‘Want to grow? Then you’ve got to test’ – ‘The IMC Insider’ newsletter

Speaking of free information, when I asked you to take part in my survey last week, I made you a promise. I said I’d share the survey results with you so you could apply the information to YOUR online business as well.

I’ll be revealing the results of that survey in just a moment… But first, I wanted to let you know what ELSE you’ll be finding in this issue:

Mitch Tarr, IMC’s Vice President of Marketing, is going to tell you the top 5 things you need to know about testing and tracking in order to make sure your online business is functioning at peak performance levels.

Then we’ll show you how online musician Aaron Bradley did some testing and tweaking of his own — and ended up growing his revenues by 300%!

So enjoy the first edition of our newsletter! Remember, this newsletter is a community resource — it’s YOUR newsletter just as much as it’s mine.

If there’s something you want to see in this newsletter… something you particularly like or DON’T like about this brand-new format… or some particular topic or strategy you want to learn more about, then go to my blog and tell me about it!

After all, if I’m not giving you EXACTLY what you’re hoping to find in this newsletter, then I’m not doing my job.

Have a great week!

Derek Gehl

P.S. How do you like the new name? Which do you like better, “The IMC Insider” or our old name, “Marketing Tips”? If you have a preference, please tell me about it on my blog. I’m dying to know what you think!

You could try putting your opt-in form in a different location on your site. You could change the wording of your opt-in offer. You could even change the offer itself! (For example, you could try offering a gift with the subscription instead of just a free newsletter.)

But if you made all these changes at ONCE and your opt-in numbers began to skyrocket, how would you know which change was responsible? Besides, one of these changes could actually be having a negative impact — and you’d never even realize it!

If you have no way of knowing, then the next time you change your opt-in offer, you’re back to square one.

2. The MOST important numbers you need to know

To keep on top of your website performance you need to know TWO main numbers: the number of visitors you get and the number of sales you make in any given period. That way, you can figure out exactly how many visitors you need to attract to your site in order to make a sale.

Here’s how you do it:

Let’s say you got 300 visitors to your site in one day and you made 12 sales. Simply divide the number of visitors by the number of sales like this: 300/12 = 25.

For every 25 visitors you got that day, you made 1 sale. (Expressed as a percentage, this means your conversion rate was 4%, as 1/25 = 0.04)

If that conversion rate remains steady, then you can expect to make one sale for every 25 visitors. If you get 100 visitors, you’ll make 4 sales. If you get 1000 visitors, you should make 40 sales.

It’s a simple conversion — but it’s something everyone should know. It tells you EXACTLY how well your website is doing its job.

If that conversion rate drops for some reason, it could mean there’s a problem with your website — and you should do a thorough examination of it right away.

On the other hand, if it spikes, then you should try to figure out why more visitors are suddenly buying your products — so you can repeat this success!

3. Test the most important things FIRST

If your site sells more than one product, then you should be tracking the conversion rate for each product separately. Maybe your site is doing a great job at selling one product, but a lousy job at selling another. This is something you need to know, so you can figure out what’s going right in the first case and what’s going wrong in the second.

BUT: Don’t start off trying to track 30 things at once! Focus on your lead money makers first, as they’ll have the greatest impact on your business.

4. Think in terms of RATIOS as opposed to ABSOLUTES

By that I simply mean, think in terms of percentages, not whole numbers.

Instead of thinking, “Hey, I made 25 sales last week!” — think, “Hey, I made 25 sales per 1000 visitors last week!”

Knowing you made 25 sales is nice — but it doesn’t tell you anything by itself.

If you know you made 25 sales per 1000 visitors, however, you know your conversion rate is 2.5%. (In other words, 2.5% of all your visitors last week bought something from you.) If it was a normal week, then going forward you can expect that 2.5% of all your customers will probably buy something.

This kind of knowledge is ESSENTIAL if you want to forecast how much revenue you’re going to make in any given time period. It also gives you a baseline number that you can refer back to when testing different elements of your web site in order to grow your income bigger.

For example: imagine if you changed the headline of your sales page this morning — and you ended up making 25 sales, just like you did yesterday. Does that mean that the change to your headline had no effect on your sales numbers?

Not necessarily.

Maybe you only got 100 visitors to your site today, instead of 1000. That means your conversion rate today is actually 25% — which is HUGE! That means 1 in every 4 people is taking action on your site. Wow. That must have been some headline you wrote.

(However, you really should find out why you only got 100 visitors to your site today. Once you bring that number back up to 1000, then if your conversion rate stays the same, you’ll be making 250 sales a day!)

5. Track your conversions by SOURCE

It’s not just enough to know what your conversion rate is. You’ve got to know where your best-converting visitors are coming from.

For example, are your most qualified visitors coming from pay-per-click ads you’re running through Yahoo Search Marketing? Or are they coming from your organic listing on Google — or maybe your affiliate network?

This is something you need to know! It’ll help you understand where your most lucrative stream of traffic is coming from — so you can focus your efforts there and work on growing those high-converting traffic numbers even bigger.

So in a nutshell, those are the top 5 things you need to know about testing and tracking in order to make sure you’re getting the best results from your web site.

Finally, I just wanted to point out that you shouldn’t worry about what the precise definition of a “unique visitor” actually is. (Different software tracking packages actually track unique visitors a bit differently) Whether your software tracks the same way as someone else’s doesn’t really matter. But what DOES matter is whether or not you count the same numbers in the same way every day.

As long as YOUR definition of a “unique visitor” remains consistent from one day to the next, then your numbers will always give you meaningful results.

[Ed. note: Mitch Tarr is IMC’s Vice President of Marketing. He’s going to be Derek’s featured guest during the next Internet Entrepreneur Club tele-seminar on April 11th, and will be talking about the latest proven email marketing strategies during that call.]

Aaron is a multi-instrument playing musician and producer who sells Hip Hop and R&B beats to musicians who want to make their songs sound more professional. He’s been running his site for two years now, and is already doing very well for himself — earning a five-figure income some months.

And get this: Aaron is only 21 years old!

Aaron offers two different categories of beats through his site: “exclusive” beats he records for the sole use of an individual artist, and “non-exclusive” beats any artist can download automatically from his site for a fee.

Aaron was clearly doing a lot of things right with his site… but he knew there was still lots of room for improvement. That’s why he joined IMC’s Internet Entrepreneur Club at the beginning of February this year.

His main goal was to increase the amount of revenues his “non-exclusive” beats were pulling in. (A good idea — he’d fully automated the sale process for the non-exclusive beats, so selling MORE of them wouldn’t take up any more of his time at all!)

Aaron came to the Internet Entrepreneur Club forum burning with questions on how he could improve his site’s performance. Our team of experts, together with some of our more advanced Club members, gave him suggestions on how to improve his headline, salescopy, and overall site design.

Aaron immediately got to work and completely revamped his site, based on the input he was getting from our experts. And by February 28th, he’d already increased revenues coming from the sale of his “non-exclusive” beats by 300%!

Here are some of the suggestions he acted on:

• His original site had distracting animation and loud music that started playing as soon as visitors arrived on his site. We suggested he remove these elements so his visitors could focus on his offer, instead.
• His original copy was written in a light font against a dark background, making it difficult to read. We told him to use black text against a white background instead. (It might seem boring from a design perspective, but in our experience, black text on a white background ALWAYS performs best!)
• His headline emphasized features more than benefits.
• His salescopy was too focused on Aaron and the services he offered. There wasn’t enough emphasis on his visitors and how they could benefit from buying his products. (Remember: the #1 question on your potential buyers’ minds is, “What’s in it for ME?”)
• His copy was written in long paragraphs, which had a negative impact on its readability.
• His site had LOTS of objects and images which were extremely large, which meant his site took at least 5 seconds to load (in Internet time, that’s almost an eternity). We told him to decrease the number of graphics and objects and to optimize the ones that remained, so his site would load faster.

And the result of all the changes he made? Here’s what Aaron had to say on February 28th: “Instead of people buying just one beat for $29.25, I had people spend as much as $300 in a single order… I did more than 300% more revenue than last month!”

Here are a couple of links to earlier versions of Aaron’s website, so you can see the kind of changes he was experimenting with:

http://AaronBeats.com/cool.htm

AaronBeats.com/indexbluegrey.html

And here’s the link to his most recent — and best-performing site so far:

AaronBeats.com

You can read the whole forum thread yourself — and check out the exact advice Aaron was visiting, by clicking here.

(One thing: the comments in this discussion thread are arranged with the newest appearing first. Make sure you’re starting at the very beginning of the thread by scrolling down to the bottom of page 3 and going up from there.)

As you read through the suggestions on the thread, ask yourself if you’re making any of the same mistakes that Aaron was making with his.

And if you don’t have your own web site yet, or are in the process of building one, keep our experts’ advice in mind — that way, you can avoid the pitfalls and set your site up right the first time!

[Ed. note: Jennifer Boulet is a professional copywriter and IMC expert moderator in the Internet Entrepreneur Club forums.]

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To claim your tickets, click on the links above — or call my team, who will be happy to answer any of your questions about these exclusive events — at 1-800-595-9855.