Reading time: 3 - 4 minutes

A split test of mine recently finished and the conversion rate increased from 2.21% to 3.92% by changing JUST the headline -- but not even the words on the headline... the COLORS!

Imagine that, an additional 14 signups to a "$47 every 2 weeks" membership site -- an extra $1400 monthly passive income -- from such a small change.

Why does this happen?  Why does split testing even work?

I'll tell you why... it's because:

Most People Are Confused About Which Way to Go!

It's the same reason why parking lots have signs that say "lock your doors."  Why airports have signs everywhere you look.  Why you have to put the silly red arrow on squeeze pages and literally TELL them to enter their name and e-mail address.

People are easily distracted, and it's up to you to explain what you want from them.

Think about how many times you see this on the internet in a single day.  When you go to YouTube, it recommends about a billion videos all around you... and you end up clicking on video after video without even realizing.  You end up with a bunch of open tabs... and you end up watching some other YouTuber's video.

Split Call-to-Action!

The days of "putting AdSense ads next to the order button" are gone (good grief), but now "multiple order buttons with payment plans" are all the rage.  Or even worse, "the P.S. with a different URL at the end of the e-mail."

Come on guys, don't give me a choice between four payment buttons.  Don't let me choose between paying it all up front or doing a payment plan -- most of the complaints and refunds come from the payment plan crowd anyway.

But with most people, the craziness doesn't stop after I buy from you.  Even after I paid you money... you're confusing me with the WORST two-letter word ever invented:

"OR!"

You could do this... OR you could do this... more choices.  Don't give me so many choices!

• You've setup your squeeze page, so you can promote it using AdWords... OR you can post on forums... OR you can get joint ventures
• You want a membership site, so you can use aMember for it... OR you can use Wishlist
• Choose one of these three methods of writing a sales letter
• Learn Windows and open up your favorite programs in one of six ways

Are you kidding me?  I have to choose?  Just give me the best way possible!

Even if you HAVE to tell people multiple ways to do something, like with a multi-part course, just give me the easy solution first.  Then tell me what's the "slightly tougher" solution to complete after I've finished the first one.

Do me a favor and stay away from giving me the "top 21 ways" in your training calls.  Instead, reduce it down to 4 or 5 things... you probably struggled coming up with all 21 anyway.

And then position those 4 ways as step 1, step 2, step 3, and step 4... remove the choice.

Today's Question: Are you guilty of the "top 21" syndrome?  How are you going to fix it?  Comment below and tell me... I'm not going to give you a choice, just comment.

Reading time: 3 - 4 minutes

Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) who is worth over 5 billion dollars and is a fantastic speaker, has a unique close that if you try to emulate it, will kill every single webinar pitch and every single sales letter you have.

I'm not a huge Apple fan, but Steve runs an event once a year called MacWorld Expo... you've probably heard of it.  A bunch of geeks go to this event and he shows off all the latest stuff their company has put out.

At the end of the presentation, he stops and says, "Oh yeah, one more thing..." And then reveals something big, like iTunes or the iPod Touch.

That Works Great If All You're After
is Brand Awareness, But...

If you're pitching something in a sales letter, on stage or in a webinar... the only "one more thing" had better be "here's this one extra bonus to get you to buy now."

I've been on far too many webinars where I talk for about an hour straight, give away a bunch of information, then transition into the close and offer the best deal possible... and then the other person presenting asks me, "Is there anything else you want to add?"

No, of course I don't! But sometimes I forget and have "just one more" little tip I want to share with people.  And guess what... people are left with that one little tip in their head, instead of "go here and buy this now."

That "One More Thing" Ruined Your Whole Close!

The point of doing webinars for other people isn't to make friends.  It isn't to fill up someone else's membership site with content created by you.  It's to make money.

If you're doing a webinar for someone else (teaching their list), the best favor you can do for that list owner is to promote your product with THEIR affiliate link.

Otherwise, what's the point? I give away tons of free information on my blog just like you do... and no matter how chicken you are of pitching on a webinar...

If you teach them a little bit of something, and you don't give them a place they can go and buy more of that information, then you're a terrible teacher and you should be ashamed.

So How Do You Avoid the "One More Thing" Problem?

Here's how...

1. If you're interviewing someone, and they've started their pitch (it might be difficult to tell because any decent speaker will very smoothly transition from content to the pitch) then don't talk at all while they're closing.

2. If you happen to share "one more thing" then close one more time. It's okay to close more than once.

3. Have just one call to action at the end of your sales letter or webinar.  Not "also find me on Twitter" or "also call me here" or "also go to my blog" or "also e-mail me here" ... go here now to buy.

You Need to Know When to Stop Talking!

Keep it simple. Have your people do just one thing at the end of your presentation.

Now it's your turn to do just ONE thing.  Do you make this mistakes on your sales letters, in your interviews, or on your webinars?  Or have you at least seen other people do it?  Tell me about it... and tell me how you'll correct it next time.  Comment below and tell me...

Reading time: 6 - 10 minutes

A couple days ago I asked my list if they had a membership site yet... I got 300 responses to that question and I want to share the results with you right now:

• 165 people, or 54.8% own membership software
• Out of that half that owned membership software, 89 people or 53.9% have at least one paying member
  
• Total, those 89 people who had a profitable membership only accounted for 29.6% of the responders

So Strange!

Some of these people paid $197, $297, even 4000 bucks for a membership script but only half of them are doing anything with it.

So let me share with you a couple of reasons that stopped me from creating membership sites (I've created 19 of them in the past 12 months... and only ONE before that time period!)

Excuse #1: It Becomes a Huge Chore You Have to Maintain. That membership site might be fun and exciting when you first get the idea, but what about a week from now?  A month or even a year from now?

That site is going to become a massive time-suck, and you're stuck with it even though you could be working on new projects instead.

Excuse #2: It's Tough to Retain Members. How many magazine subscriptions have you canceled in your lifetime?  Most of them, right?

The same thing happens to subscribers of your membership site.  Maybe you don't provide enough content, or it's not exciting enough for people, or they just quit and it has nothing to do with you.

You can try to fight it by scheduling daily e-mails in your membership and overloading new subscribers with content, so there's no way they can get through all the information and they forget to cancel... but that's kind of mean.

Excuse #3: The Conversion Rates Suck Because It's Monthly. You get a lot of extra objections when trying to sell monthly access.  How easy or hard will it be to cancel?

Will I forget I'm subscribed to your monthly membership?  Is the content going to be just as good 9 months from now as it is today?

Excuse #4: You Have to Create a Lot of Content. Let's face it, you take a big risk when creating a monthly membership site.

It's a big project, it's fun to start but tough to finish.  You might spend 6 months creating the content and another 6 months promoting it, only for it to flop... and guess what, there's a year of your life, gone forever.

Now that I've ruined your day let me drop a bomb that's super-obvious to half of you and super-surprising to the other half...

Membership Sites Don't Have to Be Recurring!

Think about it.  If someone pays you money one time, and your system gives them a username and password to login and get their download, that COUNTS as a membership site!

Between the two of us, Lance and I have been a part of 20 membership sites.  One of those (NicheSeeker), I created in 2006.  The other 19 were made in the past year.

Only 8 of the 20 are actually recurring membership sites.  The rest are things like e-classes, where they pay once and get access to a private blog.

So now that you know a membership site doesn't have to be recurring, what the heck can you do with it?

Solution #1: Bonus Drip. You can offer your regular e-book but then write some extra reports, or create a bonus webinar, even buy up resale rights to related products... drip it out over the course of a week, a month, or a year to keep people coming back.

Help them through the step-by-step parts of your book, or give them reminders... or just keep delivering value a little bit at a time to cut down on refunds.

Solution #2: Collect Testimonials. Because your membership site is setup on a blog, people have the ability to leave comments.

You could ask people for their feedback which you can use to create your next product, or your next bonus, or even work it into an actual testimonial.

Solution #3: Offer a Trial Period. What if you offered the bonuses to your product first... whether those are checklists or extra videos?

People can join your membership for $1 or $4.95 for 7 days to get a little bit of content, then once they rebill for the full amount, they get the downloads including the main product.

If They Cancel, They Are Kicked Out of the Membership...

Lance and I are using a trial period for our "List Copywriting" membership and I'm going to be applying this to some of my one-time payment products.  What's cool about the trial period is you can present a special offer to a specific person's list or a forum, without discounting the price or bonuses at all.

Solution #4: Offer a Payment Plan. This is similar to the trial period, but you let people pay in two or three parts... again, every time they pay, they get access to a little bit more content.

We used to do this all the time with our high-ticket, single payment membership sites for group coaching.  The final price might be $197, so they pay $127 now and $127 later.  Gotta add a little bit of interest so they're more motivated to pay in full right now.

Solution #5: Easy Upsell. Most membership software like Wishlist makes it super easy to add multiple membership levels.

So you could easily package a bunch of your bonuses in one membership level, or make people pay a little bit more per month to be able to download the content (as opposed to streaming it right off the blog).

Just Check a Couple Extra Boxes...

Solution #6: Cut Off Access If They Refund. If you're a product creator then you like doing this.  A couple of our membership sites run for a 6-month period.

If people get through all six months, they have access for life and can come back anytime.  But a minority of people cancel after 3 or 4 months thinking they've got "just about everything" ... but when they cancel, they're cut off.  So lifetime access after they've paid all their payments is a big reason to stick around till the end.

Solution #7: Easy Download and Password Retrieval. I deal with about one request per day from someone saying, "I lost my download link" or "It says my download has expired, can you give me a new link?"

What's cool about having a membership site in WordPress is that WordPress has a built in "lost password" feature.  If one of your customers needs their download, they'll go to your sales letter, see the link to the member's area, and use the lost password to get their login sent to them... they login and grab their download.

Solution #8: Easy to Notify of Changes. Did you improve your book or change that script?  Just upload the file, edit the post... and guess what, most membership software like Wishlist allows you to e-mail the entire user base right from within WordPress.

The thing is...

Even If Your Membership Takes Only One Payment,
It's a Membership!

So when I asked you guys on my e-mail list if you have a membership with at least one paying member... were you telling the truth or were you a liar?

If you're a liar, don't bother commenting below.

If you aren't a liar, tell me the URL to your membership site so I can check it out.

Leave me a comment below please... I'm only letting 100 of you reply.

Reading time: 4 - 6 minutes

Let me tell you about the first product online that got me to pay higher than $100 for the very first time (this was years ago).

He called it a "Because I Can" sale.  Basically the guy put together a huge package with a bunch of his own products, including resale rights.

• This was long before that kind of thing was common!
• JV giveaways didn't exist yet...
• Pitch webinars didn't REALLY exist yet...

He set the start price at $37 and the end price at something like $297, and the sale only ran for about 3 days.  Every few seconds the price would jump up a fraction of a penny.  I waited until it was above $100 before I bought.

Back then I think my highest priced product was $197, and if I sold two copies of it in a week I would be jumping for joy. I might not have had a $1000 launch yet.  I was still full-time in college, rent was only $625 a month (a lot for me at the time).  I didn't have a full time job or any other source of income.

But... I Still Bought!

What got me to buy?  Scarcity!

If you've read copywriting books (I've only read one and a half) they all try to corner you into this idea of "reason why." Why are you selling your product at this price?  Why are you limiting it to this number of copies?

Back in the day when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and the only infoproducts people could sell were cassette tapes, floppy disks, printed manuals, of COURSE you needed a reason-why.

Years ago before there were services like Amazon S3, Kunaki or even GoToWebinar I saw a couple marketers run "scratch and dent" sales. "A couple of my DVD sets fell off the shelf in the closet... the packaging is messed up, but I just checked and the DVDs still play fine.  But I want to get rid of these and that's why they're half price."

The Problem Is...

Once you have digital products all those scratch-and-dent sales, firesales, going out of business sales, overstock sales, blah blah blah... no longer work.  In fact they look cheesy.

Really, you're only limiting it to 100 copies?  Do you have a shortage of electrons on your web site?

In my past launches I have tried all kind of reason-whys.  I've tried, "I don't want to let these secrets out to too many people."  Yeah right.

I tried, "My server can only handle so much bandwidth at a time."  Yeah right.

I even tried, "I'm testing the market at a low introductory price and gathering testimonials."  Which is halfway decent except this has been used so often it's now a cliche.

So what's the real reason to limit the number of buyers, increase the price or set a deadline on the offer... the reason nobody can possibly argue with?

"Because I Can!"

Having no reason, being ballsy and saying I'm limiting the offer "Because I Can" shows you have a lot of confidence in what you're selling and you're sure it will sell out in a short about of time.

If you only let 20 people in and a few weeks later your sales letter still says 17 slots left, it hurts your social proof, doesn't it?  So you'd better sell out.  And even if you fake selling out (which you should never do) then guess what, you can't brag about your big victory without feeling bad about lying.

"Because I Can" selling pisses people off -- but ONLY that group of people who joined your list and bought from you to be your friend.  Not the ones who joined to apply what they learned from you and get more than their investment back.

But everyone else will love you and respect you more for it.

When you stick to your word about closing the offer, they'll know they can't mess around and WAIT next time.

They Have to Buy in Now!

I bought that guy's offer because I'd seen him use similar scarcity offers in the past, and he never let "just a few extra people in."  Ever.

So I started doing that with my low-ticket products.  I started with time based sales (deadline) and was the first person to offer what people eventually called dimesales -- increasing the price after each sale.  Scarcity and social proof combined into one!

The next time you're worried about justifying your price, or justifying any kind of scarcity, just remember -- you're an information marketer and you can.  As long as you're confident about it.

Speaking of scarcity, guess what... I'm limiting the number of comments on this post to 100 comments.  Why?  Because I Can!

So quickly leave a comment below and add your two cents before I close comments on this post forever.  (I did it last time!)

Has "Because I Can" selling made you buy?  Have you offered it before?  Do you think I'm right or wrong about this blog post?  Comment below right now!

Reading time: 3 - 5 minutes

Guess what, I turn 25 years old today.

And the reason people give you birthday presents or even celebrate birthdays is for one reason.

If You Know That Reason...

... Then you can apply it to your e-mails, sales letters, products, everything, and it will increase response better than any 1-click upsell, forced continuity, free CD offer, 100% commission, or whatever goofy marketing fad is going around today.

The real reason you send people thank you cards, celebrate birthdays, buy one time offers... the reason it's 20 times easier to get a girlfriend when you're already dating some other chick is because of scarcity.

Scarcity is probably the ultimate reason you bought your house or car.  You had to make a bid now before someone else did.

Here's a Funny Story...

Lance and I recently ran a webinar course with 15 students who paid $497 each to get in.  Part of the weekly challenges were to run your own webinars.

These were small webinars we only promoted the afternoon before.  The average one had 17 attendees.

But the webinar with the biggest turnout (from Andy Erickson) had 62 people register and 35 people show up. Why?

I made a single post on a forum a few hours before saying we would only let 50 people in.  Nobody knew how to react to it.

Suddenly, They Wanted In!

Just last week I was at a week-long mastermind retreat that requires you to have a certain level of income to join.  Lance was my guest, and he "sort of" wanted in the mastermind, but as soon as he realized he couldn't get in, he REALLY had to get in!

How did I build my list? The exact same way.  I made forum offers over and over again saying: here's the price now, here's the price it will be by this date.  And I stuck to my word.

How do I get so many blog comments? Exact same way.  If I don't get 10 comments, this blog is going to disappear.  Suddenly it's not around forever.

How Can You Add Scarcity to Everything You Do?

It's simple... answer one or all of these questions on your squeeze pages, e-mails and sales letters:

1. Price Justification: What's the reason why the price is so low right now?  (Even if "you" think it's a high price.)
2. Change the Offer: How soon will you change the offer by removing bonuses or de-bundling the package?
3. Price Increase: How long until your product costs twice as much?  (an actual set date)
4. Expiration Date: How long until you close out this offer completely?

... And suddenly, the decision to buy becomes a no-brainer.

I split test stuff all the time and little changes, like the headline or a single word, make all the difference.

Recently I found out adding a SMALL logo to one of my web pages increased sales by 44.4 percent. That test gave me 18 extra sales at $47 even before the split test was over!

On a squeeze page, I increased opt-ins by 20 percent (tested with 97.5% accuracy) by REMOVING the subheadline.

You have a large population of prospects who are "just about" ready for you to push them over the fence. Adding scarcity is the best push you can give them.

It's takeaway selling.  If you don't act soon, you won't get this.

You Create Excitement Just By Saying "No."

The next time you offer anything... a free report, blog post, e-mail newsletter, special report, training course, DVDs, whatever… add an arbitrary number of copies that will be sold, or an arbitrary deadline when you'll take it off the market, and stick to it.

And the real reason why birthdays are so important is because you have a very limited number of them.

What's your favorite scarcity technique?  Comment below with your answer, and oh yeah, wish me happy 25th birthday as well.

Reading time: 2 - 4 minutes

If you already sell products on the internet, and you experience some decent conversions, there are a few simple tactics you can apply to double or sometimes triple your sales.

In this business, increasing your conversion rate even from 1.0% to 1.1% can mean you can bid higher on keywords for more traffic, raise your prices for more profits, or outsource more product creation, article marketing, and video marketing. Anything you can apply that takes less an hour of work, one-time, that nets you can extra $1000 or $2000 per month, has to be worthwhile.

The first and easiest thing you can add to your business is the cross-sell.

Think of Your Selling Process...

You show people a sales letter; they pay, and go to a thank you page. On that thank you page, they download your product or sign up for your membership area. But does the selling stop there ? Take a second to find your biggest competitor. Does he have an affiliate program? If he does, try adding an affiliate link on that thank you page.

Sell people on the affiliate product, saying, "You just bought this product, but if you really want to take advantage of everything it has to offer, you will also purchase this product for the following reasons..." Due to Robert Cialdini's Consistency Principle, people will want to repeat their previous actions. If they just paid you for something, they already have their wallets out and are open to buying from you again.

The next thing you can add to your bottom line is the mailing list.

On your thank you page, allow people to opt-in to a mailing list for updates. When you come out with a new version of your product, or a new product altogether, e-mail these people about it for some repeat sales. Also setup landing pages for AdWords or add opt-in boxes to your blogs to create pre-sell lists and get prospects who are not yet customers, to buy from you.

Finally, the one easy change that will have the biggest impact on your profits is the upsell and one time offer.

When someone clicks on your order button to buy, you could send them to a page that sells them on the deluxe package. You give them a choice between buying the regular version, or the bigger and badder higher priced product.

Let's say you sell a $47 product with a $297 upsell. The $47 product converts at 2% but the $297 upsell converts at 1%. For every 100 visitors, you make $94 on the regular product and $297 on the upsell... you have just increased your profits from $94 to $391... that's more than four times what you made originally!

If you want that extra boost in sales, consider those three tatics: the cross-sell, building a list, and the upsell or one-time-offer.

Reading time: 2 - 3 minutes

Check out this cool e-mail I received from Sherm Cohen, who was a student in Product University 1.0 and the storyboarder for Spongebob Squarepants...

Subject: Thanks for the info in the footer!

Hey Robert...I just bought your 100 Time saving tips...I just wanted you to know that I would not have bought if I hadn't read THIS in your footer info:

"The report you are about to download is completely and originally created by Robert Plank... It's not a PLR product or resale rights product. There's NOTHING remotely like it available anywhere else, online or offline"

I've gotten burned in the past on buying resell products from people I trust, so that info was very helpful.
Hope you're doing well...

--Sherm

Just having that little blurb at the bottom made who knows how many extra sales? I will tell you right now that there is a huge stigma with selling resale rights products.  I'm not ashamed to admit that a while ago, one guy from the Warrior Forum bought into a membership site of mine filled with nothing but Private Label Rights content and one guy hated it so much, he canceled within an hour and posted on a bunch of review sites (Traffic Bad Boys).

With another membership site (IM Productivity Secrets) Lance and I hosted a bunch of webinars and made the recordings available within the private blog.  In between webinar replays, we posted PLR content we had made into video... and one guy quit, telling us if we had only posted the webinar replays, he would have stayed!  But the extra PLR content we threw in there to help members pass the time drove people away.

In these days of Private Label Rights recycling, if you have a product that's 100% original, mention that in the sales letter.  Resale rights and private label rights products are better as:

1. Advertised bonuses.
2. Surprise bonuses.
3. Rewritten into "real" products.
4. Upsells.
5. After-the-sale followup e-mails, if the license allows it.

What's your best tip about differentiating a 100% original product of your versus a resale rights or private label rights product?

Reading time: 2 - 3 minutes

Product creation myth number two is that: writing sales copy is hard.

You know what I'm going to say in response to that, right?

"FALSE!!!"

Just like you, I let sales copy be yet one more excuse not to launch a product.  I didn't have 20 thousand dollars or even a thousand dollars lying around to pay someone to make my site sell, so what was I to do?

My mentor at the time just said... list some bullet points.  And that really is all you have to do.  Choose ten things about your prdouct that people would really like.  What does it teach them that no one else does?  What skill do people walk away with?  How soon do they see results and how dramatic are those results?

Think of ten great things about your product that say great things about it, that don't actually give the chapter titles away.  Then take the strongest bullet point in that list, move it to the top, make it larger, and now you have your headline.

Write a couple of sentences about what the product is... for example, a 22-page e-book about organic gardening.  Mention what bonuses you provide, what guarantee you have and then push people to click that order button.

Following that formula won't give you the best salse letter in the world, but it's a start, and it will sell.  What's important is that you actually did something.  You can work that into a much better sales letter after you join us in the Product University class... but I always prefer to have something to work with.

Michel Fortin, who has promoted a lot of my products, says it really well.  Put out a low-quality sales letter, so you at least have something out there, and then split test it to perfection.  You might even end up with a sales page better than you would have paid for.

So come on, join the Product University class.  Use the money you WOULD have paid a copywriter so you can learn basic copywriting one time and create sales letters over and over again.

p.s. The FINAL product creation myth is coming tomorrow (after you guys leave me 10 comments), so don't miss it!

Reading time: 2 - 3 minutes

Reading time: 3 - 5 minutes

Today's tweak to your sales letter:

Do you have any overused words like "unlimited" ... "lifetime" ... or "fast" in your sales copy?  Those don't get attention because everyone uses words like that.

• If something is unlimited, tell visitors instead they can get "50, 100, even 10,000" of something.
• If something gets unlimited updates, make it 365 days or 1000 days or 10 years of updates.
• If something is fast, tell people your technique works within 5 minutes or 20 minutes, whatever applies.
• If something is easy, share the success rate (percentage), a testimonial, or a case study...

I guess it comes down to the show-not-tell approach!

As Jason Fladlien would say, if you're telling a story about how mean and tough a guy is... don't TELL people about how he's mean and tough.

SHOW them how he weighed 280 pounds, wore a big leather jacket, had a huge beard, and you could hear his Harley Davidson motorcycle coming a mile away... he screeched to a halt in front of your house leaving a thick rubber skid mark... and even today, 7 years later, you can step outside and see the rubber mark still in the street... cracked over the years but still there.

In my last few sales letters, at the very end, I've been saying one or both of these things:

• You can check out my product and get a refund at any time within the first 30 days.  If you're still undecided, try it out for an ADDITIONAL 30 days before deciding if you want to keep it or return and get your money back.  (This language is a lot more specific than the usual "60 day refund" explanation.)
• You get 750 days worth of updates. I used to tell people they get lifetime updates, but everyone says that, so I tried saying 365 days of updates... but that seemed too ordinary, so I made it 750 days of updates.

"Lifetime" is too ambiguous. Is it your lifetime, my lifetime, the lifetime of the product?  (Is it Lifetime: Television For Women... with weekly made-for-TV movies starring Meredith Baxter?)

Does the "lifetime" only count for versions 1.0, 1.1, 1.2, etc... and when I switch the book over to version 2.0, that counts as a different lifetime?  (I'm having Scott Bakula Quantum Leap time travel flashbacks here... "oh boy.")

You have to be different.  Using your own numbers makes you unique. In your headlines, bullet points, offer, guarantee, even your update policy. Remember the movie "There's Something About Mary?"  Harlan Williams says there is a how-to video called 7 Minute Abs ... so his big idea is to create a how-to video called 6 Minute Abs.  "If you aren't satisfied with the first six minutes, we'll throw in an additional minute for free!"

When I told my subscribers that moving my upsell to AFTER the original sale boosted conversions from 2.6% to 5.5% it had a lot more impact than just saying, "It improved conversion rates."

As I close this up, the ultimate irony of today's story is that I didn't split test the "lifetime" versus "750 day" update offer.  There just isn't enough time in the day to split test every little thing.

I'm a sloppy copywriter.  My Fast Food Copywriting method says write it quickly and sloppily... get it out there... then go back later and fix it up.  A really quick and easy patch-job is to remove ambiguity and add imagery... add numbers!

What's your best technique to add specificity to your sales letters?   Comment below to tell me!