How I started Making sense of conversion maths?
Ed’s response on my blog post “Zero – 150 Unique visitors in 8 days” got me thinking. So I am going to cover this very important topic. Its called conversion maths. Or Rather
Conversion Maths : 80 Unique visitors = $3 Income or 80 Unique Visitors = $70 Income Which you’d chose?
Before I start off this article, let me confess, I am not one of those fanatic testers. In fact I pretty much hate when I have to do the numbers and figure out if I am making money or losing. But this is a fact you have to deal with if you want to do marketing and run a business. So here’s complete background on how I got started…
I wasn’t a Traffic Expert back then…
If you have been subscribed to my list then you know my story. During my first 13 months as a failure in marketing… I started blogging and I wasn’t very good at generating traffic. On one of my main blog I was getting 80–100 uniques a day after continuously blogging for 3–4 months (that’s how much I used to suck).
When you don’t get traffic, you only have one option to turn to… Become good at converting people into clicks (Using google adsense). I think I applied every click tricks for adsense I could find… Some techniques were even pretty objectionable too.
Like the one here called Adsense beautifier. This is an example of a wordpress plugin. Of course this thing can get High CTR’s and in those good ol`days Google used to pay pretty decent money with ever click.
Though I am not using these techniques (as you can increase CTR with bit more creativeness). For example creativity with adsense. Now I don’t want to make this post another improve adsense ctr. So lets get on with story.
In one of those lucky days I sold a product and got a commission of $70. Now this kind of commission outside Internet marketing is pretty un-heard of (at least for a guy like me). So I was curious, surprised and really happy, but I didn’t do anything with the info. Later next week, I sold another of those product and this time I started wondering…
What the hell I am selling exactly for $70 commission?
Now I dug into my affiliate stats and started comparing the prices and their commission structure. I dug into my own stats to tried to understand few things like..
- Where people are coming from.
- What kind of mindset these people into before they came at my blog?
- Does that mindset change after reading my blog post (or pre-sell)?
- Which of my posts were pre-selling these costly products?
- Which keywords people are using to land up on my blog?
- Does these keyword have anything to do with decision making on the product?
- If I write this new post, will it help sell the product more?
Now as you can see, this was heavy duty work for lazy me. It took me like couple of weeks to gather that much data with small visitors. Remember, I didn’t knew about the list building concept back then…
Now after I got my data, I started working on …
- How to get more people into same mindset as when people were buying?
- Can I add something to get additional traffic to my specific blog page?
- Can I add something more to my blog post to increase conversion?
So armed with all these question and answers I started making changes to my layout structure. On how am I was writing my articles and pre-selling products.
Results : Are you interested?
After another 2 weeks I was able to sell 1 of those products in 2 days (or rather 180–200 unique visitors). now this was something good. Why ? because Before I was making $3 a day with adsense and odd change with affiliate products. Now I am selling a product at least 3 times in a week and making around $210/Week.
Now if you know the stats for affiliates, 90% of affiliates are not making $200 per month. Well Finally I was able to break that barrier.
Later on As I kept adding more post, information and becoming better at writing copy and converting, I was able to convert higher and make around $65– $70 per day just by selling affiliate products.
My lessons learned from this experience were
- If you know your basic numbers you can make more money
- Conversion Maths doesn’t have to be complicated. If doing A gets you more money, you just do that.
- Testing isn’t complicated (Hang on I’ll show you how too)
How to do basic testing…
Now there are tons of softwares and stuff out there helping you do basic testing. Of course there are also complicated formulas and terms floating (Multivirate testing) around too. Personally I do not worry about these things as much…
I want to find out 3 things first if I am starting out.
- How many unique visitors my pages are getting (in my case, I wanted to find out about that specific pre-sell page)?
- How many products I am selling from that page?
- What kind of offer I should make on my pre-sell page?
This should get you started to implement basic conversion and testing strategies. For example In that blog I am testing my character voice.
Currently this is converting at 17.9 % +– 10%. You might get worried by seeing this much variation but this version is outpulling my original by 300%. So I know for sure what kind of voice I am going to use in this market.
Whew. I almost wrote a 1000 word post this time around… Anyways I’ll add more on how to do strategy and conversion maths topic. So don’t you worry about it. For now… Sayonara.
Zero – 150 Unique Visitors in 8 days.
I’ve been posting on this blog on how article marketing still produce favorable results. If you remember in one of my old post on “Does Article Marketing Work?” It took me 12 days to get around 150 visitors a day. This time around with my new blog it took me just few days.
Why Do you think I am doing a case studies on new websites?
Simple because I want to show my readers that you can get traffic to new websites with basic techniques that I’ve been showing you on this blog all long.
as you can see my traffic touched 134 in 6th day and on 8th it crossed 150. All it took me Daily blog posting and article submitting. Nothing fancy, Nothing too scientific, just plain old vanilla basics.
But if you are sold on to the idea of “The Secret”, All of what I show it to you here can’t help you.
The “Fatal Error” I was making as an affiliate
NO, It’s NOT about List Building.
You are probably quite aware of how things are in affiliate marketing. The rosy dream of getting checks while you are lounging around your swimming pool is what you have been sold on to. No hassles for customer support or creating product or testing your markets. All you need is to find a market and start promoting someone else’s product.
So lets get this picture straight. I mean I have been that way, where I’ve promoted quite a few products and tried to build list while hiding behind a website and an autoresponder. Of course blogging was a saving grace for me but still there is a missing piece.
Affiliate marketing is dog-eat-dog market. You know how tough it is to survive the number of affiliates out there. Don’t even talk about affiliate who uses unfair techniques like cloaking and cookie stuffing and take your credit. Though there are quite a few fatal errors that might be killing your chances.
Why Are You Not Creating A Brand?
I was talking to marketing friend (from real world… LOL). We were discussing affiliate marketing and how it has been hard for me. While we were talking he asked me a very simple question…
“Why are you not creating a brand?”
huh??? <– that’s me who just lost his train of thought.
“dude, it doesn’t matter what you are promoting you aren’t creating a brand”.
Though I dismiss him outright saying “he doesn’t know online marketing”. It kept bugging me for few days. Unless I realized how simple this question was.
My Slap on forehead moment…
Now if you don’t know what it is then lets say, you wake up late night one day and say “holy shit, I forgot to do my taxes”.
This is one of major mistakes or fatal errors that almost every affiliate are making. They are trying to hide behind a website and an auto-responder. If you think you are building a list and promoting affiliate products fiercely. I’d say you are leaving tons on the table.
Why Branding?
Because it builds loyalty.
You must have noticed in Internet marketing, where marketers are promoting products with tons of free bonuses. The competition is so damn hard, it won’t surprise you if one day they’ll even offer their new born as a bonus.
Notice people who are cashing huge checks. They have a brand of their own. People like Ewen Chia, Frank Kern and so many more, they have their own brand. They are called experts in their own small world. But if you go outside the Internet Marketing niche, you’ll see there’s only rare few who are trying to make a brand as an affiliate. In fact the number is so dismal that you can’t even count.
So how you go about creating a brand.
One of the Easy way to create a brand…
Now there are many ways to create brand online but I think One of the easy way to create brand is by creating products. The moment you create a product you become an expert (at least on percieved level).
I don’t understand why not you as a merchant handle all the customer headache (which is normally nonexistent) and you don’t have to worry about getting traffic as your affiliates will do that job. I bet today the toughest thing to do is getting traffic.
In today’s world, you can pay someone to create products for you. If it’s a hard good, you can find someone to source it for you. Heck You don’t even need to take inventory if you try hard enough. So what’s stopping you to become a merchant.
Second Easy way to create brand …
Second easy way to create a brand is by owning a word in your market. For example…
If I say “Mass control” who do you think of? Frank Kern right?
Or If I say “Manifesto”, who do you think of? Who else? Rich shefren.
Or if I say “Traffic secrets” Or “VRE” You automatically think of John Reese.
Or If I say “Stoming the search engines”, You’ll think of Brad Fallon and Andy Jenkins.
Or If I say “SEO book”, you’ll automatically think of Aaron Wall.
What about “Warrior Forum”, its Allen Says (though this one might be bit hard for people to remember).
Do you need more examples? Now this can be hard too… I am personally working on creating my own word (which I am yet to finalize) But its fun thinking about online branding.
Well I bet I gave few things to think about in this post.
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