Examples of positive habits one can have:

• Exercising for 30 minutes every morning
• Meditating before going to sleep
• Remembering and using the first name of everyone, on every interaction
• Learning a new foreign language every couple of years
• Settings goals for the day every morning
• Reading a technical book for 30 minutes every morning

Cool, but how do we go about developing those habits?

The best strategy I have seen so far is this one: at the beginning of every month you will sit down and decide on which habit you want to develop over the next 30 days. It can also be a bad habit that you want to get rid of (e.g., smoking or eating junk food). After that you commit yourself to stick to the habits for those 30 days. Once the month is over you may decide to halt it, but most people find that 30 days is enough to get the habit rooted inside you, so most of them will stay.

For some habits I find that 30 days is not enough, so in those cases I commit to sticking to the play for 60 days at least, which seems to do the trick.

Matt Cutts, head of web spam at Google, is a big fan of this strategy. In fact if you visit his blog you’ll notice a category titled “30 days”. There you’ll find all his posts about the different habits he pursued in the past.

The month is almost over, so which habit will you develop over the next 30 days?

Once the test completes you’ll with a score (varies from 0 to 100), the number of requests performed (i.e., how many elements were loaded), the total load time and the total size of your page.

Here’s how DailyBlogTips scored:

On top of that you’ll also get access to a detailed break-down of all the elements that were loaded while opening your website, and the respective time that it took to load each of them. This information is quite valid to help you optimize your load time.

There are other tools that produce a similar report, but most work as browser extensions, so you need to install them forehand. As a web tool that you can use right away this is one of the best I’ve found, so check it out.

A couple of years ago I read around the web that Shawn was facing some legal troubles with his affiliate marketing activities, but there weren’t many details about the issue.

Fast forward to the present day and it seems that the problems he was facing were both real and serious, according to a recent article on Business Insider, titled How eBay Worked With The FBI To Put Its Top Affiliate Marketers In Prison.

Here’s a quote:

eBay paid Hogan a staggering $28 million in affiliate marketing sales commissions over the years, according to court papers.
Affiliate marketers place ads or links for eBay on their own networks, or on other people’s sites, and they collect a cut of any sale the online auction company generates from them. eBay has about 26,000 of them, or more, at any one time, feeding traffic to its auctions.

But recently Hogan had fallen out with eBay, and the company had sued him, accusing him of fraud. eBay had also been cooperating with the FBI since June 2006 to root out affiliate marketers whose success was a bit too good to be true. The company had even created a piece of software to monitor Hogan’s internet traffic — an online sting operation the company named “Trip Wire.”
eBay alleged that what Hogan did to earn the sting operation and the knock at his door by the FBI was to rig eBay’s system so that it falsely credited him for sales he did not generate. He did it by seeding unknowing users with hundreds of thousands of bits of tracking code, or “cookies.” If any of those people bought something on eBay, the code signaled to eBay that Hogan should get a cut of the sale — even though he had done nothing to promote eBay.

The article explains how they made the money, how eBay set an operation to discover what was happening and so on. There are even some allegations that eBay knew what Shawn and the other top affiliates were doing to generate the traffic, and even encouraged it initially. In other words, it’s an interesting read, so check it out.

1. Benefits

As I explain in this post, benefits sell, not features. And since benefits are what your customer is looking for you should always start the sales pitch with them.

2. Story

This is the only item which I think is optional, and its use depend on the type of product you are selling. For instance, if you are selling an ebook about weight-loss it would be very effective to include your own weight-loss journey, as this generates empathy and credibility. If you are selling computer spare parts, on the other hand, telling stories wouldn’t necessary help you.

3. Features

Even if features don’t sell, sooner or later on your sales pitch you’ll need to mention them, after all the customer wants to know exactly what he’s getting for his money. The clearer you can make this section, the better.

4. Testimonials

People don’t believe sales pages, they believe other people, and that’s why testimonials are so powerful. Needless to say you should use real people/customers here, and the more descriptive you can be about the testimonials (e.g., who are those people, what are their names, etc) the better.

5. Money Back Guarantee

In my opinion pretty much all products that are sold online should have a money back guarantee. That’s because the customer can’t examine the product before buying it (like he would with a pair of shoes on a store, for instance), and because since most products are digital in nature returning them won’t generate any cost. Apart from giving more security for your potential buyers a money back guarantee will also ensure that you will only have satisfied customers around.

6. Questions and Answers

You might not want to display a huge section of questions and answers on the sales page itself, but you should at least have a link to your FAQ (frequently asked questions). This section is very useful because it allows you to remove doubts and concerns of your potential customers.

7. Call to Action

This is where you will encourage the customer to take action. Usually it involves the information about the price and a big “Buy Now” or “Add to Cart” button. Sometimes your call to action might be different though. For instance, you might ask the customer to input his email address to send him some free stuff before you give him a chance to buy the product itself.

On future posts I’ll expand how you can develop each of those sections.

For instance, here’s one of the strategies mentioned, which many people overlook:

4. Share Your Technique

Giving people advice that is valuable can be a little surprising to people. Many companies will hide their best information from you, so you have to hire them. When you show people that you are confident in your work, they will be drawn to you.

It’s why I offer people a free product launch e-course when they sign-up for my newsletter updates. I know that they could probably use this information to make 10%-20% more money off their launch, but that’s ok. The people I want to be on my list and hire me will know that this is still a small percentage of everything I know. If they hire me, I could probably increase their sales by 30%-50%.

I tell people upfront the 3 biggest mistakes that they can make on their sales page free-of-charge. They might go back to their sales page and start working on these three mistakes, and that’s ok because they probably wouldn’t have hired me anyway. The people who do hire me know that I know my craft and I will help them increase their conversion rate and save them time and money.

There are many examples of live sales pages too, so check it out.