāout rate? My average eāmail to my list of 40,000
causes about 20 people to unsubscribe, which translates into an optāout rate of
0.05%āhalf of oneātenth of a percent. I think you can live with an optāout rate of
0.1% per eāmail, but more than that, and your list will shrink too rapidly.
5. Dollars per name. Dollars per name is the dollar value of each name on
your listāthe amount of revenue per name. If you make $200,000 a year in online
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sales from your subscriber list, and you have 40,000 subscribers, your dollar value
is $5 per name per year.
Why is this important? Because the various methods of building your eā
listāpayāperāclick advertising, coāregistration, banner advertisingāall cost money.
So your dollars per name tells you how much money you can afford to spend to
acquire new names for your eālist.
For example, if your dollars per name is $5, you certainly can afford to pay
$1 to add new names to your eālist: on average, youāll earn five times your
investment within one year.
Say you use payāperāclick advertising to drive people to a landing page
where you offer a free report as an enticement to opt into your eālist, and half of
the people who visit the page accept the free offer and subscribe. You can
therefore afford to bid up to 50 cents a click, since it takes two clicksācosting a
dollarāto get one signāup.
Now, general advertisers, brand marketers, and B2B marketers generating
leads rather than direct sales may care about many other metrics, including open
rates and page views. But for the direct marketer selling a product online, the five
metrics listed aboveāclickāthrough rate, conversion rate, sales, optāout rate, and
dollars per nameāare the most important metrics you can track.
Section 16
EāMail Marketing: How Much Is Too Much?
A couple of months ago, I joined the optāin eālist of a semiāobscure
entertainer whose CDs I enjoy.
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By midāafternoon of that day, I had received three eāmail marketing
messages from him.
When a fourth eāmail arrived around 5pm, I hollered āenough!āāand
promptly unsubscribed from his list.
That got me thinking about a question: how much eāmail is too much?
Say you publish a free monthly eānewsletter for your prospects and
customers.
In addition to the monthly eāzine, which they requested, will they
welcomeāor even tolerateāadditional eāmail messages from you?
If so, how many?
One eāmail a week ā¦one a day ā¦somewhere in between?
To find out, I asked several Internet marketers and users.
āThree eāmails a day seems just pathetic and desperate to me no matter
how relevant the message,ā says Sheri Cyprus.
āAs an eāmail consumer, three to five eāmails a day is definitely too many,ā
says Jodi Kaplan. Ms. Kaplan worked for a marketing association with several
different departments, each promoting a full schedule of events. āNo matter how
much we tried to coordinate our mailings and segment our list, we still got
complaints that we were sending too many eāmails.ā
āIām fine with weekly eānewsletters that also send me one weekly promo
message,ā says marketing consultant Tom Varjan. āSome Internet āexpertsā are the
greatest sinners by sending out multiple daily messages; Iāve finally unsubscribed
many of them.ā
Consultant Joel Heffner says that his tolerance for eāmail marketing
messages depends on the quality of the content in the eānewsletter itself: āIf I
really want to continue with the main message, I have great tolerance.ā If the eā
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newsletter content isnāt that important to Joel, even one extra eāmail marketing
message a month can cause him to unsubscribe.
A useful tool for determining the frequency of eāmail marketing messages
to your list is to monitor the optāout rateāthe number of readers who unsubscribe
each time you send an eāmail marketing message to your list.
Ideally, the optāout rate per eāblast should be 0.1% or lower. So if your list
has 10,000 subscribers, no more than 10 should unsubscribe after each eāmail
distribution.
Amy Africa, president of Eight By Eight, says that the maximum
unsubscribe rate per eāmail marketing blast should be 2%.
Letās say you publish a monthly eānewsletter with 10,000 subscribers. In
addition to the eāzine, which you distribute on the first of the month, you send an
eāmail marketing message in the middle of the month.
When you send your eāmail marketing message, enough subscribers buy
the product you are promoting to make it fairly profitableāand 25 unsubscribe
from your list. Youād like to make more money from your subscriber list. So you
decide to go from twice a month to weekly.
When you do, you notice that your optāout rate spikes: instead of losing 25
subscribers, you lose 100. Your subscribers are telling you that youāre eāmailing
them too frequently, and to prevent your list from evaporating, you cut back to
twice a month.
Sarah Stambler, president of EāTactics, an online media buying agency, says
the solution is to segment your eālist.
āOn the signāup page, they have to check one box to get just the eā
newsletter, and a second box indicating they are willing to accept your eāmail
marketing messages,ā says Stambler. She notes that a major publisher who did
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this found that only 50% of subscribers agreed to take the promotional messages
along with the free newsletter.
āWe follow the 80/20 rule,ā says Kim Mateus, publisher, Mequoda Group.
āFor every four editorial eāmails we send, we also send one promotional eāmail.ā
Another way to eāmail more frequently to your house list without irritating
subscribers or increasing optāouts is to write your marketing eāmails in an
editorial style rather than a promotional style.
You can do this either by entertainingātelling an amusing story, one with a
lesson embedded within it. Or, you can be educational: presenting to the reader a
useful tip or new idea within the body of the eāmail marketing message itself.
āI prefer marketing offers at the end of relevant information,ā says
marketing consultant Jim Logan, āI donāt like getting a pure pitch. The exception
is an offer arriving alone thatās tied to a theme the author has been addressing in a
series of eāmails.ā
āI think if eāmail marketers would just follow basic communication
etiquette, we would have much less eāmail,ā says Sean Woodruff. āWhy is it that
someone wouldnāt phone a person three times a day with an offer but will not
think twice about eāmail?ā
āThere is no magic rule as to how often you can eāmail,ā says Amy Africa.
āOnce a week is considered average. There are people who mail several times a
day. It really depends on our target market, product, and offer.
āI tell people to mail as long as they can afford it in terms of breakāeven. If I
had to bet my house on it, Iād say 98% of people donāt eāmail often enough.ā
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Section 17
Double or Triple Your Landing Page Conversion Rates with Taguchi Testing
Direct marketers are forever saying, āTest, test, test.ā
But in actuality, many direct marketers do little or no testing at all.
Sure, the bigāvolume consumer direct marketersālike Publisherās
Clearinghouse and Phillips Publishingātest all the time.
But many small and midāsize companies say they donāt have the budget,
time, or a large enough universe to make testing worthwhile.
Even among big direct marketers, testing is often limited to simple A/B split
testsāheadline āAā vs. headline āB,ā or a price test between $99, $199, and $299.
And thatās in direct mail. In space ads, A/B split testing is increasingly rare,
as the majority of publications neither offer nor encourage it.
But thanks to technologyā¦specifically the Internetā¦testing is undergoing a
revival using a technique called āTaguchi testing.ā
If youāre already familiar with and using Taguchi testing, you may get a
few useful ideas out of this article.
But if you are not, then listening to what I am about to tell you could be the
most important development in your Internet marketing this decade.
Since I am not a Taguchi expert, I wonāt attempt to go into the technical or
statistical details, which I donāt really understand anyway.
Instead, letās discuss Taguchi testing on a high level.
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Specifically, Taguchi testing is a system where, with a landing page or other
online direct response promotion, you test not one but many variablesā
economically and in a relatively short time frame.
David Bullock, President of Results Squared, a consultancy offering
Taguchi testing services to direct marketers, says that his program typically
involves testing the following promotion elements: three preāheads, six headlines,
three subheads, three salutations (e.g., āDear Home Builderā vs. āDear Lumber
Buyerā vs. āDear Wood Traderā), three lead paragraphs, three visuals (e.g., a
product photo vs. a photo of the inventor vs. a photo of a happy customer), three
guarantees, and three calls to action.
But you can choose to test other elementsābonuses, prices, even different
lists of bullets in the copyāreally, anything you want. Other factors Bullock often
tests include traffic source (e.g., organic search traffic vs. Google AdWords vs. eā
mail) and what he calls āpredisposition to purchase.ā
āPredisposition to purchaseā is a measure of how convinced the prospect is
of the offerās value before he even clicks onto the landing page. For instance, a
visitor responding to an eāmail sent by a joint venture partner to his list of loyal
readers has a greater predisposition to believe the message than a visitor who
finds the page from a keyword search.
With specialized Taguchi testing software, each unique visitor to the site
sees the landing page with a different combination of the elements being tested.
The results are measured, tabulated, and analyzed. Reports are generated
to show which headline pulled the best, which lead paragraph pulled best, which
visual pulled best, and so on.
The advantage is that you are testing multiple versions of many key
variables in landing page performance, and not just two versions of one variable
as is usually the case with traditional A/B split tests.
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Therefore, conversion is increased incrementally for each variable, e.g., a
20% lift in orders for the best headline, a 17% increase in conversion for the best
lead, and so on.
By incorporating the winning versions of all variables tested in the final
landing page, Taguchi testing can double, triple, even quadruple or more the
conversion rate of your landing pages.
To do Taguchi testing, you need to write complete copy for your landing
page along with the needed elements listed above: the six headlines, three
subheads, and so on.
Then, you give the copy to your Taguchi testing service and you are ready
to roll. You can find several Taguchi testing vendors listed under āTaguchi
Testingā on the Vendors page of my Website www.bly.com.
In the āgood old days,ā it would take many weeks, or even a couple of
months, to get a valid reading on a direct mail testāand even then, it was usually
just an A/B split of two different packages, prices, or headlines.
But because Taguchi testing is done online, you get the results much faster.
Depending on the amount of traffic being driven to the URL and the conversion
rates, says Bullock, a complete test can be completed and verified in three to five
weeks.
The amount of traffic required also depends on conversion rate, since
statistical validity of testing is based not on ānumber of pieces mailedāāor online,
on amount of trafficābut on number of responsesāor in the case of a landing
page, number of sales made.
Typically you want to get at least 1,000 unique visits per test cell.
Depending on the number of test cells, you need anywhere from 12,000 to 20,000
visits for a complete test.
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Section 18
5 Ways to Capture Eāmail Addresses of Landing Page Visitors
Most Internet marketers I know who use landing pages to make direct sales
online focus on conversion: getting the maximum number of visitors to the
landing page to place an order for the product being advertised.
Other Internet marketers, when writing landing page copy, focus not only
on conversion, but also on search engine optimization: key word selection and
meta tag creation that can increase traffic by raising the siteās search engine
rankings.
But in addition to conversions and unique visits, savvy Internet marketers
are also concerned with a third performance metric: eāmail address capture.
If you have a 2% conversion rate, then for every 100 visitors to the landing
page, only two buyāand of course, during these transactions, you capture the eā
mail addresses of those buyers.
What happens to the other 98 visitorsāthose who do not buy? You will not
be able to add their eāmail address to your list unless you incorporate a deliberate
methodology into your landing page to capture it.
Here are four different methodologies for capturing the eāmail addresses of
landing page visitors who do not purchase. Every landing page you operate
should use at least one of these methods:
1. Eāzine signāup box. This is a box where the visitor can get a free eā
newsletter subscription just by entering his name and eāmail address. You can see
an example of a simple eāzine signāup box at www.bly.com and countless other
Websites.
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The eāzine signāup box placed prominently on the first screen is a widely
used method of eāmail capture for Websites. But it is less commonly used for
microāsites and landing pages.
The reason is that, if your headline and lead properly engage the readerās
attention, he wonāt bother to sign up for the eānewsletterāinstead, heāll start
reading.
Then, if he loses interest or reaches the end but does not order, and instead
clicks away, you havenāt captured his eāmail address.
2. Squeeze pages. Also known as preview pages, these are short landing
pages that require the visitor to registerāby giving his name and eāmail addressā
before he is allowed to go on and read the longācopy landing page. To see a
squeeze page at work, visit: www.squeezepagegenerator.com.
In some cases, the longācopy landing page itself is positioned as a āreportā
which the visitor can read only if he submits his name and eāmail address first. For
this to work, your landing page should be written in an informative, educational
style.
Many squeeze pages offer a content premium, such as a free report, just for
submitting your eāmail address. Those seeking to capture snail mail as well as eā
mail addresses make the premium a physical object that must be shipped, such as
a free CD.
Squeeze pages work well when your primary source of traffic is organic
and paid search. Reason: search visitors clicking to your site are only mildly
qualified, because they are making a decision to visit based on only a few words in
a search engine description or paid Google ad.
Therefore, they may not be inclined to read long copy from a source they
are not familiar with. A squeeze page lets them absorb the gist of your proposition
in a few concise paragraphs. The main advantage of the squeeze page is that it
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ensures capture of an eāmail address from every visitor who reads the full landing
page. In addition, these prospects have been preāqualified, in terms of their
interest in the subject, and so are more likely to stick with long copy.
3. Eāmail capture sidebars. These are forms built into the main landing page
as sidebars, again making a free offer. In a longācopy landing page, the eāmail
capture sidebar usually appears early, typically in the second or third screen, and
may be repeated one or more times throughout the page. Example:
www.rocketfrench.com.
The drawback of the eāmail capture sidebar is that the prospect sees it
before he gets too far in the sales letter, and therefore before youāve sold him and
ask for the order.
Therefore, the risk is that if your product teaches, say, how to speak French,
and the eāmail capture sidebar offers free French lessons, the visitor will just take
the free offer and feel no need to spend money on the paid offer.
4. Popāunder. When you attempt to click away from the landing page
without making a purchase, a window appears that says something like, āWait!
Donāt leave yet!āāand makes a free offer. To see how this works, go to one of my
sites, www.becomeaninstantguru.com.
The big advantage of the popāunder is that the visitor sees it only after he
has read to the point where he is leaving without ordering. Therefore, the free
content offer doesnāt compete with or distract visitors from the paid product offer.
The disadvantage is that about half of Internet users run popāup blockers
on their PCs, and these blockers will prevent your popāunder from showing.
5. Floaters. A floater looks and functions much like a popāup window, but
itās actually part of the landing pageās HTML code, and therefore, wonāt be
blocked by a popāup blocker. You can see a floater at bhg.com.
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The floater blocks a portion of the landing page when you click onto the site.
You can enter your eāmail or click it away without doing so. Either action removes
the floater and allows you to see the complete landing page.
As you can see, all of these eāmail capture methods offer some sort of free
contentātypically a downloadable PDF report, eācourse delivered via autoā
responder, or eāzine subscriptionāin exchange for your eāmail address.
Why bother to maximize capture of visitor eāmail addresses on your
landing pages and other Websites?
There are two primary benefits. First, by sending an online conversion
seriesāa sequence of eāmails delivered by autoāresponderāto these visitors, you
have another opportunity to convince them to buy and increase your overall
conversion rate.
Second, the best names for your eāmail marketing efforts, far better than
rented optāin lists, are in your house eālist. So the faster you can build a large eālist,
the more profitable your Internet marketing ventures will become.
How much more profitable? Internet marketing expert Fred Gleeck
estimates that, for information product marketers, each name on your eālist is
worth between ten cents and a dollar or more per name per month.
Therefore, a 50,000āname eālist could generate annual online revenues of
$600,000 a year or higher. In other businesses, the sales could be significantly
higher. HewlettāPackard has 4.5 million eāzine subscribers, from whom they
generate $60 million in monthly sales.*
ā¢ B-to-B, 4/4/05.
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About the Author
BOB BLY is an independent copywriter and consultant with more than 20
years of experience in businessātoābusiness, high tech, industrial, and direct
marketing.
Bob has written copy for over 100 clients including: Network Solutions, ITT
Fluid Technology, Medical Economics, Intuit, Business & Legal Reports and
Brooklyn Union Gas. Awards include a Gold Echo from the Direct Marketing
Association, an IMMY from the Information Industry Association, two Southstar
Awards, an American Corporate Identity Award of Excellence, and the Standard
of Excellence award from the Web Marketing Association.
He is the author of more than 50 books including The Complete IdiotŹ¹s
Guide To Direct Marketing (Alpha Books) and The CopywriterŹ¹s Handbook
(Henry Holt & Co.). His articles have appeared in numerous publications such as
DM News, WriterŹ¹s Digest, Amtrak Express, Cosmopolitan, Inside Direct Mail, and Bits
& Pieces for Salespeople.
Bob has presented marketing, sales, and writing seminars for such groups
as the U.S. Army, Independent Laboratory Distributors Association,
American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the American Marketing
Association. He also taught businessātoābusiness copywriting and technical
writing at New York University.
Bob writes sales letters, direct mail packages, ads, eāmail marketing
campaigns, brochures, articles, press releases, white papers, Websites, newsletters,
scripts, and other marketing materials clients need to sell their products and
services to businesses. He also consults with clients on marketing strategy, mail
order selling, and lead generation programs.
Prior to becoming an independent copywriter and consultant, Bob was
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advertising manager for Koch Engineering, a manufacturer of process equipment.
He has also worked as a marketing communications writer for
Westinghouse Defense. Bob Bly holds a B.S. in chemical engineering from the
University of Rochester and has been trained as a Certified Novell Administrator
(CNA). He is a member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers and the
Business Marketing Association.
Bob has appeared as a guest on dozens of TV and radio shows including
MoneyTalk 1350, The Advertising Show, Bernard Meltzer, Bill Bresnan, CNBC,
Winning in Business, The Small Business Advocate and CBS Hard Copy.
He has been featured in major media ranging from the LA Times and Nationās
Business to the New York Post and the National Enquirer.
For a FREE Copywriting Information Kit, or a free, noāobligation cost
estimate on copywriting for your next project, contact:
Bob Bly, Copywriter 31 Cheyenne Drive, Montville, NJ 07045 Phone (973) 263-0562, Fax (973) 263-0613 eāmail: [email protected] Web: www.bly.com