A/B is the most basic form of split-testing. Essentially, you have 2 copies of a page/e-mail, and you see which one performs best. The difference between a profitable campaign and an unprofitable one can literally come down to the headline you are using. So, what’s the correct way to split-test your site?

1. Find out / pick one exact call to action that you want to optimize for. Whether this is the play button for a band site’s audio player or the purchase button for a product, set up Google Website Optimizer to make this action trackable. This way, you can actually see what percentage of your users does this given action.
2. Create 2-3 drastically different copies of your current page and split-test these with Google Website Optimizer.
3. Once one of the 2 or 3 shows consistent outperformance of the others, you can start testing the individual elements of your site: headline (headline split-testing alone can increase conversions by 200%), call to action (colors, text, style, etc), color, graphics, layout, and copy.

With this formula, you can ensure that your site is optimized and performing at its peak for your purpose. Let’s look at an example of a sample site selling one product. Let’s say the page converts at 3%. This means that out of 100 visitors, we’ll have 3 purchases. If we’re driving traffic at $1 a click and the net profit from each sale is $30, we’re going to be losing $10 for every $100 worth of paid traffic.

If, after split-testing, we’re able to increase our conversion rate ONLY  to 4%, which is an extremely conservative improvement, we’re now profiting $20 from every $100 worth of paid traffic. Without even touching our traffic source, we’ve turned a loser into a winner.

After optimizing the site, you can then optimize your ads for an improved CTR (which will result in a lower CPC), as well as your autoresponder e-mails. It’s crucial to have a strong grasp around the metrics of your websites. After all, if you’re not tracking it, you can know for certain that your site is performing less than it can be with just a few, simple tweaks.

No matter how hard you work, there’s only 24 hours in a day, and there’s only so much you can do by yourself.

That means, if you subscribe to the idea of having a fixed income, no matter how much you love your job or how often you want to work, there’s a very clear wall to how much money you can make.

Why does it appear that, in general, the more difficult and tedious the work is, the person working

By definition, employees exist to make employers money. An employer will never pay you what you’re worth, because if they did, you simply wouldn’t be a profitable asset to the company.

The question stands – how do you break through the limit of having just 24 hours in a day? How are people making millions of dollars in a DAY, when they only have as much time as everyone else?

The answer is leveraging time and resources so you can make as significant of an impact in your day. If you have 10 workers, all of a sudden you now have a potential 264 hours in a single day.

If you have a website where search engines, Facebook, Twitter, and other advertisements are sending thousands of people a day, you’ve expanded this even further.

The key is finding a profitable system that you can package in such a way that can be sold and consumed without your direct attention. Information products and services are two very common outlets for this idea. Rather than working 8 hours a day @ $10/hour for a total of $80 a day, what if you could sell just TWO copies of an information product or TWO subscriptions to a membership?

Now, what if rather than you directly selling these copies, you had advertising campaigns doing all of the hard work for you, driving endless volumes of visitors to your sales page?

Once you break out of the confines of a 24 hour day, the possibilities are endless.

-John

First, you’ve got people who think it’s impossible to make money online, no matter how much detail is given about how it works. It’s just… “impossible”, until they make that first sale.

Then, you’ve got the people who put their goals so far ahead of their current situation that it’s difficult to get in the right direction. For example, “I want to make $100,000 a day.” That’s perfectly fine… but how? Without direction, you’re just going to be walking in place.

That’s why I like to break things down to the smallest elements, so I can literally take everything piece by piece, so I know exactly what my next task to complete is.

Let’s say you want to be doing $900 a day. It makes it easier when you break it down with “real figures” rather than some monetary projection. Let’s say you’re promoting an offer that pays $37 per sale.

This means you have to make 24-25 sales a day to hit your goal. If your offer is converting at 10%, then you know you have to drive 240 to 250 people a day to your site. By breaking it down piece by piece and turning dollar signs into real figures, your goals become much more of an achievable reality than a dream.

Say you don’t drive 240 to 250 people one day. Write more ads, find more keywords, find more advertising avenues. Scale your PPC campaigns to other search engines.

Or perhaps, your conversion rate drops to 5% instead of the original 10%. That means you’re going to have to drive 480 to 500 people a day to achieve that goal, or you’re going to have to improve your sales process. Split-test your landing page, offer, and work on more ways to pre-sell your visitors.

Do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. Make decisions based off of the data, and you’re moving in the right direction. The key is to continue moving forward, and working through any setbacks.

“If you never take your eyes off your goals, you will never see an opportunity to fail.”

-John

A lot of people get ready to go into a niche. They’re super motivated.

Then they start doing keyword research and realize that there are literally hundreds of advertisers competing in their niche. What’s the deal?

Well, you don’t have to be the best marketer to succeed in a niche. You just have to be the best marketer in that niche. There might be some marketing masterminds targeting “Lasik Surgery”, but perhaps “Lasik Surgery in Boise” is a much easier niche to break into.

Besides drilling down your niche to sub-niches and even micro-niches, you can try different avenues of advertising. Rather than just AdWords, experiment with some of the following.

• MSN / Yahoo Pay-Per-Click
• 2nd Tier Pay-Per-Click (7Search has clicks for as low as $0.01)
• Pulse360 for miniature media buys on sites like USAToday.com
• Pay-Per-View
• Twitter and other social media
• Your list

Another great idea – rather than promoting your offer directly, you can promote a general offer as a free giveaway to incentivize an opt-in. That way, not only will you have the leverage of continual contact with your lead to cross-promote similar products, they’re more likely to buy them since you’re giving valuable free content away.

Good luck!

-John

Forums are places where unique ideas are shared. Duplicate / rehashed information is heavily frowned upon, and forum regulars would never think of providing it.

If you need ideas for topics or content that you want re-written as your own, you can easily find as much information as you would like by simply looking for the most active forum on your niche.

Looking for internet marketing topics for your blog? “Hey guys, I’m looking for some popular current events going on with internet marketing for an assignment. Could you guys point me in the right direction?”

Remember: Even if someone can’t answer a question, almost all are going to be able to point you in the right direction.

-John

Don’t want to pay for traffic? Ever wish your sales page was like one of those videos that gets passed around Facebook or MySpace?

Well… it’s a bit easier than it sounds. In fact, adding the element of viral marketing to your online business is simple. However, we’ve got two forms of it.

Suggested Viral Marketing

Simply adding a link to Twitter can get your product a huge amount of exposure if it truly is something they want to share with their friends online.

Example: http://twitter.com/?status=Enter the message you want to retweet here

Including a link like that on your page will pre-populate the tweet field on Twitter.com.

Another easy way to make your sales page viral is to put up a promotional video on YouTube, and then link to it through other social networks like Twitter and Facebook, or social bookmarking like Digg.com.

There are tons of ways to make your page viral-able… but what if you REALLY want to make your page explode with traffic?

Forced Viral Marketing

Take a quick look at my most recent training product, Tweet ATM. It’s located at http://www.TweetATM.com, and it’s a great example of what forced viral marketing is.

Users are given the traditional video sales pitch, but just for “retweeting” (that is, sending out our promotional message to THEIR followers…), they are given instant, free access to a very high quality product.

Not only will this build my list, it will FORCE everyone on my list to be essentially driving me free traffic.

Think of different ways you can force users to promote for you without paying a penny. “Refer 5 friends”, “retweet our message”, “follow us on Twitter”, “add us on Facebook”. The list goes on, and you can split-test elements to see what works best for your audience.

Enjoy the free traffic!

-John

I’ve experimented with video squeeze pages compared to ‘regular’ squeeze pages to capture e-mails, and I have to say… Video squeeze pages rock!

• Compress more sales force into a 30 to 60 second video than you can a couple of pages of sales copy.
• You’re ensuring your visitors aren’t “skimming” your persuasive content.
• Faster AND more effective than writing copy for a squeeze page.

I’ve also experimented with screen capture vs. “real video of yourself”, and the results are interesting for their effectiveness at capturing e-mails.

• Video squeeze page with a video of myself – 65.9% opt-in rate.
• Video squeeze page using Jing – 38.4% opt-in rate.

While this is definitely a limited sample group, you should be split-testing the type of video you’re using to get people to enter their e-mails.

Find out what works best for your market.

-John

Once you’ve developed a product or an offer page that’s ready to send traffic to, it wouldn’t be the best idea to immediately scout high-ticket media buys or establish relationships with joint venture candidates. Those are relatively large investments, and unnecessary for testing a new offer.

What if the product flops? Not only is your credibility going to be tainted with JV partners, you will have a difficult time securing more JV partners when all of your connections friends ask him “how that one offer went.” You also wouldn’t want to risk the $5,000 to $10,000 minimum for media buys.

It’s much better to test small to find out what works, then scale up to get more data. I’ve designed a scaling process that has worked for me.

1. Start with instant, free traffic to get an immediate idea. You can do this through targeting your niche on Twitter using something like Twollo.com, or posting on forums your niche frequents. Although most people frown down on ‘auto direct messages’ on Twitter, it does work for niche audiences.
2. Pay-per-click traffic. With optimization and testing, this will allow you to see what exactly which keywords you should be targeting later on with SEO. Shoot for over 1000 unique clicks before determining your true conversion rate.
3. Once you’ve got solid numbers with PPC, you can do a few things. Find authority sites on your niche and look for a media buy opportunity. Directly contact them if nothing is apparent on the site.
4. Use your contacts you found in point 1 to JV with you. From ‘forum celebrities’ putting an affiliate link in their signature to having competitors mail advertisements for your product out, there’s really unlimited opportunity once you have a sales page with a proven conversion rate. Package your data up into a case study, and shoot it off to potential JVs!
5. Search engine optimize. Take the keywords that are working for you on PPC, and have your website optimized for these keywords. Build strong backlinks so you can rank for these keywords and get free traffic to your offer.

Using this formula, you’re cutting off the potential to upset people or lose money in an investment that won’t produce a profit for you. The key is to start small, plugging “leaks” in your sales process through split-testing, and scaling it up with little risk.

Good luck!

-John

But how about just being outright… banned from advertising on Google all-together? Your IP, your credit card, your address, your phone number, all blacklisted from Google Adwords

Zac Johnson posted an interesting article on his site about some of his contacts getting their AdWords accounts completely banned because of the tactics they were using. Here are the things you need to avoid:

• Using shady tactics like re-uploading your campaigns to AdWords after they’ve been slapped
• The infamous “fake blogs”
• Google Business Opportunities, like Google Money Tree.

That’s pretty much all you’ve got to keep an eye out for when promoting through Google. It’s not difficult, and it’s hard to blame Google for not wanting these things. However, a bit of warning from the company would have been great, especially since a lot of people rely on Google as their main source of income. This brings me to my next point.

A Foundation of Multiple Pillars

In all aspects of life and business, it’s important not to support yourself with just one single element. Building a strong foundation and developing diverse streams of income is vital to living the freedom of your own business, while being stable and secure with that freedom.

In internet marketing terms, that means don’t rely solely on just pay-per-click. Or just Twitter. Or YouTube.

Spread out and dominate all of your markets through as many avenues you can. Not only will you be able to increase your exposure significantly by doing this, your presence will be instantly validated by the immense social proof you will have by appearing everywhere, and it will be secured by spreading out your income streams.

-John

If you’re trying to get the much chased 9 and 10 quality scores from Google AdWords, keep reading. First though, find out your market’s demand for your offer with Google Insights.

Step 1) Enter your ‘root’ keyword into the Google Keyword Tool. For example, ‘dog training’.

Step 2) While staying super relevant to your audience, pick the top 10 most searched terms. For example, ‘dog training, dog obedience training, training a dog, dog training school, dog training classes, training your dog, dog behavior training, best dog training, dog training online, obedience training dogs’.

Step 3) Repeat this process of entering the top 10 most searched terms with all of these keywords, drilling down DEEP, until you see the majority of bids at $0.05. That’s when you know you’re at about the right level – not too specific, so you’re still getting traffic, but specific enough, so you’re not paying $4 a click.

Step 4) Combine all of your keywords and run them through (okay, I lied… we’re using a tool, but you could do this by hand… and this isn’t technically part of the keyword research ) my longtail filtering script. Remove keyword phrases with less than 3 words, and more than 9.

Step 5) Optimize your landing site around these keywords. If you’re using WordPress, create categories in a vertical fashion, rather than laterally. For example, rather than ‘dog training’ and ‘canine training’ and ‘dog lessons’, you should be doing something like: ‘dog training’, ‘dog training at home’, ‘best dog training at home’. You get the picture. This is AMAZING for boosting your quality score.

There you go. You now have a laser-targeted keyword list ready to target with PPC. Now you can feed these into AdWords. I have been getting CTRs of 10 to 100% on every keyword with clicks in some of my campaigns using this exact formula.

Enjoy.
-John