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 I recently asked Michel Fortin for some advice on testing sales pages. His advice was great, as always:

When I think about elements to test and that convert the best, the two most important ones are the headline and the offer.

But other than that, I think of the AIDA formula. That is, anything that helps to draw attention, create interest, increase desire and drive action are elements I want to test.

For example, when it comes to attention, think of the things that help stop people from scanning/surfing, and forces them to start reading. From headlines to pictures, from pop-ups to video, from different colored backgrounds to different colored headlines.

I’ve been watching my blogs web statistics lately. If you have a blog, I highly recommend doing that as well. Some things I’ve noticed…

1. This blog’s audience has grown every month since I started posting regularly in January.

2. There are a few topics my readers aren’t too interested in. I can tell, because when I post about them, my traffic stays about the same as if I hadn’t posted at all. If I didn’t know this, I could post this blog into the ground. But checking my stats lets me know to move on to something else, or… else!

3. My stats can tell me what keywords were used to find my blog in the search engines. This has helped me to discover which keywords I already rank well for, and which keywords I’m close to ranking well for. Some strategic posts can solidify my search engine ranking for those terms, and I get even more traffic.

4. Being ranked well for some keywords don’t help at all. For example, the keywords “Internet Advertising Copywriter” hasn’t gotten me a single hit, despite my ranking.

5. I’ve still got a lot of work to do 

Most likely, your webhost has some sort of web statistics installed on your server already. Recently, my hosts stats program have become less reliable (along with a ton of other problems over the last 6 months). So I’ve started using www.statcounter.com. It’s free up to a point, but you need to upgrade if you’re getting more than 500 visitors. I’m going to see what the stats look like with the 500 visitors before I make my final decision.

Michel Fortin once told me that if one of his sales letters bombs, 99% of the time it was because he didn’t understand the market well enough. And since Michel is really good at understanding markets, his sales letters are almost always successful.

One way to get to know the market you’re writing for is to hang out where they hang out. And see what they see.

For example, you could do a Google search for terms they might search for, and check out the top 10 sites that come up. (Also check out the ads on the side, and I like to type in the URL so I don’t cost the advertiser money while I’m researching.)

PCMag.com has a list of the top 100 sites covering several different markets.

But that won’t always take you to the spots where your market “hangs out.” A great way to find the most popular sites in your market is to go to Alexa.com and do a simple “web search.”

The results don’t come back in the order of popularity, but the site’s traffic rank is listed below each result. Any site under 50,000 is a popular site, but anything under 10,000 is gold.

Check out these sites to discover what’s “new” in the marketplace. What are these people reading? What are they thinking about? What offers are other copywriters/publishers presenting them with?

This information can help you to take advantage of trends, but also tell you what you need to be DIFFERENT and UNIQUE, which is important.

So that’s my resource for today. What about you? Where do you go or what strategies do you use to check out your marketplace?

Yesterday I lost several hundred dollars. How? I spent all my time trying to fix a Wordpress Plugin (that’s fantastic) but didn’t work on about 80% of Wordpress blogs.

It started out when I hired a programmer on RentACoder.com. He was extremely helpful and made suggestions to improve the plugin. He even checked in nightly with his progress (and finished a day before the deadline).

But when I got the plugin, it only worked correctly on 1 of 4 of my blogs.

So I spent quite a bit of time talking to the programmer who couldn’t find the fix and thought that it might be a problem on my end. I also spent quite a bit of time trying to fix the plugin myself (and I have no clue how to code Wordpress plugins).

All in all, that wasted time cost me several hundred dollars in copywriting work I could have accomplished. I could try and blame the programmer, but that’s not the answer (and really he did a great job except for on one tiny point, which I’ll get to).

John Alanis is an entrepreneur in the men’s dating niche. I saw him speak at a business conference once and he said something that I’ll probably remember the rest of my life… although not in the exact words.

What he said essentially was, ALWAYS take responsibility when something goes wrong. Even when it wasn’t really your fault, there’s always something more you could have done.

To me, that’s a good philosophy because then you’re completely responsible for your success… and not relying on others.

So instead of blaming my programmer for not recognizing a small tweak he could have made to make the plugin operational, I came up with a new system for hiring programmers. Simplified, it looks like this:

1. Fill out the bid request.
2. Select the best bid.
3. When finished work is completed, test it. And send it to a group of beta testers.
4. If the feedback is perfect, you’re done. If not, submit the feedback to the programmer.
5. The programmer gets one try to fix it, if it doesn’t work…
6. Hire another programmer to spot the mistake.

After a days work trying to fix the plugin myself and discuss the problem with my original programmer, I finally decided to make a new bid request for a new programmer to take a look.

I attached the plugin for coders to take a look before they even bid. Within 24 hours I received a bid request from a programmer who had the code fixed and installed on 3 different blogs for me to test and make sure it worked.

The cost? $20. $20 compared to losing several hundred trying to solve the problem myself.

The fix ended up being a one word change in the code. I showed the original programmer the change and he concurs that it’s a valid fix. It was one small mistake compared to the rest of his high quality work, so I’ll probably be giving him another chance.

(If he works out long term, I’ll share his name with you.)

Take a look at the steps I mentioned above. If you value your time, I highly recommend following them.

If you’re trying to sell anything online, copywriting is important. Have you ever paid to send visitors to a webpage hoping to collect a truckload of sales…

…only to be disappointed when you didn’t even get one.

That happens a lot to many Internet Business owners. And poor copywriting is often the bad guy. You gotta fix that and get a good sales letter on your site…

Here’s how I recommend getting a sales letter.

Option #1: Hire me. That’s what I do. I write sales letters. I’m not cheap, but I’m more affordable than many copywriters. I start at $3,000 per letter, but that doesn’t scare off my clients. They know it’s a great deal, and I’ll make them money.

You can fill out an application here…

But maybe you’re not ready for that.

Option #2: Hire me to write a mini-letter. I also have a $500 option I offer to people who aren’t ready to pay 4 figures. But I try to downsell it first. These are not near the quality of the real thing above. Don’t expect a good conversion rate.

The 2 Hour Sales Letter is a good example of a mini-letter. I wrote it in a little over 2 hours and did little strategic planning or editing. That’s how I write mini-letters.

Sometimes they sell great, sometimes they don’t.

Why do people choose this option? Because my mini-letters are usually far better than what a lay person can write for themselves. AND you can use my tips from option #3 to help increase the conversion.

You can fill out an application here…

Option #3: Write your own sales copy. The best way to get started is to watch the 2 Hour Sales Letter first to see how a sales letter is written from beginning to end. Then get the “7 Deadly Sins That Kill Amateur Sales Letters” to take the “amateur” out of your copy.

After that, my Copy Boosters will give you tips and tricks to slowly but surely raise your conversion rate.

In the end, you can create a pretty good sales letter without paying me $3,000.00. (I can only take on so many projects anyway.)

That’s it. Now, will you take action to get sales copy that converts on your website?

I recently noticed a web forum where people were giving away access information to some of my products.

I did it by setting up a Google Alert for the URL to my thank you page. A Google Alert allows you to tell Google to send you an email whenever they find a certain word, phrase, or in this case a URL.

If Google finds a link to your thank you page that you didn’t authorize, you found a crook.

After about a month I finally was alerted that someone was sharing my URL. It was inside of a forum where people freely share links to digital products they purchased or stole.

And it turns out I got lucky by discovering my product was being given away inside. Usually they disguise the URL so that Google Alerts isn’t able to discover it. This thief messed up this time.

So what did I do about it? Nothing so far. What would you recommend?

I’m considering moving to all physical products. What do you think about that?

The ugly irony in all of this is that the thief praised the guy who gave him my free link because “Copywriting is SO important.”

Do you think the thief will use my product to help him create sales copy for his digital product? Wouldn’t be a surprise. Why wouldn’t a thief also be a hypocrite?

Do you Split Test or use multivariate testing on your sales copy? Most people don’t, but that’s a terrible thing. Let’s take a look at some numbers.

Let’s say you’re using google adwords to get traffic to a squeeze page. The squeeze page asks for the visitor’s email address before taking them to the sales letter. Ok, the numbers… We’re going to try to keep the numbers simple so that the math is more clear.

Let’s say your Adwords ads are getting 1 click for every 100 impressions, and that’s leading to 1000 visitors per day.

Your squeeze page is capturing the email of 20% of those 1000 visitors (200) and taking them to the sales page.

The sales copy is converting 2% of those 200 visitors in to buyers. That makes 4 buyers total. And let’s say you make $100 from each sale, so $400.

How much more cash do you think you could make after simple split testing or multivariate testing? Let’s take a look.

It’s quite conceivable that with some testing, you could double each of the numbers above. 2 out of every 100 impressions is not high for an Adwords ad. 40% is very reasonable for a squeeze page. And 4% is certainly achievable for a sales page. The key is to test and continually improve your ad.

Here’s how the modest test results would effect your income.

Instead of 1000 visitors from Adwords, you’d receive 2000 visitors.

Of those 2000 visitors, 40% (or 800) would submit their email address on the squeeze page and make it to the sales letter.

Of those 800, 4% would buy. That makes for 32 sales, or $3,200 in profit.

So just by doing a little testing, you were able to take your business from $400 per day to $3,200 per day.

If you have a product and a sales page now, is there any activity you could perform today that could match the profit increase of adding testing to your sales process?

I recommend two products for testing your sales copy. My Split Test software at http://www.easysplittest.com and James Brausch’s multivariate testing software at http://www.muvar2007.com.

$97, $95, $100. Three different prices that aren’t too far apart in dollar amount, but can have a large effect on the dollar amount in your bank account.

The truth is, the actual price of your product is a major testing factor. Those 3 different prices above may swing the number of sales you get by a surprising percentage rate. I’m not going to get in to specifics because the data coming in to me now is from a client. But here are some things to think about when testing price.

1. Don’t just test lower prices. Most of my clients want to test lower prices when I suggest a price test. It’s good to test lower prices, but stop doubting your product. It’s possible that more people may want to buy your product if you give it a HIGHER price. A price says something about your product to the customer. If you price it too low, they may suspect it’s low quality and pass on it. Raising the price may convince MORE people to buy.

2. Test the “dollar” digits first. Some people like to test $99.97 versus $99.95. Instead, I’d test $97 versus $95. Michel Fortin backed this up when he told me numbers on the dollar side of the decimal point provide the most answers and profit increases.

3. Don’t just stick with “7″. Glyphius, a software that analyzes profitable copy, HATES the number “7.” I don’t have stats to back that up, but I do have promising results with numbers other than 7. So don’t just test $57, $67, $97. Mix it up and test $57 versus $55, $59 and more. If you believe “7″ has a psychological impact, you must believe other numbers have an impact as well. Find out for yourself what digits are best.

4. Pay attention to visitor value over conversion rate. On one test I’m conducting one price is solidly beating a price $30 higher. The problem is, the 20% higher conversion doesn’t beat out the 33% higher profit from each sale. So consider getting less sales at a higher profit. Unless…

5. Unless, you have backend products that are selling. If you can get more customers at a lower price and have backend products to sell them, you have to factor that in to the above equation. Can the backend sales make up for that initial loss in profit?

If you’re not currently testing, I recommend http://www.muvar2007.com.

Ok, let’s say I’m the copywriter (which I am), and you’re the client (which you could be). How could you get me to fall in love with your project?

Here’s a hint. It will make my job much easier. And if you’re writing your own copy, including it will make your letter more successful.

The answer: providing me proof that your product/service works.

In order to convince the reader your product is fantastic, I’ve got to show them that what you’re selling actually works.

That’s why people who sell “make money” products include screenshots of Paypal accounts and scanned checks.

That’s why people who sell “weight loss” products show before and after photos.

That’s why eHarmony commercials show happy couples together, who usually got married after using the service.

Many people who write their own copy will make claims about their product… but will stop short of proving those claims. Don’t do it!

You may know your product works, but you have to pass that knowledge on.

So here’s your homework. Go through your copy and find every claim you make. Then consider it a challenge to immediately show proof for that claim.

Recently I sent people on my announcement list free access to 2 of my products. I asked if in exchange they would give me feedback or a testimonial for the product.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t get any feedback from people on my list. BUT, I think that’s my fault.

At around the same time, I ran a special discount for the products on a popular web forum asking again for feedback in exchange. The people who paid the small amount were much more likely to leave me feedback. What made the difference?

I think it’s because they paid for it, while my subscribers didn’t. It automatically made the product more valuable in the eyes of the paying customer, and they were probably more likely to go through the product… and take the time to leave me feedback.

So in the future, I’ll probably offer products to my announcement list at a big discount in exchange for feedback/testimonials, instead of just giving them away for free. I suggest doing the same.