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The Daily Feed Issue #41: How to persuade people to buy on your website

Tuesday, October 5th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #41 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

I’m going to give you a simple tip today that has worked for me and will help you sell more on your blog or website. Here’s a rule of thumb: Long copy sells better than short copy. In other words a page of 600 words talking about your product will sell better than a paragraph of text. This rule applies to low and high cost items, but the effect is stronger for higher cost items. That is why when you respond to a late night infomercial enquiring about the Sleep Number bed they send you a big info packet with about 20 pages of information that includes a DVD. It’s a long copy sales pitch.

There’s an assumption on the Web that you have exactly 2 seconds to sell someone before they click through to the next website. People who only have 2 seconds to spend on your site aren’t going to buy anyway, so forget about them and focus on visitors who do have time.

I’m going to give you a real-world example that caused me to buy something today. Go and take a look at the following website. I don’t have a relationship with this company and I don’t get anything from you visiting them – it’s just a great example of long copy direct marketing.

http://www.bearextender.com/

The entire website is selling a single product. The reason I fell for this sales pitch today is because it has a ton of text. If you click through the tabs at the top you’ll see:

A home page with about 300 words of intro
How it works with around 1000 words of copy, a video and lots of photos
A ton of reviews. This is an important component called Social Proof.
The Buy Now page has yet more copy with more reviews and photos.
And there is of course the accessories and support page.

All of this for a single product. There’s a reason this site reminds you of a 30 minute infomercial: Because this format works and has worked for over 50 years. The medium may be changing to the Web and the graphics and art may be updated, but the strategy is the same.

You’ve probably run across those sites on CNN selling a diet formula, weight loss trick or exercise system. When you click the ad you land on a site that looks like a news site or blog entry. What you’re really doing is reading a long copy direct marketing pitch. I can’t stand those sites either, but take the time to click a few of the ads and examine what the pitch looks like and how it guides you into making a buying decision. You’ll learn a lot.

As I said yesterday, when you’re selling on the web you need to do everything a real-world sales person would do in a real-world sales pitch. That is why longer copy sells more if you’re marketing without physically being there.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO

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The Daily Feed Issue #40: Selling using copy on the Web

Monday, October 4th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #40 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

Last week we chatted about Direct Marketing. On Friday I gave you a history lesson courtesy of legends like Ogilvy and Ben Franklin. Today I’m going to focus on one aspect of Direct Marketing: Selling using Copy.

If you are selling something on a web site, no matter what you’re selling and no matter whether the site has a blog format or a catalog format, you are engaged in Direct Marketing (DM). To be even more specific, you are engaging in either one step or two step direct marketing.

One step DM is used primarily for products with a low to moderate cost. A visitor arrives at your website, you show them your sales pitch and try to get them to buy then and there.

Two step DM is also called Lead Generation. A visitor to your site reads an interesting article or sales pitch and fills in a form to request more info. At that point a sales person may call them or you may start the sales process via email. Higher value items are usually sold this way.

In both styles of DM you are selling someone without being there. This is a very important point. Usually when you buy a car, house, even a magazine subscription a sales person is present. They’ll shake your hand, you’ll see they dress well and have a polished manner about them. You decide you enjoy their company and will give them some of your time. You’ll laugh about the fact that you met your wives in the same city, and so on.

When you’re selling online you can’t be there in person. You have to do everything a sales person would normally do when they’re selling someone in person. The best online direct marketing companies know this and make sure that their website does an excellent job of filling in for a real-world sales person.

It constantly amazes me how few people know this basic principle. The web is filled with sites that show a product, a brief description and a price and expect customers to click the “Buy” button in droves. You need to SELL them.

I’ve said this before and I’ll remind you now: All money is made by someone selling something to someone else. Remember that and realize that your website needs to be the sales guy and you will do well.

Tomorrow I’m going to give you a few ideas on how your website can be a great substitute for a real-world sales team.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Daily Feed Issue #39: Longer edition – Learning from old school direct marketing legends

Friday, October 1st, 2010

Welcome to Issue #39 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

Today’s edition of The Daily Feed is slightly longer than normal, so save it for later reading if you’re in a hurry.

Most of this week I’ve been chatting about AB testing and how it can help you sell more or get more signups on your blog or website. When I started learning about AB testing I read a lot of recently written blog entries and articles on ways to test, how to write effective copy, ideas for great headlines and so on. I was picking up bits and pieces of information and some of them worked, others didn’t.

What I failed to realize is that the field that I was entering has been around for centuries. Since 1744 in fact when Benjamin Franklin invented it (read on to learn more). Not only that, but there are centuries worth of accumulated wisdom that are collected in one place and ripe for the picking if you know where to look.

The field is called Direct Marketing or Direct Response Marketing. Many non-marketing people think of late night infomercials and old school snail mail marketing campaigns when they think of Direct Marketing. Some Madison Avenue ad executives thumb their noses at Direct Marketing. The irony of this is that one of the greatest proponents of Direct Marketing is also the greatest Madison Avenue ad man who ever lived: The late David Ogilvy.

Ogilvy has been an inspiration for me and his ideas have had a direct and very positive impact on the revenue of my company. I’d like you to watch this video of Ogilvy. It’s a very old video, recorded 30 to 40 years ago and Ogilvy is discussing the differences between “general advertising” (Madison Avenue agencies) and Direct Marketers and their approach. Watch the video here.

You should know that the video you just watched inspired me to create The Daily Feed. Many of you will have seen a scratchy old video with an elderly English guy talking about the before times. But a few of you will have recognized the weight and wisdom of this great man’s words: Ogilvy predicted the power of marketing on the Web 20 years before the Web was invented and that measurement would become critical to the success of any ad agency or campaign.

In the video Ogilvy emphasizes measurement and that it is the main reason Direct Marketers are more successful than general advertising agencies. AB testing is one of the forms of measurement that Ogilvy is describing. Measuring which headline, photo or text sold better is what turned Ogilvy and Mather into the most succesful ad agency on Earth.

If you are trying to get visitors to take an action on your website, whether it is to buy something or simply subscribe to your RSS feed, you are engaging in Direct Marketing.

As I mentioned before the field has been around for some time now. Benjamin Franklin was possibly the first direct marketer. He sold scientific and academic books via a mail order campaign. He even included a money back guarantee that read: “Those persons who live remote, by sending their orders and money to B. Franklin may depend on the same justice as if present.”

Now that you know what the field is called – and has been called for some time now, you can start digging into that accumulated wisdom I was telling you about. One of my favorite books is now out of print. It’s called “The Complete Idiots Guide to Direct Marketing”. The book contains some great established Direct Marketing wisdoms. Most current books on direct marketing focus on technology and software. This book was written in the early days of the web and it’s focus is on what gets people to buy (or take action).

Here are a few things I learned from this book and other old school resources on Direct Marketing:

Offers are important. The right offer can increase response rates up to 1000%
Long form sales copy (up to 400 words) will often increase response rates, especially for complex products that need to be explained.
When direct marketing on a website or in any other media, you need to do everything a sales person would normally do. Another reason why longer copy often increases response rates.
Putting a time limit on an offer almost always increases response rates
Premiums or discounts are extremely effective at closing the sale
Not offering a money back guarantee is a mistake and will depress your response rate.
In direct marketing, test results are the only opinion that matters.
The best direct response prospects are those that have previously responded to direct response offers
Successful direct marketing campaigns ask for the order and give people a reason to respond now.
It’s a good idea to do limited marketing tests to see which campaign is the most effective before rolling it out to a larger audience.
The first step in writing successful copy is to get the reader’s attention.
The quickest way to engage the reader in your message is to appeal to self-interest, promise of a big benefit or a revelation of important information.
Back up your claims with proof. Consumers are skeptical and you have to work to get them to believe you.
Write in friendly, conversational language.

Gary Halbert is another late Direct Marketing legend who passed away in 2007. He has written some of the most effective sales copy the world has ever seen. This is one of his most famous ads for a weight loss campaign. You can find the archives of Halbert’s newsletters on this site. Halbert claimed that he once earned $5.2 million from two newsletters.

Now that you know what the field you’re engaged in is called, start poking around used bookstores and the darker dustier corners of the Web and you’ll be surprised what you’ll find. Remember that many of the things that caused people to buy 200 years ago are just as effective today. Technology might change, but people largely remain the same.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Daily Feed Issue #38: What we’ve discovered using AB testing

Thursday, September 30th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #38 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

Yesterday I introduced you to what AB testing is with a very basic example. We are constantly AB testing on Feedjit. Some days we’ll be testing two versions of a headline, other days we’ll vary the body text of a particular page. In all cases we are measuring wether it causes more people to take the action we want them to take. That might be to sign up for a free product, to buy a paid product or to take some other action like clicking a button. Today I’m going to share a few of the things we’ve learned.

Firstly, the word “Free” is incredibly seductive for most people. It instantly grabs their attention. We discovered this about 2 years ago when we launched a paid product but had a link with the word “free” on one of our menus. People would land on the paid product page and instantly click the thing that said “Free”. That was a negative side-effect of using the word.

A positive effect of using the word “Free” is to include it in the pitch for a paid product. For example, “Free 10 day trial” is very effective as a headline. Notice that I’ve put the word at the front of the sentence. If you can incorporate a free offering in your product or service, I recommend you do it and include it in the headline of your pitch.

Another thing we learned is that big buttons with a large surface area will lead to many more people clicking through to the next page and taking the desired action. Most people scan web pages, absorb small chunks of information and then rapidly scan for the next action they’re going to take. If your buttons aren’t huge, people don’t notice them.

Think about when you move your mouse to click a button. As your mouse approaches the button you need to decelerate and stop exactly on that button or link. If the link is small, it takes a lot more effort to move your mouse to that link, position it exactly and click it. People are inherently lazy when they’re online. If they see a tiny link they may not even start to move their mouse because it will take too much effort to position and click. Large buttons take very little effort so they encourage people to move, position and click on them.

The text on the button that takes your users further down your sales funnel matters a lot. It needs to be non-threatening. “Buy this now” makes the user hesitate because they think you’re going to drop them straight into a secure checkout page and before clicking the button they decide whether they’re ready to buy. “See plans and pricing” makes it sound like it’s safe to browse through to the next page. It’s non-threatening and will get more clicks.

Putting text under a button that gives an extra reason to click is a strategy that has worked well for us. You could reinforce a message like “10 day free trial” or let them know about an amazing feature that will ensure they buy.

Tomorrow I’m going to tell you about a few pearls of wisdom I learned from a very old book that is now out of print.

ps: We’re still running our special that gives you an additional 2 Million free impressions with any Feedjit Rush Global Ad.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO

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The Daily Feed Issue #37: AB testing and why it will make you more money

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #37 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

One of the factors that have been critical to our success at Feedjit is AB testing. So what is AB testing and why will it make you more money?

I’m going to start with a very basic example. Lets say you’re selling antique coke bottles. You have a page that displays your inventory. A customer clicks a coke bottle and gets taken to a checkout page. On that page they enter their credit card number and hit submit. The order is placed and you get paid.

Imaging the two pages I’ve described above as a funnel. 1000 people a day land on the first page with the coke bottles. A certain percentage click through to the checkout page. And a percentage of those enter their credit card and buy from you. Here’s what it looks like:

1000 people arrive on product page —10% click through—>100 people on checkout page —-10% buy—> 10 people bought.

In the above illustration, if your browser hasn’t mangled it, you have a 10% click-through rate at each step in your two page funnel. That results in 10 purchases.

If you can increase your clickthrough rate from the product page to the checkout page by 5% that means you get 15 purchases at the end of your funnel.

AB testing lets you put up two unique versions of a page in your funnel and then test which of those pages causes more people to click through to the next step in the process and ultimately buy.

Our site has several products and we carefully monitor what kinds of things cause people to click through to the next step in the funnel and what kinds of things cause them to buy. We’ve made some interesting discoveries that I’ll share with you as the week progresses.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO

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The Daily Feed Issue #36: Feel special with Google

Tuesday, September 28th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #36 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

Today I want to talk about special searches you can do in Google that gives you insight on how Google views your site. Try entering the following commands into the Google search box and replace example.com with your website URL.

site:example.com This will show you all the pages Google has indexed on your site. There are a few variations of this special search:
1. site:example.com/products This will show you the pages indexed in the subdirectory products
2. site:blog.example.com This will show you the pages indexed in the subdomain blog.example.com
3. site:example.com -site:example.com/products (notice the space before the –site) This will show you all the pages indexed in example.com minus the pages indexed in the products subdirectory.
4. site:example.com –site:blog.example.com This will show you all the pages indexed in example.com minus the pages indexed in the subdomain blog.example.com
link:example.com This will show you all the sites linking to your site. Here are some variations of this search:
1. 1. link:example.com/mypage.html Show sites with links to a specific page on your site
  2. link:example.com/products Show sites with links to a subdirectory on your site
  3. link:blog.example.com Show sites with links to a subdomain on your site
cache:example.com This will show you the cached version of your page that is seen when someone clicks the Cached link under your site info in a Google search. At the top of this page Google will tell you when it cached this page as well include a link the text only version of this page. Clicking this link will show you the text only version which is how the Google crawler (Googlebot) sees your page.
related:example.com This will show a list of sites that Google has determined is similar to yours. They use an unknown magic spell to make this decision but do state that the quality of similar sites does not impact your ranking or how your site is indexed.

You can use these searches to keep track of how Google is indexing your site. The site: command shows the total number of pages indexed at the top of the page. You should check this periodically to make sure the number is growing as you add more content and especially that it is not decreasing which indicates a problem.

With the link: command, you can also track the total number at the top to see if more sites are linking to your site. You can see when you create new content, how quickly others link to it by watching the overall number grow for that particular subdirectory or page. And lastly, you can use this command to view some of the top entries to see what others are saying about your site.

We are running a killer special on Feedjit Rush today: Get a free additional 2 Million ad impressions for globally targeted ads. That’s 3 Million ad impressions for the price of 1 Million. Go to the Rush signup page and scroll down for details.

Regards,

Mark Maunder.

Feedjit Founder & CEO

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The Daily Feed Issue #35: Feedjit launches Geo-targeted ads

Monday, September 27th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #35 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

This morning we have a big announcement. A few minutes ago we launched a geo-targeted ad network that lets you run targeted ads on our global network of blogs.

I am excited because it lets many of our customers narrowly target to their exact demographic. For example, last week one of our customers was a Spanish social networking site. You can now select the top 22 Spanish speaking countries with a single click and show your ad in only those countries.

We have included a powerful feature that lets you select pre-defined lists of countries and then manually edit your list. For example, you could select the G20 countries and then add and subtract countries manually. You could also select all countries with over 50% Internet penetration or all countries with Portuguese as a first language.

We launched a test version on Sunday morning and a few of our advertisers discovered the geo-targeting feature and placed ads. One of our bloggers has placed a narrowly targeted ad in India, Kuwait, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The blog entry discusses a Hindi action film and he’s seeing an excellent click-through rate from the relevant target market.

Let me know what you think. As always you can email me at my personal email address mark@feedjit.com. I’d love to hear your impressions and feedback.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO

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The Daily Feed Issue #34: Polar Bears and how to write your own press release

Friday, September 24th, 2010

Welcome to Issue #34 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

We had another day of great ads with Feedjit Rush. There was one ad in particular that caught our eye, posted by Bob McKerrow, a New Zealander and titled “Save the Polar Bear”. Bob’s ad links to his blog which has some great data on the Arctic Ocean. He discusses the latest developments regarding mining and mineral rights in that area and the potential impact it could have. Bob’s blog entry contains a lot of well researched data.

If you would like to help share the message and data that Bob has on his blog, drop us an email when you purchase a Feedjit Rush ad tomorrow and we’ll add the same number of impressions that you bought to Bob’s Polar Bear ad at no extra cost to you.

Now, lets discuss writing your own Press Release.

By far the best book I’ve read on writing news releases is “The Associated Press Guide to News Writing” [Links to a Google search]. It’s an essential read and will give you the guidelines that the best in the business use for writing news and feature releases. Read it cover to cover before you put out your release. It contains a lot of great writing tips that you’ll use even after you’re done your PR campaign.

When you’re writing your news release, the most important component is the headline. You should spend three to five times as much time on the headline as on the body text. It is what news men read to decide if they want to know more.

Start your body text with the date and the city in which the release is written. If the city is confusing because there are multiple locations or you don’t have a location then you can omit the location. The first sentence is your lead and it is almost, but not quite, as important as your headline. The next 2 sentences should expand on your lead.

The body of your news release is simply well presented data that journalists will mash up into an article they can call their own. It needs to be well written and present the facts starting with the most pertinent and interesting first. It should be concise but not choppy or clinical. It should convey data that is worth printing.

Don’t make your press release longer than 400 words. Journalists are busy and they will contact you if the are covering you in detail and need more information.

If you’re a company, include a brief company “bio” at the end of your release.

The absolute best advice I can give you if you’re doing a news release is to read releases from fortune 500 companies. They employ the best copy writers in the world to write their releases. Study the format and style and imitate them freely. Google’s press release archive is a great place to start.

When reading the press release archives of companies, note in particular how they use quotes. Not where the quote is positioned in the release and how it’s incorporated into the copy. Most company news releases I’ve seen include a quote that a journalist can lift verbatim and incorporate into their story. This acquisition announcement by Google is a great example.

That’s it for today. In a future issue I’ll cover how to get your press release out into the wild and covered by journalists.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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The Daily Feed Issue #33: A surprising discovery about what people like

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

Welcome to Issue #33 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

Our Feedjit Rush launch yesterday was incredibly exciting. We’ve had everyone from major universities to gaming companies sign up and send a surge of visitors to their sites. We’ve also learned some surprising things about what kinds of ads generate high click-through rates. Rather than focus on PR today, I want to share one of the surprising things we learned.

We had a number of great ads appear today on Rush. Many of them were clearly written by experienced copyrighters. We saw a lot of variations in font size, font family, italics and so on. But early in the day someone posted an ad that generated a surprisingly high click-through rate.

The ad used simple Arial size 14 text with a bold headline that simply said: “Life is Wonderful”.

The positive message in this ad reminds me of a story Robert Cialdini tells in the book Influence about a car salesman. Every month Joe Girard sends over 13,000 cards to previous customers with a simple message: “I like you”. It may sound corny, but Joe Girard holds the Guinness world record for being the most successful car salesman in history.

It goes to show that people still love a positive message.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder and CEO.

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The Daily Feed Issue #32: Get a Rush of Visitors

Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

Welcome to Issue #32 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page. You can read previous editions of The Daily Feed on our blog but note that posts to our blog are delayed 24 hours or more.

We have a very exciting announcement today. About an hour ago we launched a new product called Feedjit Rush. With Rush you can put a 2 line text ad in the bottom of our popular Live Traffic Feed and have it appear 1 Million times across our global network of blogs. We display your ad as fast as our network allows sending you a Rush of visitors in under 2 hours.

Standard CPM ad pricing for a blog ad would cost between $1,000 and $15,000 for 1 million impressions. At Feedjit we think that’s a little overpriced, so we’re changing the game. For a limited time we’re offering Feedjit Rush for $49 for 1 Million impressions. You won’t find better pricing that targets a global audience of bloggers and blog readers anywhere else.

We’ve also built great features into Feedjit Rush. You can customize the font and the text size of your ad. We also give you a link to a real-time report that shows impressions and clicks as they occur. Feedjit Rush even includes SMS alerts as your ad starts and finishes.

Click here to get 1 Million impressions for $49 and take advantage of this limited time offer.

Because Rush is hot off the press, I’d like your feedback. Please email me personally at mark@feedjit.com with your comments.

Tomorrow I’m going to complete Monday’s post on writing your own press release.

Kind regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

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