One of my new Landing Page Cash Machine Workshop members had put up a web store to sell hand painted glassware. He wanted to know how to increase sales.
Although there are many areas for improvement that he could work on, I gave him three specific recommendations to start with.
1) Get to know your customers.
Who is your ideal customer? What is he or she looking for when they end up here?
Why is this important?
Why do you do the things you do?
If you think you are in complete control of your everyday actions, you are unfortunately mistaken.
I'm not talking black helicopters and voodoo mind control here. I'm instead referring to subliminal influence. Every day, we are influenced by people who want you to move in their direction, whether figuratively or literally.
Today's election is a good example of that.
Here in California, Phil Angelides is running for Governor against Arnold Schwarzenegger. He's got a TV commercial where Angelides is walking among a few dozen cardboard cutouts of Schwarzenegger.
The cutouts are interesting, though.
The first struggle with any new online marketing effort is
getting traffic. The final focus is on getting that traffic
to buy from you.
But what comes in the middle?
When I speak publicly, it's usually about my 'Six Simple
Landing Page Secrets'. And I talk about exactly this. Are
you converting at least ONE PERCENT of your visitors to buyers?
If you're not, you're in good company. The average is a
little below that (I've heard about 0.86% cited), with a the largest number of websites bottoming out at zero.
One thing I just can't believe is how many people don't
bother to build a list on their sales page. On average
you'll get 20% of your visitors to opt into your list . . .
that's probably not a surprise. But with a well designed
autoresponder you'll get about 25% of those to buy from you
— five sales.
That probably *is* a surprise.
I frequently get questions like this from newbie internet marketers. They don't know what shopping cart to use. And usually the question boils down to 1ShoppingCart or Clickbank. Here's how Daniel phrased the question.
Mark, I'm confused and stuck, and don't know what to do. I've received some advice that I should sell my new ebook at Clickbank, but other people say I should use 1ShoppingCart. I've got my ebook nearly done, but I am stuck because I don't know what to do about this. What do YOU think?
Dan
Hi Dan.
Well, I won't give you an answer to use one or the other, but I will help you make your decision by helping you understand what the advantages and disadvantages of each solution are, and what you need to add to create a complete solution.
From my perspective, you need the following abilities for a complete internet marketing setup.
Is that what you need, too? Probably.
I got a question from Kumar (no domain name provided) about popups and such.
Hey Mark,
I don't have any popups or popunders or popovers or any pop anything on my site, but I do know that they can increase my optins. I also heard that Google doesn't allow these things.
I don't want to offend anyone, but I do want people to sign up. What do you suggest?
Kumar
Kumar,
Popups open in a separate window and are verbotten by Google when sending traffic from Adwords. You can have them deeper in your site, but not on the page you land on from Adwords.
Popunders are also separate windows. Anything that opens in a new window can be blocked by a popup blocker.
John C wrote me the following email. . .
> Hi Mark
>
> I have been looking at your Landing Page Cash Machine site
> for a few days and have a question:
>
> I am in the middle of rebuilding my site(s) with Xsitepro,
> this does a lot of SEO work etc and I wonder whether the
> LPCM program will have a lot else to offer. Give me an honest answer.
>
> John C_____
I had a discussion with a client the other day. We had already built them a website, and designed a set of integrated, cross-pollenating autoresponder series to offer different whitepapers to his visitors. (Cross-Pollenating means that when someone joins one autoresponder series, they'll eventually get a promotion to the other autoresponder series. They all promote the others.)
They spent a considerable amount of time and money developing the whitepapers that are given away in the series, and the subsequent autoresponder messages that dive deeper into the points made in the white papers. It's really an excellent piece of marketing.
The goal of the autoresponders is to