Big Selling Conversion Secrets

Big Marketing Secrets Book: Update #4

2009-05-26T10:39:55-07:00

It’s been a while since I last posted any results here. To be honest I wanted to give it some time so I had a conclusive result to report back to you. So much time has past I almost forgot what I was testing!

After re-reading my blog it all came back to me in a flash and I’ve gone and taken a fresh look at the Google Website Optimizer results.

So far the the total number of page visitors has been 2,538 since the test began. From this we’ve had 758 conversions.

Now you would have thought that by now we’d have a clear winner. That’s a decent amount of traffic and easily enough conversions right?

Does having the “as seen on…” logos actually increase conversions on this squeeze page I’m testing?

Unfortunately it’s not worked out as I had planned because Google Website Optimizer still hasn’t decided a high confidence winner from these 2 pages I was split testing.

Here’s what Google is telling me…

It looks like the overall conversion rate is pretty decent, but I’m just not getting a clear winner. Based on what I’m seeing above I’m tempted to say not having the logos is better …but it’s so close.

These stats expand on the above a bit more…

So where to now?

I could let this test run some more or I could look at testing other more significant changes like:

1. The Headline
2. The offer
3. A totally different design

What I’ve learned from this test is small changes (like adding these “as seen on…” logos) don’t really make much of a difference.

Interestingly my opinion of split testing has changed as as result of this, now I’m thinking that it’s only worth testing the headline, the offer and a significantly different design. Everything else is mostly a waste of time!

What are your thoughts on split testing?

How To Use Google Website Optimizer…

2009-01-27T04:54:45-08:00

Website Optimizer is the free online software I’m using to run all my split testing, it’s a fantastically powerful and uniquely robust tool that you MUST use if you want to multiply your online profits.

Until about 5 minutes ago I was seriously considering creating a how to video for Google Website Optimizer.

That was until I discovered this excellent video Tom Leung created…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Thanks Tom!

AWeber “live” conversion stats video update…

2009-01-22T06:24:49-08:00

Here’s a quick video update on the stats AWeber is giving us in this never before seen split test experiment…

Click here to view the embedded video.

It’s these live conversion test results I’m giving you here that will point the way forward to the success of your own split testing.

If you missed the start of our conversion testing you can catch up with introduction of everything here…

Black, Yellow or Some Well Placed Flare?

P.S. These stats don’t include the JV email promo that’s going to be running in a few hours time. I’ll be back with more on that either tomorrow or over the weekend.

About to run a promo to a 7K list!

2009-01-22T03:41:49-08:00

Great news!… The other day I set up a JV cross promotion with another marketer with a list of around 7,000 subscribers.

Basically this means I’ll run a promo to my 7k subscriber list for one of his websites and he’ll do the same for me with this promo of “The Big Yellow Book Of Turbo Marketing Secrets”

Here’s the email he’s sending for me (notice I’ve gone for a very short and simple message)…

{!firstname_fix}, a free gift for you:

Dear {!firstname_fix},

A free gift for you from expert online wealth
builder John Delavera:

http://www.BigMarketingSecretsBook.com

(name of JV partner goes here)

This should get me a good 300-400 website visitors based on another JV cross promo I ran with him last year. It’ll be very interesting to see how it does.

The promo is scheduled to go out at 11am EST today.

These kind of cross promos (or email swaps as some call them) can be fantastic ways to build your list really fast! Imagine if you just have a list of a couple of hundred subscribers, all you do now is find someone with a similar size list targeting people with the same interests. You both run promotions to each others lists and you could potentially see a 20-60% increase in the size of your list virtually overnight.

As soon as I have some results to report back I’ll post them up here.

Big Marketing Secrets Book: Update #3

2009-01-18T04:14:40-08:00

A couple of days ago I ran another email promo to The List Auction promoting the Big Yellow Book of Turbo Marketing Secrets. This time I used a much shorter email that didn’t give any of the details away about the offer.

Here’s the message I sent…

Subject: a free gift for you…

{FIRSTNAME}

Here’s a 100% free gift for you…

=> http://BigMarketingSecretsBook.com/Gift

All the best!

-Brian Terry

Here are the clickthrough results of this shorter email campaign…

As you can see the more “criptive” shorter email offering the free gift got a higher number of clickthroughs (141 unique clicks)

The only problem I’ve realize in collecting this data is it’s not how many clicks you get but how many convert into new subscribers. Unfortunately I don’t have a conversion stats on this, so whilst the free gift email campaign gained more clicks it might have not converted clicks into subscribers as well as the longer email version.

This is something you really need to be thinking about in your own testing. Don’t fortet this blog is all about helping you to learn from my own mistakes at testing and tracking so be sure to take notes and susbcribe to this blog.

Now it’s time to reveal the Website Optimizer test results for the simple A/B split test for these 2 pages…

Original (control):
BigMarketingSecretsBook.com

Test page with the logo “flare”:
BigMarketingSecretsBook.com/version3/index.html

This screen shot below reveals the total number of visitors received to both pages combined and also shows us the overall conversion rate.

Next we can see the conclusion Google Website Optimizer has come to based on our stats. No high-confidence winner has been found yet.

That’s right, we still need more traffic… 462 unique website visitors has not given us the information we need to decide if one version of the squeeze page converts higher than another.

When your traffic is of a lower quality (i.e. traffic exchanges, FFA’s and most safe lists) you need lots of it to get the data you need. The standard of the traffic we’ve been getting has it’s origins in traffic exchanges, but has become more targeted through the websites they’ve visited before finally getting to us and our website.

In the next screen we can see that the test subject (the squeeze page with the logo flares) is showing slight improvement over the control (original version with no logo flares). But just as Google Website Optimizer rightly says the confidence in this page winning is simply not high enough. The truth is it could still go either way.

Next… I need to figure out how to drive more traffic to this page.

With this in mind I thankfully now have access to this awesome new traffic generation training product created by my good friend Joe Lavery… It’s a video series called: “The Ultimate Traffic Secret“. Over the next few days I’ll be working my way through these videos to see what can be applied then apply it so we can get more people in front of our split testing experiment.

Terry Dean just said it all…

2009-01-13T09:31:52-08:00

I’ve just finished reading an outstanding blog post by Terry Dean. In it he asks “What are you testing in your business today?”

Over the years I’ve learned a lot from Terry and constantly testing has got to be one the biggest lessons learned so far.

The fact is you’re going to write ads, you’re going to create website graphics but do you know if they could be working harder for you by testing other variations? That’s all it comes down to, it’s so simple, yet leads you to your ultimate success.

I highly recommend heading on over to Terry’s blog right now and read every word of this excellent article “What Are You Testing Today?“.

Big Marketing Secrets Book: Update #2

2009-01-12T10:56:59-08:00

Here we go… the next update on the results of this simple split test to see if having “as seen on” logos (a.k.a. “Flare”) makes any difference to conversions.

Hopefully by now you’ve been able to check out the 2 versions of the page I’m split testing, if you’ve not seen them yet here they are again…

Original (control):
BigMarketingSecretsBook.com

Test page with the logo “flare”:
BigMarketingSecretsBook.com/version3/index.html

Unfortunately I still need more traffic to be able to get any significant data on this (who said split-testing was easy?).

Here’s how the numbers stack up so far…

But first…

Here are the results on a quick email I sent out to the List Auction database to promote the site I’m testing (this is a viral MLM style email broadcast membership site where you can email all their members once every 3 days).

In this post here I showed you the email I sent. It was quite long and worked well in the past to my own in-house email lists.

Here’s how many clicks it generated since I sent that email out (I use Adtrackz to track all my ads and links, I give it my highest recommendation for tracking links!)…

Not many as you can see but it’s one of those “safelist” style lists and they don’t tend to be that responsive. Saying that it was a list of 4,500 people which gave us a 2.64% conversion rate, still much better than banner advertising and possibly even some PPC.

Baring in mind I can email this list twice a week that could turn into 240 (+/-) extra visitors a week …to any website I choose. So from this point of view it’s actually pretty good.

However, I have another plan… tomorrow I’ll send a much shorter email message and offer The Big Yellow Book of Turbo Marketing Secrets as a gift. I’ve used this strategy before and it pulled quite well, so I’ll give it another shot.

Now, onto the Google Website Optizer split test results so far…

As you can see we’ve had 252 visitors (since 4th January when the test began). This has given us a mere 44 conversions (by no means enough to see anything significant).

This gives you a side by side comparison from one version to the next…Even with this small amount of data the signs look good for Test page with the logo “flare”.

But don’t let this early result fool you with your own testing! That would be a HUGE mistake!

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through testing… it’s anything and everything is possible. So whilst it’s winning now it could all change several times before we have a clear and confident winner.

Here’s another part of the stats I wasn’t able to get into the screen shot above, this one goes on the right side and shows you the confidence factors gained so far (the one on the bottom is combination 1, the version with the logo flare)…

So there you have it, live and hot off the press! The results so far of the Big Marketing Secrets Book test: Update #2.

Make sure you subscribe to this blog and I’ll keep you posted.

Have a good one!

Big Marketing Secrets Book: Update #1

2009-01-06T12:36:10-08:00

It’s been a couple of days now since the Big Marketing Secrets Book A/B Split Test experiment began.

As I mentioned the traffic was fairly qualified exit traffic from a website targeting newbie opportunity seekers (note to myself: how can I categorize traffic more effectively?). However… since starting the test there have only been 47 page visitors …which is no where near enough traffic to get any kind of significant data from.

Take a look at the screen shots and you’ll see the kind of progress made so far (not great, but it’s all about getting started no matter how small!):

Here’s how the conversions of each type of page look so far…

So how can I quickly get more targeted traffic to this page?

Simple… use the power of email marketing and other people’s lists.

Without any JV partners for this there’s not much else I can do except to buy my way into this great email broadcast service I discovered last year.

This service is called List Auction.

It’s a very simple system, my email gets to go out to 3,000 of the members of ListAuction. By using the points I get as a paid member I can broadcast to an extra 1,500 people. The only downside is I can only mail out once every 3 days.

My experience of services like this in the past has been pretty poor. However, ListAuction is very different and I’ve been able to get pretty decent clickthrough conversions on the emails I send out …all because of the way ListAuction is set up. To get the best results you do need to upgrade your membership.

Just a few moments ago I sent out an email through this service to see how many extra visitors I can get to my target test squeeze page experiment.

I wasn’t sure if I should show you the email as I want this blog to be about design changes that help improve conversions. However… without traffic what is there to convert? (if you catch my drift).

So with that said here’s the email I sent out to ListAuction…

Subject: BIG yellow book + {FIRSTNAME} = your dream come true!

Hey {FIRSTNAME}

Listen up!…

If you’re in a hurry, please go take
a look at this…

=> http://www.BigMarketingSecretsbook.com/BIG

You’ve downloaded marketing
software tools…

You’ve tuned in to the webinars…

Perhaps you’ve even invested in
marketing seminars…

And yet, you still feel like
something is… missing.

You’ve tried to apply what you’ve
learned, but it seems like there
are just too many pieces for you
to put together.

You want to succeed with your
Internet business, but so far
nothing is happening…

That all changes today!

No, you are NOT going to be presented
with the latest software tool…

No, this is NOT another webinar
to attend…

And no, you aren’t going to be
invited to a “pitch-fest”…

What you are about to see is quite
possibly the world’s “magnum opus”
on a proven Internet Marketing system
for newbies…

Given to you in one single BIG yellow book…

You won’t find this kind of teaching
anywhere else, so I encourage you
to check it out at…

=> http://www.BigMarketingSecretsbook.com/BIG

Your cost = nothing

All the best!

Brian Terry

P.S. Why is something of this magnitude
free for you?…

As you’ll soon see, the book author’s success
is directly tied into your success.

Shh…I can’t say anymore…

=> http://www.BigMarketingSecretsbook.com/BIG

The url you’ll see in the email above has been tracked using a great script called AdTrackz. All I did was install this on my website and use it to create special links that Adtrackz then monitors for me. AdTracks will tell me how many people click on the urls it tracks.

So what next?

I’ll let the Big Marketing Secrets Book A/B Split Test experiment continue for a few more days. It’ll still be getting exit traffic from the other site only this time I’ll be getting more traffic from List Auction.

As always I’ll keep you posted on progress…

Big Marketing Secrets Book A/B Split Test Experiment Begins…

2009-01-04T11:47:45-08:00

Ok… here we go… this is the first in a series of A/B split tests for “The Big Yellow Book of Turbo Marketing Secrets” squeeze page.

As the results come in I’ll keep you posted (here’s the first screen shot)…

(Screen shot from Google Website Optimizer)

Just in case you’re wondering what I’m testing…

I’m testing if having “as seen on” logos (A.K.A. “flares”) effects conversions in any way. I’ve heard that including flares in your squeeze page can increase conversions by 10-40% (if not more).

Here are the test pages…

Original (control):
BigMarketingSecretsBook.com

Test page with the logo “flare”:
BigMarketingSecretsBook.com/version3/index.html

Let’s see how it goes! It’s what testing is all about.

The traffic source for this page will be exit traffic from another site I run. These visitors are newbie business opportunity seekers who are looking for additional online income so it’s fairly targeted.

I’ve also got Google Analytics wired up to the test pages so I’ll be keeping a close eye on those results too.

Before I forget… make sure you subscribe to the RSS feed of this blog either through your feed reader or even by email. This way you’ll get to see my results as soon as they’re ready.

I’ll be back in a couple of days time with an update on my testing.

What is Google Website Optimizer?

2008-12-30T06:38:38-08:00

When you’re on as many subscriber lists as I am there’s not much that gets past my radar and what I’ve got for you today is no exception.

So what is Google Website Optimizer?

Who better to show you what it’s all about than Tom Leung the Senior Business Product Manager of Google Website Optimizer.

Pay close attention to this (it’ll help you grow your business and make you more money)…

Click here to view the embedded video.