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FreedomFire
Administrator
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Posted: Sat Feb 9th, 2008 02:03 am |
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I just received this email from Ann Sieg. Good stuff and oh so true! Read it .... and apply it!!
God Bless,
Michael
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You probably already know that having a good conversion rate is your number one concern when it comes to making money online with your business.
There is nothing that has a more direct impact on your bank account than your website's ability to convert visitors into leads, customers and distributors.
There's also nothing else that has more of an influence on WHERE you can advertise...
How much you can afford to PAY for your advertising...
And what KIND of advertising opportunities are available to you.
Simply put, it will single-handedly determine whether or not you succeed or fail in your business.
But what you may be surprised to know is that when it comes to getting killer conversion rates, the most important factor is NOT your ads.
It's NOT your emails.
It's NOT your sales letter.
And it's NOT your copywriting skills.
Yep, you read that right.
These are all crucial and you need to master them.
However...
There's another element that has a far greater impact on whether or not people choose to opt in to your newsletter, purchase your product, or join your opportunity (or even click on your ad in the first place).
You'll want to really let this sink in because it's dangerously simply. So simple in fact, that most people never even think about it or they completely overlook it even if someone tells them about it. Very few people online actually practice it diligently. But what I'm about to share with you may be THE most valuable piece of knowledge
you can have when it comes to getting the most out of your advertising.
If you understand this concept and you make a commitment to NEVER advertise again without taking this into consideration, you'll be able to routinely achieve conversion rates that most marketers can only dream about.
You see, when it comes to conversion rates, the single greatest factor has nothing to do with you...
And EVERYTHING to do with your audience.
What is that factor?
Your traffic sources.
In other words:
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WHERE ARE YOUR CLICKS COMING FROM AND WHAT KIND OF CLICKS ARE THEY?
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Most people, myself included, assume that all clicks are created equal and blindly pour tons of time and money into just getting as many visitors to their site as they possibly can.
This is one of the most costly mistakes you can make online.
I wasted a lot of money before I finally figured this out and it's a lesson that never ceases to amaze me.
It's so counter-intuitive because whenever we think about how to make more money, the first thing we always think about is how to improve OUR ability to convince people to do what we want them to do.
We ask ourselves things like...
"How can I improve my sales presentation?"
Or...
"What's the latest trick or gimmick I could put on my website that would bring in more sales?"
Or...
"What new headline idea could I come up with that would cause people to throw their money at me?"
Now don't get me wrong-you can't have a profitable business without being able to persuade people to take action and this is the number one skill you need to develop... BUT... all too often we forget that it's the prospect - not us - that's the most important part of the entire equation. And the key thing to keep in mind about marketing on the internet is that every different source of traffic, every different type of click or visitor, is a completely different type of prospect.
To illustrate this point, think about this: In many cases, if you get the right person in front of your message, someone who has been DYING to find something exactly like what you're offering, they won't even read your sales letter. They don't even care. They'll go straight to the bottom and hit the order button or submit their info.
Just think back to a time when you've made a purchase like this. I'm sure you can think of a few. You didn't even have the patience to listen to any kind of sales message. You wanted the product NOW.
What if you only targeted groups of people (aka - traffic sources) like this, as opposed to ones that require a lot more selling?
How much more profitable (and easier) would that make your job?
By continually testing and making improvements to a given marketing piece, like an ad or a website, you can increase the conversion rate by 50%... 100%... 200%... 300% or more over time.
However, by simply targeting better and more qualified sources of traffic, you can easily get TEN TIMES the conversion rate - in some cases basically overnight - without hardly even trying!
Which is why I say in 'The Renegade Network Marketer':
"A mediocre sales message given to a red-hot prospect will ALWAYS give you better results than a whole bunch of red-hot sales messages given to an indifferent prospect."
Now, on the surface, this idea of targeting the right prospects seems pretty straight forward. It doesn't really sound like there's a whole lot to it.
Just go after people who want to make money from home right?
But here's where you really have to be careful.
When I first began studying direct response marketing and I started building my business online, I mistakenly assumed that as long as I was advertising on home-based-business-type-websites or as long as I was bidding on MLM-ish type keywords, that's all I needed to do.
I had no idea the extent to which this concept of a "starving crowd" was true and just how far I needed to take it.
What I failed to realize in the beginning (a big thank you to John Reese for teaching me this) is that if you're not tracking the performance of EACH individual ad or traffic source separately, not only are you wasting an enormous amount of money...
But you're also leaving tons more on the table - money that's just sitting there, waiting for you to scoop it up.
Experienced direct marketers from the offline world have known this for years.
Even the greatest sales letter in the world will be a complete flop if it's mailed to the wrong list of people (a list being a collection of names and contact info, for example, subscribers of a golf magazine). EVEN IF it's a list of people you would think would be highly interested in your offer, a list that for all intents and purposes SHOULD be interested in your offer.
The problem is, even the smartest marketers in the world can never know for sure what audience will respond best. They can certainly make educated guesses and those guesses may turn out to be right a good percentage of the time, but they never leave anything to chance without testing it first.
That's why successful direct mailers always send their promotion to small sample audiences of 1,000-5,000 people from different lists in order to test the response BEFORE sending out mass mailings of 100,000 or more letters.
The reason they have to be so careful is because the cost of making a mistake in the "physical world" and mailing out a few hundred thousand letters to the wrong group of people could end up putting them $100 grand or more in the hole.
But today with the internet, these incredibly high costs have been removed and ANYONE who wants to can quickly, easily and cheaply reach thousands and even millions of potential prospects.
Never before in the history of the world has this been possible.
But of course there's a flip side to this coin.
Because of the speed, simplicity and low-cost of the internet...
It's also easier for people to be a lot more careless.
LESS RISK = LESS RESPONSIBILITY.
And this is where 90% of people doing business online are missing the boat because the most powerful advantage of the internet isn't the speed or the low-cost or even the huge reach that it offers...
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THE GREATEST ADVANTAGE OF THE INTERNET IS THAT IT'S THE MOST TRACKABLE ADVERTISING MEDIUM EVER!
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The biggest difference between successful business owners and unsuccessful ones has always been that the successful ones track EVERYTHING they do to make sure it's earning them a return on their investment.
If it's not, they stop doing it. If it is, they do more of it.
(This is why MLM companies don't teach their distributors to track all of their warm market/cold market prospecting activities. If they did, no one would do them anymore!)
But for those who want to take a truly scientific approach to their business, the internet is a dream come true.
Let me show you what I mean...
For starters, it's important to know that organic traffic... pay-per-click traffic... banner traffic... article traffic... press release traffic... blog traffic... social networking traffic... youtube traffic... JV traffic... offline-to-online traffic...viral traffic... and any other type of traffic you can think of, ALL convert differently.
And an ad or website that works great with one of them, very well could, but may not work so well with others.
Here are a couple extreme examples just to show you the vast difference between all these types of traffic.
One of the best ways to generate a lot of leads or sales in a short period of time is to have someone recommend your offer to their list of subscribers (this is known as a joint venture or endorsed mailing).
In one instance I did this with a newsletter owner who had a very high-quality list of subscribers. The offer I was making on my website in this case was actually to opt in for my free newsletter.
The promotion ended up with an almost-unbelievable 87% of the people who visited my site taking me up on my offer!
I then did it again with another joint venture, a different list of subscribers, and this time "only" 54% of the visitors opted in for my newsletter.
Then, I took this exact same website and advertised it using pay-per-click listings on one of the smaller search engines and it got a not-so-exciting 6.5%
average conversion rate.
Keep in mind, all this traffic, all of these visitors, were within the make-money-from-home crowd - people who should have all been interested in my offer.
Now, I could invest time into improving the conversion rate for the "6.5%" traffic source... or...I could invest time into finding more "54%" and "87%" traffic sources.
It's not that I DON'T want to work on improving the "6.5%" conversion rate, but out of those two options, if I was pressed for time (and who isn't?) and I had to choose, which one would bring me the greatest return in the shortest period of time?
Like I said, that's an extreme example and the difference isn't always so big since good joint venture traffic is just about the most qualified type of traffic you can get (aside from your own list of subscribers). It's also not always easy to find.
So what about within the same individual traffic generation techniques themselves?
You already saw the huge difference in conversions between two separate lists of subscribers...
What about pay-per-click?
Did you know that in many cases, especially in our industry, Yahoo traffic usually converts better than Google traffic?
What about even more specific than that?
When I say track every traffic source separately, I don't just mean individual traffic generation techniques or even just individual ads... I mean every KEYWORD (if it applies).
This is where it gets really interesting -- and super profitable. Here are some specific keyword examples that I have bid on over the years.
In these examples I wasn't promoting a free offer either, but a couple different paid products.
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networkmarketing . com = 10.2% conv. rate vs. network marketing = 3.33% conv. rate
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Isn't that amazing?
Same industry. Exact same website/message. Same traffic technique. Even the same keyword almost.
Totally different mindset.
This one's insightful:
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network marketing = 3.33% conv. rate vs. MLM = 1.27% conv. rate
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Now, a 3.33% conversion rate over a 1.27% one may not seem huge, but it makes all the difference in the world.
It's the difference between being able to pay $3.00 for your clicks vs. $.50.
It's the difference between having a prime spot on page one vs. being buried on page four.
It's the difference between hauling in hundreds of leads every month like clockwork vs. having a trickle of five or six to work with.
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free MLM leads = 1.96% conv. rate vs. MLM leads = 4.13% conv. rate
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This one doesn't really surprise me too much because I would assume that someone who types in "free MLM leads" is less likely to be interested in learning how to generate their own leads as opposed to someone who types in "MLM leads."
But here's a weird one for you...
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multi level marketing = 1.79% conv. rate vs. multilevelmarketing = 14.29% conv. rate
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Why is this?
Who knows.
I have a few theories, but all that really matters is that for the last two years I've been getting almost eight times the conversion rate from the keyword
"multilevelmarketing" with no spaces vs the normal keyword "multi level marketing."
(Something tells me there's going to be a lot more competition for this keyword, starting tomorrow morning. 
And one more...
If you're savvy about pay-per-click, this one's to illustrate the importance of using different match types. (If you're not, that's okay too - it's still just illustrating the bigger point of tracking). This shows the difference between exact match and broad match (I see this all the time by the way, with many, many different keywords).
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[network marketing business] = 12.5% conv. rate vs. network marketing business = 1.66% conv. rate
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What if you were advertising and you DIDN'T know this information?
What if you were paying $.15 for a keyword that converts at 2% and more than twice as much for a keyword that only converts at .8%?
Or what if you were paying through the nose to have your ads placed on a website that hasn't yielded a single prospect in the last 4 months and you had no idea about it?
How much money would you be wasting?
A lot.
Michael, if you're not doing this right now, you need to be. You're really operating in the dark until you are. And you won't fully realize it until you actually start doing it.
Then you'll look back and say, "How in the world could I have gone so long without doing this? I must have been insane!"
What's really scary about this whole thing is that if there's THAT much of a difference in conversion rates between different groups of people who are all LOOKING for information about network marketing...
How bad are the conversion rates for people who have no interest in MLM whatsoever or who just want to be left alone?
People like friends and coworkers or dead-beat "opportunity leads" that just requested info about making money from home because they wanted a free iPod.
It really sheds a whole new light on this business of sponsoring and recruiting doesn't it?
But even more important than the money you're wasting by not tracking is the money you're missing out on...
When you're able to pinpoint those advertising sources that are bringing you the absolute highest return on your dollar and you focus all your money and efforts on them, it's very powerful.
The greatest and fastest increase in profits I've ever experienced with the least amount of effort was when I started tracking individual traffic sources.
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IT WAS, WITHOUT A DOUBT, THE EASIEST MONEY I'VE EVER MADE.
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But the best part about this strategy, is that this is something you can go implement RIGHT NOW and immediately see dramatic results from (not to mention the tools you need to do it are free).
Most of the activities in business that really make you a lot of money require a good amount of learning and skill development.
This is not one of them.
This is something that anyone can quickly and easily put to use, today, with no learning curve, and in some cases, if you're currently doing a decent of amount of advertising, produce huge results literally overnight - as was the case for me.
On the other hand, if you're just getting started learning how to generate your own leads, you're way ahead of the ballgame.
It's pretty easy to see how a savvy marketer who focuses on highly qualified pockets of traffic that convert like crazy can dance circles around everyone else who's just randomly throwing stuff out there and hoping some of it works.
If you're currently using The Renegade Network Marketer right now to help you build your business, you already have access to a free built-in tracking and reporting tool that allows you to separately track an unlimited amount of ads or keywords.
Just log in to: http://www.TheRenegadeSystem.com and click on the 'Tracking' tab at the top.
It's drop-dead simple to use and I walk you through the steps on how to create individual tracking urls.
This feature works great if you're promoting your Renegade Network Marketer landing pages, but if you have your own website and you promote numerous different offers or sites, I highly recommend you check out Google Analytics:
http://www.google.com/analytics/
It's an immensely powerful, full-scale tracking and site statistic reporting software.
This is the exact tool I use to find out where all my visitors are coming from... which sources convert the best... what people do once they land on my site... what pages they visit... how long they stay... and a million other little useful pieces of info.
This software actually used to be sold for a pretty hefty price tag by a company called Urchin, until Google bought them out and decided to give it away for free.
One last note:
If you advertise different websites using the keyword examples that I gave above, will you see the exact same conversion rates that I did?
No.
Because different audiences respond differently to different messages.
That's the whole point. That's why you have to track everything for yourself. If you just advertise blindly, you may very well be hurting yourself.
Think of each traffic source or each keyword as representing an entirely different group of people.
Different mindset, different needs, different hot buttons.
To Your Success,
Ann Sieg
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*..Best MLM Resources..*
Commission River = MORE $$
"How To Have A Custom MLM Website"
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