“Everything else is overhead if you can’t close the deal.” — Ross Lambert

If I’ve ever coined a phrase worth being quoted, I think that would be it. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve clicked on a link in Adwords only to be taken to an abysmal sales letter; Google, Yahoo, and MSN will happily pocket your pay per click ad money whether you make any sales or not.

I’ve followed internet-based marketing since the dawn of time: I had a technical publishing business on the web way back in early 1996. In the decade since I’ve seen far too many honest, hard-working folks lose a lot of money promoting solid products–including me! Most had to throw in the towel and go back to their cubicles.

It makes me sad. In many of these cases (maybe yours?) the difference between success and failure was undoubtedly an inability to close the sale.

Although sales copy can make or break a fledgling internet marketing business, the difference it can make to an already profitable product is even more astonishing. Small improvements to a good sales letter can have enormous results. Consider this scenario…

Joe Blow created an excellent info product that is well-targeted to a rabid niche market. For the sake of example, let’s say that Joe is an avid golfer who created an e-book with instructional videos. Joe is pretty savvy and knows that e-books alone are a hard sell these days, but add some video and the possibilities become quite dramatic.

Anyway, Joe’s golf instruction is so good he guarantees that customers will take 3 strokes off their average score within the next year or they can get their money back.

Golfers are a well-defined, highly-motivated, generally affluent, and easy-to-find niche market, so Joe is making some decent money already. Let’s look at the numbers.

Joe’s e-book sells for $37. He is promoting it via Adwords at a cost of $0.20 per click. He’s getting 100 clicks per day and is converting 1.5% of the traffic to sales. As those of you who’ve done Adwords know, these are pretty average figures.

Sidebar
Conversion Rate: The percentage of web site visitors that wind up placing an order. If you get 1.5 sales for every 100 visitors, your conversion rate is 1.5%. If you get 4 sales for every 100 visitors, your conversion rate is 4%.

Here’s how it all added up the first month:

Income
Sales (1.5/100 clicks for 30 days = 45 X $37): $1665.00

Expenses
Adwords (30 days * 100 clicks * $0.20 per click): $ 600.00
Web hosting: $ 15.00
Net Profit: $1050.00

Joe’s got a pretty good thing going here, doesn’t he? He should definitely let that Adwords ad run. But guess what? If Joe tweaked his sales letter just a little, he could do a lot better! In fact, look what happens if he converts 2.0% of his traffic to sales, a mere 0.5% increase:

Income
Sales (2.0 per 100 clicks = 60 X $37): $2220.00

Expenses
Adwords (30 days * 100 clicks * $0.20 per click): $ 600.00
Web hosting: $ 15.00
Net Profit: $1605.00

Cowabunga! Joe just increased his net profits by nearly 60%!

Now consider that most master copywriters consider anything less than a 2.5% sales conversion rate to be a failure. These magicians often get 3.0% – 3.5% (or more). Look at what a 3.0% conversion rate does to the bottom line:

Income
Sales (3.0 per 100 clicks = 90 X $37): $3330.00

Expenses
Adwords (30 days * 100 clicks * $0.20 per click): $ 600.00
Web hosting: $ 15.00
Net Profit: $2715.00

The net profit at 3.0%, $2715, is nearly 260% higher than the net profit at 1.5%, $1050.

Improving your sales copy is low risk and has an incredibly high return on investment. I’m amazed at how many internet marketers invest enormous amounts of money in additional advertisements and new product development when simply improving existing sales letters could fatten their bottom line just as much–and with far less risk.

The Opt-in Conundrum: “The money is in the list.”

If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard “The money is in the list”, in the last 10 years, I’d be retired to Maui and wouldn’t be writing this. Still, it is repeated so often because it is true. If you consider the lifetime value of a customer–the sum total of all revenue you’re likely to generate from a long-term relationship with a satisfied customer–it is truly worth it to sacrifice money up-front in order to acquire an “opt-in” (which is when your web site visitor assents to receiving e-mails from you by providing their e-mail address).

Sidebar
Tip-of-the-Day: I strongly recommend you use a double opt-in process. This means that the prospect must not only fill out and submit and HTML form on a web page, but must also “confirm” their subscription by clicking on a link in a confirmation e-mail sent to the address on the form.

The double opt-in process shows your respect for your prospect’s privacy. Anyone can fill out an HTML opt-in form for anyone else, but only the actual recipient of the e-mail can confirm that they want continue to receive e-mails from you.

There are many ways to get the opt-in, but they all require a pretty severe interruption to the sales process. The reason is that every mechanism must post the user’s data (usually name and e-mail address) to an external e-mail autoresponder service, which then transitions the user to a different page, often a “thank you” type of page.

There are certainly ways to minimize this disruption. One is to put your form into an IFRAME. The other is to use the new AJAX technologies to post your opt-in form.

The point of raising the “opt-in conundrum” issue is really this: Building an e-mail list is so critically important that you’ve got to make it an integral part of your planning from the very beginning.

If you just try to make one-time sales with a sales letter and do not try to capture e-mail opt-ins, you’re leaving money on the table. In fact, I would argue that you’re leaving most of the money on the table.

Ross Lambert is the Midnight Marketer, the publisher of the Midnight Marketer News. He also created Magic Opt-in
and Ross’s Guide to the Masters of Marketing.

I’ve been expanding my entrepreneurial horizons lately by meeting entrepreneurs in businesses I’d never been exposed to before. I learned that there are many kinds of entrepreneurs and each dances to his own drummer. Some do it the right way while others do it however they dang well please. I have found that their attitude determines the quality of work they do and most likely how long they will stay in business.

Case in point: my eighteen year old daughter, Chelsea, decided that the world would come to a screeching halt if she didn’t get her belly button pierced. Yes, I said, belly button pierced, which to me sounds about as sane as having your head waxed, but I’m told belly button piercing is all the rage, even with girls whose bellies should never be exposed under penalty of law (you know who you are, ladies).

Now I personally don’t see the logic in having holes poked in your body other than those that the good Lord put there in the first place, but according to my daughter, Daddy, all the girls are getting their belly buttons pierced.

To which I replied, If all the girls were having their heads waxed and painted blue would you want to do that, too?

To which she replied, Dad, you’re an idiot. When she switches from Daddy to Dad I know I’m in trouble.

The conversation just went downhill from there and as usual I lost the argument when she used the magic words, Mom said it was OK with her if it was OK with you.

Man, I hate it when the ball is bounced back into my court and I don’t know how to hit it.

So I replied, If your Mom waxed her head and painted it blue…

Now if I’ve learned anything in my life it is this: when Mom says its OK that either mean it’s really OK or it isn’t really OK and she’s putting the bad guy hat on me and I’m supposed to put my foot down and say no. Since her mother wasn’t around to give me hand signals and calling her to verify the story would have meant that I didn’t trust my sweet daughter (so I was told) I had to take her at her word. I gave my blessing to said piercing and wished her well.

Then the kicker came when she said And Mom said you should go with me to have it done.

Now I was with this child when she rode her first bike, when she put on her first pair of skates, when she danced her first dance with a boy (I still hate that kid), and when she bought her first brassiere (that’s a whole other column), but I never thought I would have to hold her hand while she got a loop of surgical steel poked through her belly button. I wasn’t sure I could watch such a thing without doing something violent to the person making my baby uncomfortable, but the duties of the modern father never end.

So off we go to a tattoo/piercing parlor. I have to be honest, I fully expected to walk into a place so dank and dirty that I would have grounds to kibosh this whole belly button piercing thing. To my surprise we walked into a facility that was well decorated and brightly lit, and probably more sterile and professionally run than most hospitals.

We were warmly greeted by a young fellow who was tattooed and pierced like a walking billboard to his industry. He had a thick hoop dangling from his nostrils, which I assume his wife used to hook a rope to and pull him around with, kind of like leading a brightly painted bull. First impressions go both ways: I’m sure he was wondering what this redneck wearing a Hawaiian shirt and torn jeans and cowboy boots was doing in his store.

Then I realized he was an entrepreneur (we can spot each other) and I immediately pulled out my microscope to inspect him and his business. Tattoos and nose hoops aside, he was friendly, knowledgeable, professional, and supportive of his customer’s needs. As I looked around the waiting area I could tell that his business was well-run and designed to make his customers feel confident and comfortable at the same time.

The girl (an employee as equally friendly as her boss) who actually did the piercing was meticulous and thorough and highly trained, and took more time consulting with my daughter than any doctor has ever spent talking to me. She made sure Chelsea and I understood the entire process and the ramifications. Only when she was convinced that Chelsea was satisfied with her choice did the piercing begin.

In the end, Chelsea got her belly button ring and I got my first exposure to an entrepreneur of another kind. Maybe I’ll get my belly button pierced. I’d look good with one of those big old lion head knockers like you see on the doors at church hanging over my belt.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well. Then her mother called….

Tim Knox
Entrepreneur, Author, Speaker, Radio Host
“Check Out Tim’s New Radio Show!”
http://www.timknoxshow.com
Preorder Tim’s New Book:
Everything I Know About Business I Learned From My Mama
http://www.timknox.com/amazon/

A few day ago, while I was surfing the web, I came across to a site: thebillivard.com, I checked a few things and I was able to confirm that it gets a lot of searches per month, from people like us, that are always looking for new ways of making money online. Since now this is a hot topic, to be more specific, the mentioned web site, is having more than one hundred thousand searches a month according to the Yahoo Search Marketing Tool, we can say: not bad at all!

What this web site is, and what is meant for is easy to understand: it is a site were all the people that are interested in making money online go there to find new ideas and services related to the topic, there is no doubt that is a successful site that must be making a lot of money just for delivering to the interested people the right information that are looking for.

The first thing I thought is, why is this web site so successful? If 100 thousand people look for it in a month there must be a reason for this success… well, I think that it is a good idea to group all the resources of such a hot subject, like how to become rich with the Internet market. Consider that the subject is highly on demand and the sites that are about that are doing good, because no matter if you deliver good quality product, now is the moment of the “become rich web sites”.

The variety of sources in thebillvard.com makes the difference, no texts in the web site, just links, is more like a directory, just URLs categorized and you don’t know if what you get is going to be good for you or not, one thing I noticed is that all the web sites listed there are promising great success, it seems a competition on who offers more.

It is organized by Internet marketer, but again, not every Internet expert has the same ethical principle, for example among the famous gurus you may find a Michael Cheney, that as long as he sells, he doesn’t care the quality of what he sells, or Internet experts like Michael Campbell, or Brad Callen that are much more high quality gurus, committed to deliver only quality products. All this important people are not included in thebillivard.com and this fact makes me suspicious.

When you go and navigate a site like that, if you are not kind of a little expert yourself for the Internet market, the chances you have to get ripped of are extremely high, because all the products listed in there, sound really interesting and they are great to sell, this is their forte, so, you have to navigate that site like if you navigate the ocean, with a lot of carful.

I make a living on the Internet and I think I can recognize what can be good for me or what can be useless, but I have to be carful when I visit sites like that, because they know how to make a sale, but let me tell you that finding something appropriate for your level and that can take you a step further to your financial freedom, is a different matter.

Let me give you a quick example of how even a person with some decent experience, can get scammed by a site that was announced in thebillivard.com, to be more accurate was: http://www.immensehits.com. They claim to sell you 10 thousand clicks for just 7.95 dollars, that would be an incredible price to pay the clicks and I obviously didn’t belive it, but I thought, since I wanted to write something about thebillivard.com if I get scammed I can tell everybody about it… Well I was scammed because I haven’t got any click so far, and they say that are delivering the traffic to the indicated web site.

When shopping for a product, or looking for a way to make money online, be sure that they say how the product is going to help you, the formula where I will tell you my secret to make ten thousand a month, but you will understand how just after you pay is not to trust. This is basically thebillivard.com. You may consider it as a heaven or as a hell, just use your best judgment, don’t belive everything they say there.

About Fabio Uncinotti: is an Italian SEO expert, if you want to read more on this subject: Blogging Money Thebillivard.com. To read in Italian go visit his site:
Ottimizzazione Pagine WebInteresting information about optimization.

Click here to get your own unique version of this article.