Brent Hodgson, Copywriter

When you think about it, it’s SUCH an obvious concept…

But at the time, it’s also SO valuable.

When you’re testing, you want to test EVERYTHING at the largest part of your sales funnel. That means you shouldn’t necessary test sales copy on your sales page.

This one concept will make a zillion percent difference to your efficiency as an internet marketer.

If you just said “ah”, scroll down to the bottom now and show your appreciation

But if you said “huh?”

Then let me explain what I mean… Because if you’re split testing, or if you want to improve your conversions, this is going to make a WORLD of difference to your effectiveness.

When you’re split testing the conversion rates of a sales letter, the faster you can collect a large number of “responses” (clicks, sign-ups, buys, sales leads, whatever), the faster you can optimise the sales letter.

You need “responses”.

And you need as many of them as possible.

It’s the reason a page that gets a lot of traffic (or, has a high conversion rate), can split test faster than a low-traffic page (or, a page with a low conversion rate).

So the more traffic you’re getting, and the “easier” it is for people to say “YES!”, the more results you’ll get, and the faster you can optimise.

Simple!

Consider this model…

You have a fairly standard internet marketing website - you have a simple squeeze-for-email that signs people up to an autoresponder on the homepage. This then leads to a longform sales letter. If people choose to buy, they’re asked if they want to upgrade to a premium version of your product (an upsell). And you’re driving traffic through Google Adwords to your site.

Have you been paying attention?

Good!

Let’s test your lateral thinking skills… Grab a piece of paper and write down the answers to these 4 questions:

Question 1: What’s the most effective and efficient way to test the headline of your Upsell page?

Question 2: What’s the most effective and efficient way to test the appeal of your sales page?

Question 3: What’s the most effective and efficient way to test what you should be offering people in exchange for their email addresses on your squeeze page?

Question 4: Where should you be testing different Adwords ad variations to work out what your market will respond to?

Have you completed the quiz?

What were your answers?

Upsell pages get the fewest hits of any page. They usually have phenomenal conversion rates, but with the fewest visitors of any of these pages, they’re the hardest to test. Although you might want to test the sales copy for this page ON this page, it’s going to take FOREVER to optimise.

Sales pages require a big buy-in. If the conversion rate of your sales page is 10% (like one of my clients), you’re killing them - do whatever… But if you’re like most people and in the 0.5-2.0% range… then you’re going to be waiting forever for a result here too.

Squeeze pages, you have a much higher result - a lot of my clients run squeeze pages that convert between 10%-50%. This is a good place to test.

HOWEVER…

In the example above, the answers to Questions 1, 2, 3 AND 4 is “With different Adwords Ad Variations”.

This is at the very “opening” of your sales funnel - it’s where you’re going to get the biggest data set, fastest.

By testing your appeals, headlines and everything else at the highest point in your sales funnel, you’re able to optimise everything faster and more effectively.

“But, Brent! Adwords is different to a sales letter, or a squeeze page, or an upsell… You’re testing on two different mediums.”

You’re correct - however there’s an important distinction you’re probably missing…

The same person who responded to your upsell - they were the same person who responded to your salesletter, the same person who responded to your squeeze page, the same person who responded to your salesletter.

Any “appeal” you’re testing, it doesn’t matter where you test it in your sales funnel, you’re essentially testing it on the same person each time.

That’s why you should test it at the “widest” point of your conversion funnel, on a call-to-action that’s incredibly easy to respond to (like a click), in order to test to the biggest data set and get the best response rate so that you can get results as fast as possible.

…In essence, you’re optimising your optimisation!

It’s so freakin’ obvious… but so powerful!

Brent

P.S. - There’s huge value in surrounding yourself with other smart marketers.

I wouldn’t be a fraction of who I am today as a marketer if I didn’t have people around me like Eugene Ware, Pete Williams and other smart dudes.

All the credit for this idea goes to Eugene Ware.

If you want to show your appreciation to Eugene, leave a comment below.

P.P.S. - If you want to network with other smart marketers, also leave a comment. You’ll receive an email from me that includes my email address. Use it!

Popularity: 24%

Have you ever been into an ice-cream store, and seen only “Chocolate Ice Cream” available?

Never!

In fact, one multi-national ice creamery’s slogan is all about the choice of selection that they offer - “31 Flavors”.

But when you go to an ice-cream store, how long does it take you to choose the right ice cream?

“Do I want chocolate fudge plus mint in a waffle cone? Or do I want wildberry swirl and vanilla in a sugar cone?”

For marketers, this example tells us a lot about the value, and cost, of choice.

The Cost of Choice

Just like in the example of choosing the right ice-cream… The more choices you have, the harder it is to make a decision.

Let me give you an example of this.

Last night I went to dinner with a close friend, Eugene Ware.

In my pocket, I had three rolls of Lifesavers - Fruit Pastelles (sugar-coated jubes), Peppermint, and “5 Flavours”. I offered one of the packets to him after dinner.

Euge and I have practically been siamese twins since we began working together - I know all his bad habits, and he knows mine.

Fruit Pastelles are one of his favourite types of lollies… And when I offered them to him, I expected he’d reach straight for that packet.

But something unexpected happened…

He stopped.

He paused.

He thought about the decision.

The fact that he had to make a decision between three options made making a decision harder.

I handed him the packet of Fruit Pastelles, which he immediately accepted, and asked why he paused.

“I guess it was because I had to make a choice.”

“But the Fruit Pastelles are your favourite of the three, right?”

“Yeah… I would have chosen them. But psychologically, I must have had to weigh up the options.”

It’s the same at the ice cream counter - you have favourite ice creams that you’ll go back to every time… But it still takes a few minutes to come to that decision.

Generally, when you’re in a sales situation, you want people to make a decision to buy as quickly as possible.

Especially in internet marketing: It’s buy-or-die.

Either you get the reader’s attention, and get them to buy immediately - or you’ve lost that person forever.

Something that complicates the buying decision means you might lose the customer. Which is why copywriters tell you that you want to create a “slippery slope”.

So I wonder, does choice adversely affect conversions?

I’ve seen evidence for-and-against.

Let me show you the flip-side of the coin:

The Value of Choice

The positive side of choice is that it gives the customer more CONTROL.

They can choose HOW they want the product (payment terms, shipping terms, etc), or WHAT they want (vanilla or chocolate, standard or premium package, etc).

And as a result, they can have more OWNERSHIP over their decision, and generally more SATISFACTION.

Two jobs ago, before Alliance asked me to become a full-time Internet Marketing Consultant, I was working for a highly profitable online business where I co-managed (with Eugene) internet marketing.

(P.S. - It was SO much fun having complete control over creating kick-butt marketing, rather than being a consultant and only being able to “suggest” things… That’s where we did our “570,000 in Sales in 37 Minutes” launch. Doing crazy things like that is what I miss most now… but I digress)

Some of the products this online business would sell were reasonably high value.

Almost anything over a few hundred dollars would have a “choice” attached.

“Do you want to pay $X up-front, or would you like to pay $Y per month (a 10-30% premium, depending on the product).

We never split-tested this tactic.

However, the anecdotal evidence suggested we sold more products as a result of offering a choice of payment options.

That evidence was simply that we sold more of them after we began offering this installment-payment option.

I say it’s anecdotal, because it was likely affected by any number of other factors - such as changes in the general marketplace outside our control, growth in the size of the database we were promoting to, and more - so we didn’t actually have any hard “split testing” on whether choice of payment options improved conversion or not.

It’s something interesting that I’d like to test in-depth one day.

Have you tested “choice” as a conversion factor?

What choices did you give your customers? How successful was it for you?

Brent

Popularity: 15%

Interesting stuff keeps pouring out of the Google Adwords data that I’m collecting through Tracked.to

As I’ve mentioned already, Google’s broad matching is “VERY broad” - more broad than most people give it credit.

Most of the time Broad Match completely misinterprets your keyword, and gives you a bunch of crappy keyword clicks…

But every now and again, it grabs a few clicks on a really great keyword.

Going through my Tracked.to data yesterday, I found I’d received a click for a new search term…

I’d set up a new campaign around the keywords “copywriter” and “copywriting” - in broad, phrase and exact match. The purpose of this campaign was to drive a little traffic to this blog, but mainly to gather more Tracked.to data.

Here’s what I found:

Although I was bidding on the keyword “copywriting”, I’d received a click for the keyword “Harlan Kilstein” - the name of another copywriter, and a specific “buy-term”.

Awesome!

You can bet I’m specifically testing the effectiveness of this keyword now!

I had a look in Wordtracker and the Google Adwords keyword suggestion tool - if you look for keywords around “copywriter”, neither of these tools will pick up Harlan Kilstein’s name as a keyword - but based on early data, it highly likely that this keyword will result in signups and sales for me.

This is gold-level keyword research - I’m gathering real-life data on the precise keywords that result in clicks, in any market I want.

I’m a huge believer in Tracked.to’s ability to uncover negative keywords, and positive keywords (like in the example above) - “gold-nugget”, high-converting keywords that other keyword research tools won’t give you. And I genuinely want to see it help you too.
There’s still time to jump in on the Tracked.to Closed Beta, and trial Tracked.to for yourself for free.

To find out more about Tracked.to or the Closed Beta, visit http://www.tracked.to

Popularity: 15%

The traditional internet marketing model is simple:

Have a squeeze page on the homepage, that sits infront of a salesletter… And tacked in behind the scenes, you have a bunch of traffic-generation articles.

Fundamentally, this model is flawed.

Sure, it works to convert traffic into sales - but no better or worse than taking these same pages off your site’s homepage, and putting them into a subdirectory.

You might get more people visiting your sales letter (or squeeze page) if you put it on the homepage - but you’ll get fewer people visiting your site overall.

So what do you do with your homepage?

Give something away!

Give away some value somewhere. Offer articles, advice, free software, calculators, tools - whatever.

Ranking well in search engines is important - sure, you shouldn’t rely on it for ALL your traffic - but a sales letter is rarely going to rank well in search engines. It’s not optimised to rank, and (with the exception of affiliate links) it’s not going to attract links.

Links are a critical factor for improving your search engine rankings.

A sales letter on your homepage makes it harder to get links to your site.

That’s because there is no incentive for people to link to a sales letter.

Here’s an example of why it pays to build sites around content rather than a “pitch”:

Scott Bywater is a highly respected Australian direct response copywriter.

I know Scott’s invested a lot of time, effort and money into SEO for his web-site. His site’s older than mine, he has a better name in the industry, and is a far more prolific copywriter than I am.

I’ve invested practically no time into SEO - just setting up my Wordpress site initially.

All things being equal, Scott should outrank me for search terms like “copywriter“.

But I outrank Scott.

I have more links, for less effort and less cost.

The difference is that I’m running a content-based site (and at the bottom of each post, still offering a squeeze and a pitch on each post), and Scott’s running a Squeeze page focussed site.

Brent

Popularity: 7%

Rob Somerville just Twittered an amazing link - a leaked document that appears to be Google’s “Human Reviewer” Quality Guidelines for Natural Search.

This is great information for any SEO’er - it shows you exactly how Google asks its reviewers to analyse sites, and what they want to see in Search Results pages.

This gives you the opportunity to genuinely optimise around the real quality guidelines used internally at Google.

Chances are, if you already use Google’s Webmaster Guidelines as your White-Hat SEO Bible, you’ll know 90% of this stuff already - but that extra 10% might be what you need to get ahead.

If I were you, download this before it’s taken down.

Just like when AOL released it’s actual search data - I don’t think it’s going to be up for long, and it’s going to be something you’ll kick yourself if you miss it.

Brent

Popularity: 7%

A friend recently noted how much time and effort I put into this blog, and asked me:

“Why do you do it, Brent? Surely there’s more productive things you can be doing.”

Sure there are more productive things I could be doing… And more profitable things too!

For starters, I could be billing hours to clients - there’s always more work for me to do than I end up getting done. Or I could be working on my own ventures.

But I give that time up when I blog.

My motivation for blogging is simple - I have three reasons to blog:

1. A selfish reason;
2. An unselfish reason, and;
3. A relationship building reason.

The selfish reason is simple. I blog to remind myself about the things I’ve learned, the things I know, the things I want to achieve, and the things I already do well. I blog as a journal - to keep myself focused, positive and moving forward - and as a record of how far I’ve come.

The unselfish reason is that I also blog for the people I have personal relationships with in my life - my friends, colleagues, family, and clients. I blog to share with them some of the things I know, and some of the things I want them to know. I blog to give them things I feel they may want, need or are missing, and to stay in communication and relationship with them.

The obvious thing about relationships is that they are all about constant communication.

The thing I’ve noticed is that when communication is poorly and selfishly executed, it’s called “marketing” - but when done well it’s called “relationship”.

Because of this type of honest communication in my blog, I end up connecting with other people around the world, and building relationships. People just like you. People no different to the people closest to me in my life - those who I already have personal relationships with. It’s not my primary purpose (it’s reason #3) - but I’m glad when I can help people through my blog, and end up building a relationship with them.

That’s why I don’t hold back here - with anything I say.

If I hold back here just so “I know something you don’t know”, I’m holding back.

I’m holding back from making a connection. I hold back from my friends, colleagues, clients and family. I hold back on relationships. And I’m holding back from myself.

That is the reason I dedicate hours each week to this blog, and why I’m willing to give away all of what I know about marketing.

It’s for you, it’s for my friends, my family, my clients and my colleagues - but first and foremost, it’s for me.

Popularity: 30%

I stumbled across this video today, and I want to share it with you:

It’s a speech recorded by philosopher Alan Watts, set to an animation produced by South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker.

Interesting, isn’t it?

What I got out of this video is a reminder to take stock of life. I agree with this life perspective, although it’s often easy to lose sight of the “present”.

What are your thoughts after watching this video?

Popularity: 12%

The idea of Geo-arbitrage is great… “Earn Dollars by selling locally… outsource your labour offshore… pay in Rupees… keep the difference”…

It’s practically a licence to print money!

WRONG!

The idea is great IN THEORY…

But IN THEORY, Communism works too.

Face the facts - (you’ll never read this in the “Four Hour Work Week”) - Geo-arbitrage is a con.

FACT: There is no “global labour market imbalance”. Economic imbalances correct themselves quickly.

FACT: You get what you pay for.

FACT: When pay you peanuts, you get monkeys.

FACT: In almost any situation - if you live in a western country, you can get the same result CHEAPER and BETTER when you hire locally.

That’s why a growing number of companies who previously outsourced are now nursing their pride, and bringing their operations back on-shore.

Why Hiring Offshore Outsourcing Providers Sucks:

1 - Lower Quality Output

Let’s face it, the vast majority of people you’ll find bidding on sites like Guru, Elance etc - they just aren’t from countries KNOWN for producing quality outputs.

Take Japan, for example.

The culture in Japan is one where mistakes are seen as a dual-edged sword. On the one hand, they’re not tollerated - but on the other, they’re embraced as learning experiences.

Companies like Toyota have built empires on this philosophy - battle-hardening and systemising the most minute details of their business, to a point where their products now out-perform, out-sell, and out-last just about about of their competitors.

As an example, compare this type of efficiency and effectiveness you experienced with your last experience with an Indian telemarketer.

Why is this?

Is it caused by culture? Capability? Lack of industry experience (caused by massive growth)? Poor management (not enough “wise and time-proven” managers leading the pack)? Lack of effective training? Are the only companies looking for work online the crappy ones nobody else will employ?

Maybe it’s all of the above.

2 - Difficulty Handling Complex Tasks

Sure, it takes time for someone to be brought “up to speed” - but if I’m hiring a company that specialises in X (X = PHP development, Virtual Assistance, whatever), shouldn’t they be able to handle something slightly more complicated than the average project?

If you haven’t outsourced before, it’s really simple.

You read about Tim Ferriss’s Four Hour Work Week, and decide to hire a virtual assistant.

Let’s say you manage to find a company that actually has some experienced VA’s (not one that’s just hiring as a result of the post-4HWW-boom… ha, good luck!)

You read the introduction letter, and find out about your new VA…

“Degree in Science, Masters in Microbiology - she’s great! She should be running a laboratory, not doing my dirty-work!”

You set her a reasonably easy task to begin…

You get questions. Then more questions. Simple questions, not hard ones. Questions with obvious answers - things you don’t need to answer. Questions that show a lack of attention to detail.

Suddenly, you come to the realisation…

“Yes, my Virtual Assistant has a university degree - but she JUST CAN’T THINK!”

Did you get a bad apple?

You try again… With other Virtual Assistants… Programmers… Article Writers… Whatever.

You hire more expensive providers, cheaper ones, give them different tasks.

The problem remains the same.

For some reason, your “paid monkeys” just can’t work this one out.

3 - Constant Mistakes and Misunderstandings

Re-doing work is a killer of profitability and productiveness.

Screw-ups need to be paid for by someone.

Surely your systems should be improved with every screw up… But you still need to fix the problem in the immediate term.

Suddenly, you get drawn into “managing” the people/company who is supposed to be “managing” the task for you - telling them what went wrong, and what they need to do to fix it.

Once you’ve nailed them down on the problem, someone needs to pay to fix it.

Will your outsourcing company pay the costs? Will they expect you to pay them to fix the mistake? Or will you end up back at square one, looking for a NEW company to use?

Hang on - wasn’t this outsourcing thing meant to improve your efficiency?

4 - You Spend More Time Doing Their Job

This is another issue that comes down to “ability to think independently”.

Every minute detail has to be specified - or when you get the output back, the things you didn’t specifically ask for are simply “missing”.

“Yes, I asked for an email enquiry form on my website… But why is there no ‘SUBMIT’ button?!”

In my experience, this is particularly true for programming and development projects.

Every detail needs to be spelled out.

Every… mundane… tedious… painstaking… eye-popping detail…

Augh!

And even then, something gets missed!

You have to spend time completing review… Spend time bug testing… Spend time chasing up outputs that aren’t delivered… Spend time kicking people’s butts…

It all takes time…

How much is this time really worth to you?

5 - It Takes Longer

OK - so you’re paying $5 per hour… That’s heaps cheaper than the $20 per hour you could pay if you hired your next door neighbour, right?

WRONG… If it takes 4 times longer to generate the same output, it’s the exact same price.

In my humble experience, even “high quality” outsourcing companies have invariably delivered less output, to a lower quality, with more time spent - than similar tasks completed on-shore.

6 - You Pay The Cultural Costs

Finally - and this might be an obvious one - you lose a sense of cultural understanding when you don’t hire locally.

Think logically about what you expect from outsourcing providers…

• Getting your Virtual Assistant to organise a child’s birthday party in Melbourne… When she’s never lived in Melbourne.
• Getting a telemarketer to “sell” phone plans to Australians, when she’s never even spoken to an Australian in-person.
• Getting a writer to write an article for you in English, when they’re not a native English speaker.

It just doesn’t work.

The more time I spend outsourcing offshore, the less value I see in it, and the less I’m coming to expect from providers.

Sure, when you have a “point and click” task that can be completed by a well-trained monkey, that’s when paying peanuts offshore is OK.

But when you have “Important”, “Critical” or “High Value” tasks, you’re just wasting your time, and frustrating your guys.

It’s cheaper, more effective, and more efficient to exclusively hire from first-world countries.

Popularity: 16%

Have you ever thought about what happens when someone makes a decision?

I mean physically, what happens.

Synapses flare, neurons pulse, and an electrochemical chain reaction is set off in that person’s brain.

With all the books on selling and copywriting and influence, we might be mistaken for thinking we can actually “make” people change their mind, “make” them decide on a course of action, or “make” them come around to your point of view.

But really, we can’t “make” people do any of these things.

The decisions are out of our control.

Although we might be in a position where we can influence the sale, as salespeople we do not control the sale ourselves, and we cannot “make” a customer decide to buy.

I recently finished a book that I’d been meaning to read for some time: Wombat Selling by Dr Michael Hewitt Gleeson.

Dr Gleeson Co-founded (with Edward De Bono) the School of Thinking and is a fellow Melbournian.

Because salespeople aren’t able to physically “close the sale”, Gleeson suggests a logical alternative: Stop putting so much effort into the close.

Instead, Gleeson suggests focusing effort at the beginning of the contact with the client, making contact more frequent, and using the number of client contacts (check moves) as a measure of sales team effectiveness rather than counting the number of sales closed.

(If you only skimmed the paragraph above, you’ll want to re-read it… You just missed three big concepts.)

The book also goes into ideas like how to create word of mouth selling opportunities, and achieve true viral marketing. In fact, the title of the book is to illustrate Dr Gleeson’s ideas around this - Word Of Mouth, Buy And Tell

I’ll be honest… It’s a great book - but I hated reading it.

It’s about twice as long as it needs to be, repeats key messages in detail long after they’ve become redundant, includes several patriotic odes to Melbourne and Australia (yes, I live here, and even I wanted to throw up), uses endless acronyms and buzzwords, and the book is as much a diatribe about organized religion as it is on effective marketing and salesmanship…

…So if you choose to read the book based on my recommendation, then let me apologise to you now.

I’m sorry.

I truly am.

My apology is sincere.

It’s a painful reading experience. But if you’re in marketing or sales (particularly online marketing and sales), then suck it up. Get a copy of Wombat Selling, and read it. Then put it on your bookshelf next to other great books like “Influence” by Robert Cialdini.

Popularity: 10%

Psssst…

…I’ll let you in on a secret.

I know how Google’s will be changing their search engine ranking algorithm next month…

In fact, I know how they’ll change it next year too…

I know exactly what types of sites Google is going to reward with good rankings, and what types of sites Google will penalize with poor rankings.

Let me ask you…

If you had this information, would it change the way you conducted SEO?

If you knew about Google’s search engine ranking algorithms, and how they would change in the coming months, years, even decades - could this help you to make significant amounts of money online?

Sure it would!

SEO experts spend weeks testing, measuring, gathering ranking data - just so that they can achieve this type of market advantage in the short term!

Want to know how you can achieve this SEO market advantage in the long term?

It’s no secret. Google wants to tell you.

Read between the lines here and here, and you’ll find out what I’m talking about.

Google literally spells out in black-and-white exactly what a “good” site looks like to them.

This is the point on the horizon that Google is sailing towards. This is where they want to get to. It’s what sort of sites they want to reward with the highest rankings.

The algorithm changes that they make are simply “changes of tack” - tweaks that they make to ensure they end up at their destination.

So what sort of sites will rank well in Google over the long term?

• Sites that have lots of text-based links, both internal links and inbound links from other sites within the same topic area;
• Sites that offer valuable and useful information, where pages accurately describe content and are stored in clear hierarchical structures;
• Sites with descriptive and relevant TITLE and ALT tags;
• Sites with easily accessible pages;
• Sites that AVOID deceptive or “spammy” practices such as participating in link schemes, keyword spamming, cloaked pages and redirects;
• Sites that respect the Google’s cost of processor time, and make the Googlebot’s job as easy as possible.

Google goes into much more depth within the Webmaster Guidelines pages themselves - so if you haven’t read them, or even if you have, go have a read of them now.

Stop listening to SEO experts, and listen to Google themselves!

Brent

Popularity: 11%