Dry Spell Has Broken!

After days with no sales, the terrible streak has been broken. Unfortunately, the sales were split evenly between the pages I was testing. So no data on which is better. Alas.

First JV attempt

At the behest of Jean-Rene and Burke, I contacted my first potential JV partner this a day or two ago. I'm planning to promote her product first to my list and see how it converts. If it does well, then I will come from the angle of becoming JV partners. I think people will be more likely to partner up if I have already made some money for them. One of the techniques I picked up from the program I bought (I'll get the name for you guys later) is becoming JV partners with someone and promoting each other's product on the "thank you" page after someone has bought from you. According to them, people are more likely to buy when they have just parted with their cash so the "thank you" page is prime real estate. I'm excited to try it out.

Enter MSN Adcenter.
I received a $100 coupon in the mail a while back and decided to jump on it.

The Bad: The system is cumbersome as Hell. I mean, this thing makes the old Overture interface look like Adwords. That's how complicated and convoluted it is. Buggy, too. Two properly spelled keywords were rejected while all of the misspellings for those words were accepted. I also have to bid almost twice as much to get decent rankings compared to Adwords.

The Good: Their support is great. Unlike Google and Yahoo, no attempt is made to hide the telephone support. I called in and was talking to a live person in less than 2 minutes. We went through my campaign and figured out why the system denied the two keywords. The explanations is so silly that I'm not even going to detail it here suffice to say it was caused by a prevalent system bug. Support Lady was very helpful, a bit on the verbose side, and more than willing to explain how to use the system.

I'm hoping it works out well so that I can add to my traffic sources. The PPC Triumvirante - Google, Yahoo, & MSN!

Conditioning

I recently purchased an email marketing course. Yeah, I know. I've been buying a lot of them lately and this is coming from the guy who said "don't buy marketing ebooks, all of the info is available in forums". Well, these are audios, so there.

In all honesty, it doesn't make any real difference. Ebooks, audios, videos - almost all of the info IS available in forums. Things have changed in that I don't have the time to scourer forums anymore. Sigh alas.

Anyway, back to the story at hand. In the audios, one of the individuals said that you have to condition your list to be responsive and buy from you. This really hit home for me. I started my list in July 2006 but didn't release the product until December 2006. That period of time the only money the list generated was in the form of Adsense. That is a long time and during that entire time I never made offers to them. I conditioned them to be "freebie seekers". I have to recondition them to be "buyers". I have to make sure the new subscribers are buyers up front.

Enter the One-Time-Offer. I found a free script that will give those who opt into my newsletter a chance to get my product for 15% off. One time. If they try to come back or reload the page, the offer is gone. According to the speaker, doing this will get it into the mind of the subscriber up front that they will be offered products to buy.

What do you think?

Burke, Jean-Rene, and I have discussed the issue of affiliates and they have convinced me to take a shot and get them now. Let's see how it goes.

Split Tests Up

Two of them, in fact.

Split Test 1 - Namesqueeze (NS)
On the NS page, I changed the image to reflect the newsletter and moved it and the sign up form to the left hand side. I know you should only change one thing at a time but placing these items on the left seems to be what all of the eye heat maps suggest so I'm testing it out. The other is the regular NS page I have been using for months now.

Split Test 2 - Salesletter
One salesletter is the one I have been using. The other is completely revamped with all new text, images and everything. Out of these, I will choose the best and then start the "one-change-at-a-time" testing. As we have already discussed, the goal is 3% sales rate. I also used a redirect so that when people mouse-over the buy links, they see pretty, regular URLs and not the nastiness my product protector throws up. We will see if that makes a difference.

Sales have really slowed down since the beginning of the month. I am about to try to send out another sales broadcast. Hopefully a little prodding will get more traffic to the split test to see if it has an effect.

Salesletter B IS Finished

First post was a false alarm. It is officially finished and up. The problem is that now my 30 day trial of Stuffed Tracker is up and I can't do the split test. Can anything come easy? I mean, seriously, what does a man have to do to catch a break?=)

Anyway, I'm going to redirect traffic to it and see what happens. Meanwhile, I need to decide if Stuffed Tracker is worth the $99 price tag or if I should go with Adtrackz. I would to go with Adtrackz hands down it I were sure that it could record a visitor's progress through the site, when they first showed up, how many times they came back, etc. I know Stuffed Tracker can do this but I have to admit for all of its nice pretty charts and graphs the thing is buggy as hell! This is really a tough call. It has the features I need but is somewhat cumbersome to use & Adtrackz looks like a down-n-dirty campaign tracker. It's like comparing one of these fancy workout centers to a high school weight room. The gym is full of flash and pomp but the old school weight equipment will get you strong.

Well, that's where that is. I can't wait until I can start making progress and get the conversion rate up. 3% is probably the lowest I can go before offering my product to affiliates to sell.

More Salesletter B

I think I may be finished with Salesletter B but I'm too tired to proof read it and actually do a good job at it. Tomorrow the page will go up and the tests will start.

Creating Salesletter B

I'm nearly 50% finished with the Salesletter B. This one is far more elaborate than the first and almost twice as long. In reading a couple posts on a forum, it was recommended that the salesletter should be long and address every possible reason a person could come up with NOT to buy. It should also reinforce each reason a person would want to buy and even create a few more reasons to cement the deal.

Writing good copy is hard. I was tempted to get Instant Sales Letters by Yanik Silver but I haven't made the jump yet. Instead I have found sales letters for popular products that I know sell well and have taken various elements from them to make the letter. I'm excited to see how it goes.

I Love This Game

Right now I am setting up a new spreadsheet to track my earnings and losses each month. Critical stuff. You can't get to where you're going if you don't know where you've been.

Jean-Rene brought up a good point about making a limited time bonus instead of doing a physical product in limited quantities. One thing I didn't write in the comments for the last post is that I think that customers will feel it is more legitimate to offer a limited time deal on something that is physical compared to an information product. Really the only reason to limit an information product is to cause a frenzy and reduce the number of people that can get that bonus. There are an infinite number of copies of an information product and people know that. On the other hand, physical products by their very nature are limited. It just seems to be a more legitimate way of producing scarcity. I don't know because I'm still a pup in this game and need to test things out.

I want Product Launch Formula. It is $997. Yes, it is nearly $1000. I want it and my product is going to buy it for me. I will test new salesletters, new email ads, incorporate SEO techniques, add the product to one of my established sites, just about whatever it takes to get my hands on PLF.

The product has grossed $721.90 since launch and I am just now starting to really market it. There were huge dry spells, too. To get to 3 sales/day I will first have to make 1/day=)

Fun times!

Last Night's Work

This week has been great as far as productivity goes. I have nearly finished the bonus I've been working on, set up Linkmachine, did some keyword research, and came up with some strategies for the next big push on my product.

Everywhere you go, there is talk of scarcity and using it to sell products. Up until now I have had a lot of trouble coming up with an idea of how to make my information product scarce. It's not like there are limited quantities available. The whole reason I developed an information product was to avoid the problems that go with shipping a physical product. What if I made a limited number of physical versions of my product? And if I were to take the physical version off of the market after 7 days whether I sell through the physical versions or not, that may prompt people to jump on it.

That's the scarcity tactic I will be attempting soon.