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).

Largerectangle.thumbnailWhen 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 …

  1. How to get more people into same mindset as when people were buying?
  2. Can I add something to get additional traffic to my specific blog page?
  3. 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?

CountmoneyAfter 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

  1. If you know your basic numbers you can make more money
  2. Conversion Maths doesn’t have to be complicated. If doing A gets you more money, you just do that.
  3. 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.

  1. How many unique visitors my pages are getting (in my case, I wanted to find out about that specific pre-sell page)?
  2. How many products I am selling from that page?
  3. What kind of offer I should make on my pre-sell page?

ConvThis 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.

About the Author

Varun Pratap is working in online business as a pro blogger from 2004. His blog on Imbasics (Internet marketing Basics) is all about making money online ethically without resorting to tricks, techniques and gimmicks.

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By Varun Pratap | Filed Under Blogging Tips, Online Advertising 

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5 Responses to “How I started Making sense of conversion maths?”

  1. miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG on June 30th, 2008

    Thanks for the link man :) And that’s a very good and in-depth discussion you got going here.

    Here’s something to add to it – this is about AdSense Referrals – not the normal text-ads. If you’re using them on your site, make SURE you deck them up with some sort of graphics to make them eye-catching. In fact, you can even write posts and ask people to click on those links as this is permitted by Google. They ask you to actively endorse the referral links to produce better CTR.

    I hadn’t really gotten around to implement this till recently – but I got some amazing CTR increase once I did. Earlier my only referral links were a 125×125 button in the sidebar which no one ever bothered to click. Most of the time the referral link that was displayed was that of the Firefox with Google Toolbar.

    About 2 weeks back I had this idea that first of all the referral button was placed somewhere that most visitors are likely to ignore… and secondly, why should the button be shown to everyone – even people using Firefox??? What good will it do in such a case.

    So I got tweaking with the template code and implemented a tiny workaround. As of now, visitors coming to my site through Internet Explorer get this warning box on the top of a post – stating concern over IE and that they should consider using Firefox. Along with that I’ve given the referral link to download Firefox with Google Toolbar. You can check this out by visiting my site using IE (check out a single post – not the home page, where I omitted this to keep it from looking ugly).

    And immediately overnight my CTR shot through. Whereas I had months after months of 0% CTR for the referrals, in 2 days I had 7 conversions!! And rising…. Each of these fetch between $0.50 to $1.0. That’s pretty nice considering the earlier returns – if you ask me :D

    As for the other referrals links, I’ve chosen a handful of them related to topics on my site and placed them over an attractive graphics background on the top-most position in my sidebar (a hand holding up a red box). That’s working like a charm too !!!

    These are couple of helpful pointers that you can keep in mind while integrating AdSense ads in your theme’s template. These WORK!!

    Cheers,
    m^e

  2. Varun Pratap on June 30th, 2008

    Great comment m^e (nice way to sign off too).

    This is what I am talking about. Conversion math is all about user experience.

    Thanks for the link to the wordpress script. I’ll use it on some of my niche blog where 90%+ of my traffic uses IE.

  3. Seo Guy on July 25th, 2008

    Hey Varin,
    This is a good article.

  4. Traffic does NOT equals Money on December 1st, 2009

    [...] If you remember my story, I was getting less than 100 uniques per day (somewhere around 70–80). Even then I turned my blog into $20/day and then converted into $80 a day in about 2–3 months of testing. [...]

  5. Affiliate Marketers – Can You reduce Your Time/Money expenditure by 70%? on December 20th, 2009

    [...] and stuff like that. Which is time consuming process. If you remember my earlier blog post on testing advertising concepts, then you know I tested without any script or software. Do you know the basic process of [...]

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