What doesn’t WordPress do well on its own? Well…
* It doesn’t tell you what to write,
* It doesn’t update its own content,
* It doesn’t serve up the right ads to your visitors,
* It doesn’t syndicate your content very well (or completely),
* It doesn’t accurately report your bounce rate to Google, and
* It doesn’t let you see what’s wrong with your site (according to Google).
It so good at so many things, but really sucks at those. But this
Wow, there was a big response to my offer to help you with your web pages. You’ll remember that I gave you a free membership to the Optimizers Club (http://www.OptimizersClub.com) so you could get some new ideas to improve your website.
I was a bit surprised at the response, but probably not in the way you might expect.
Yes, there were a lot of really bad web pages (you’ll see one in a minute, link is below). But there were also a surprisingly high number of already-good ones.
What made them good?
When you get to that level, you might think that the Optimization work is over. But it’s at exactly this point that
Whether you’re an affiliate marketer or you sell your own stuff, chances are, your website can make you A LOT more money than it does now.
What kind of difference would a mere doubling of sales do for you? I don’t know your personal situation, but it might mean you’re able to make a MUCH better Christmas for your kids than in years past. Or it might mean being able to expand your business, hire more people, and give yourself a raise.
Or maybe it means you can pay a few bills.
Whatever it means to you, it’s NOT TOO LATE. All you need is a little help.
Here’s what I’m talking about:
The difference between an average or poorly performing sales or squeeze page, and a page that works twice as well might be a VERY SMALL TWEAK. It could a difference of one
If you’ve ever wondered whether your landing page, squeeze page, or entire website was as good as it could be, I’ve got an answer for you.
IT ISN’T.
And there are two reasons why that’s probably the case:
1) “You’re probably not split testing.”
Split testing is the probably the single best way to improve the performance of your website. If you wanted to get more opt-ins, make more sales, and overall just make more money, split testing can get you there more quickly than any other method I know.
If you’re not split testing, start now.
** ON THE OTHER HAND… **
If you’re already split testing, there is one more demon that may be getting in your way. And that brings us to the second reason why your site isn’t as good as it could be. It’s that…
The last week or so we’ve been talking about bad squeeze pages.
There’s CLEARLY no shortage of them online. Once you learn that step one of internet marketing is to build a list, you decide to build your first squeeze page.
I remember my first squeeze page. It was for a mattress website, of all things. I thought I could sell leads to local businesses — a good business, but at the time I had no idea what I was doing.
Having been a programmer in a past life, I thought I’d design the mailing list system myself (bad idea). It’s much better to use standard list-building tools. They’re ultimately cheaper and easier.
And although I had heard that the best way to build a squeeze page was with no menu choices, no links and no distractions on the page, I had plenty of them all.
It wasn’t pretty, and I don’t think I got a single lead.
Well, I’ve come a long way since then, and I’m sure over time I’ll travel even further. But at this point it’s time to give back a bit, and help others in the same situation.
A bit of advice: Don’t expect that just because you WANT someone to opt into your page, that they will. It’s an odd thing, but we tend to think that the things that we love, are in fact also loved by others, and that’s not always the case — in life and in marketing.
In my last post, I showed you the Worst Squeeze Page Runners Up.
Today, you get the winner (or loser, depending on how you look at it.)
Last week, I wrote you about the “worst squeeze page ever,” a post that got a LOT of interest on my blog. I even asked for you to send me your own squeeze page, if you thought it was worse than the one I wrote about.
I thought I’d see some that are bad…and wow are they BAD, each for their own special reason!
As a prize for the loser…err, I mean winner… I offered a web-page evaluation worth about $125. But there were some classic examples of “squeeze pages gone bad,” that I also decided to do a few additional quick reviews for three runners-up because the lessons you can learn from seeing how other people put a page together can be very valuable.
You might be making the same mistakes on your own pages.
One note before you look: I wrote my reviews of the pages very impersonally. I didn’t pull any punches or try to be nice or polite. In fact, in a few cases, I wasn’t polite at all. I just wrote about what I saw, and what I thought about it. My apologies if you’re offended.
So here are the runners-up. Learn from them. The winner will be revealed in my next post.
A couple of days ago, I wrote a post on my blog called “Is this the worst squeeze page ever?”
Did you read it? If not, go take a look.
I showed you a squeeze page which I thought was pretty darn bad. It actually does have *two* redeeming qualities, but overall, it really looks like a stinker to me.
In response to that blog post, I got a comment from “Lyn”, who wrote…
“For me, the “worst” landing pages are those with video that starts playing automatically. I like to leave browser tabs open, those products that interest me, that I want to consider. And once you have several of the auto playing type opening the browser becomes a nightmare. But that’s from a consumer viewpoint.”
I wrote back to Lyn because I think that her observation was a good one. In fact, you probably agree with it. But that’s only part of the story.
One thing that’s important to keep in mind with respect to Landing Page conversions (or squeeze page conversions, or any website performance metric) is that just because someone
My friend Jim Stone is the creator of the premier multi-variate split testing tool, the Split Test Accelerator.
Among all of the good marketing friends I have, Jim dives deepest into the science of split testing.
For example, he just wrote an article about something new, called “untethered split testing”.
It’s a technique for increasing your conversions far beyond what you would normally be able to do either with simple split testing, or even multi-variate split testing.
Interested?
Go read Jim’s split testing blog here.
To Your Success,
–Mark Widawer
p.s. If you want to make your web page perform better, go get Jim’s free 3-step split testing starter kit here.
This is an important lesson for any marketer.
I was at a private event in February with some of the smartest marketers on the planet.
I was talking about some new business ideas (things I’ll tell you about on another day) when John Reese came and sat at my table.
Now, if you don’t know John, he’s a bit of a legend in the Internet Marketing world. He’s the first guy to do a “million dollar day” for an information product, and has been known for that ever since. But John is ironically a pretty private guy, and not thrown to tooting his own horn.
So today, I’ll toot it for him (please don’t take that the wrong way).
I was talking about an upcoming project of mine that has to do with conversion optimization, and split testing, and John gave me this feedback. (Paraphrased, by the way. Not quoted.)
Conversion is a hard thing to sell. In fact, it’s the HARDEST thing to sell, even though it shouldn’t be. Conversion is all about TRADING DIMES FOR DOLLARS, and anyone who doesn’t understand that isn’t going to be in business very long. But it’s not as flashy a topic as Traffic, and so few people want to learn conversion.
For that matter, John continued,
I’ve got a question for you: If YOU could get JOHN CARLTON on the phone, what would you ask him?
As you probably know, NOTHING sells unless someone writes some copy. Whether you’re speaking that copy on a video, or pasting it into an autoresponder, or writing a sales page or squeeze page…copy is critical.
It makes money for you.
Like it or not, if you want to sell your stuff, your number one job is to get your audience to understand why they should spend their hard-earned money and give it to you.
Now, you can call that influence, inspiration, persuasion, convincing…whatever you like. But the bottom line is that no one buys unless they understand why they should buy. That’s what writing copy is all about.
And there are WRONG ways and RIGHT ways to write copy.
And there are SLOW ways and FAST ways to write copy.
And there are HARD ways and EASY ways to write copy.
Writing copy the wrong way might not only lose a sale for you, it might even chase away your best customers.
John is a master of writing GREAT copy the FAST and EASY way.
So I’ve arranged to get about 45 minutes of John Carlton’s time, and he’s going to