200-Proof Marketing

You probably know Testimonials are important and you’ve probably seen how much they’re used in just about every form of Direct Marketing.

But I bet you still don’t understand how powerful they can be and the enormous effect they can have on your conversion rate.

Just watch any Infomercial… The better ones are composed of about 70%-80% Testimonials.

You might remember John Reese’s Relaunch of Traffic Secrets. The sales page was absolutely packed with Testimonials. Over 100 pages worth I think.

So what’s the key to getting the most out of your Testimonials?

First of all… Don’t call them Testimonials in your Copy. Call them Success Stories, Reviews, or anything besides Testimonials.

Testimonial is a dry, boring, and unexciting word. You’ll get better response with one of the alternatives.

Secondly, they’ve got to be interesting and specific.

“Thanks for your book, it really helped me alot”

Short, boring, and undetailed Testimonials like the one above are a waste of space. You want your Testimonials to tell a story, give a lot of detail, and keep the customer interested and excited.

When asking for testimonials, ask your customers to be detailed and if possible put the testimonial in story form.

Maybe even give your customers the option of taking a survey that asks them specific questions like:

In what ways did my product help you?

Tell me, in detail which parts of my product helped you the most.

and so on…

Help the customer write the testimonial you want.

And the last key to a Great Testimonial that will skyrocket sales is….

“Believability”

If your potential customers don’t believe your testimonials, they’re useless.

You want your testimonials to be as believable as possible because the more believable they are, the more they will increase your sales.

How do we make them more believable?

Here are the three easiest ways…

1. Add a picture in the testimonial. The picture can be of the customer, a before and after, or a picture of results achieved.

For example: You sell a book on Quilting and your testimonials show pictures of the Quilts made by your customers.

A picture not only makes the testimonial more believable but it also draws attention to the testimonial.

2. Add Audio to the testimonial. If you let your potential customers listen to the testimonial, it might make it a little more believable.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be the person who wrote the testimonial talking in the audio either. You can hire a couple voice actors if you want to.

3. Video Testimonials… This is quite possibly the future of testimonials because seeing and hearing the person giving the testimonial makes it much more believable.

Do you want an instant increase in sales?

Test adding a couple video testimonials to your sales page and I bet you’ll see your conversion rate increase instantly.

I did a test on one of my Niche websites a few months ago that demonstrated the power of testimonials. It was a new product so there were no testimonials yet, and sales were sluggish. The product was barely profitable.

That is until I got my first testimonial. When I did, I immediately emailed to person asking if they could elaborate and give me a more detailed testimonial as well as a picture if possible.

Almost a week later I got a reply with a testimonial that was about a page long and included a picture of the “results” from using my product.

I featured that testimonial right smack in the middle of my copy(a little toward the top, but below the fold) so it stood out like a Figure Skater in a Hockey Game.

That testimonial more than doubled my conversion rate and made the product a money machine for years to come.

Testimonials are so powerful, that I believe you could sell with nothing more, except a brief benefit driven intro explaining the product and a strong close.

No more body copy, just believable, exciting Testimonials.

So, do yourself a favor and start spending more time on your testimonials. Run a few tests, even something as simple as making them stand out more could easily increase your profits.

Well… It’s not quite free, but from the customer’s perspective it is.

The idea is to offer a product that’s very cheap to create and ship, for Free plus Shipping & Handling.

The catch is that you hide the cost and a small profit in the S&H.

That’s perfectly legal and it’s done all the time. In fact many marketers cover their entire fulfillment cost with their S&H, leaving the full price as pure Contribution To Overhead.

With just a little bit a of thought, I was able to think of quite a few products and markets this could be done with.

The idea has been around for a long time and a lot of marketers use it, but I had never seriously considered it until recently.

To make it worth the effort, you have to move a lot of product and the best way to do that is to target a large, “hungry” market.

Here’s a quick(well it was supposed to be) example…

A well known large market is the diet market.

Creating and popularizing a new diet takes to long so we don’t want to mess with that. Instead we can take advantage of whatever the most popular diet at the time is.

I’m guessing the low carb, high protein diet is still the popular fad diet right now, so let’s think of a product that would help people on that diet.

How about a small book called “10 low carb foods that will curb your carb cravings.”

Craving Carbs is a common complaint for people on that diet so it should appeal to much of our target market.

Next, find a fulfillment company that will print and ship the book for you, so all you have to do is send them the names and addresses of your customers.

You should be able fulfill orders for under $5.00 dollars each.

If you charge 7.95 S&H, that leaves you with $2.95 per order CTO or Contribution to Overhead.

Now write a small ad for your free giveaway. Something that grabs peoples attention, offers them the book for free, and contains some type of limited supply message.

For ordering it would be best to use a 800 number and a website in your ad. You might be able to get away with just the website, but who knows.

Ok… Now you’ve got your product and the ad… The next step would be to find a diet magazine to advertise it in.

Unless you already have a lot of money, you should start with one of the smaller ones that only has a circulation of a couple hundred thousand and work your way up from there.

Just find one that targets your market well and then contact them and ask for a “Rate Card” or “Media Kit.”

Because I don’t want to spend hours researching this, I’ll use “Self Magazine” as an example(I’ld start with a smaller magazine though).

They charge $14,665 for a 1/6 page B&W ad. I know that’s not cheap but they have a circulation of 1,332,782. So your Ad will be exposed to over 1.3 million people.

Because it’s “Free” and because we hopefully wrote a good Ad, we should get a pretty good response.

I don’t want to be over ambitious, so say we get a piddly 0.5% conversion rate. That’s about 6,663 orders which adds up to $19,655.85 in CTO.

We subtract the cost of the ad and we’re left with 4,990.85 in profit.

The truth is, we’ll probably be able to fulfill the product for less than I estimated and the conversion rate will probably be higher than I estimated.

I just like to underestimate things for safety.

I bet your thinking… All that for less than 5 grand a month?

Well not quite, that’s just the first step of many… We can eventually move on to other magazines thus increasing our profit many times over.

But more importantly, we can collect the names and addresses of all the people who order our free booklet.

Then we can create or find another higher priced product, with a much higher profit margin and market it to them by mail.

Let’s say we turn around and send every person that orders our free booklet a sales letter for another product that has a profit margin of $20.00.

It’s much easier to sell to people on the backend than it is on the front, so we should get a much better conversion rate for this list.

Let’s say our second product converts 5%(underestimating again) which gives us 333 orders on the back each month.

We make 20 bucks profit on those orders so that’s an additional $6,660 dollars in profit which brings us to a total profit per month of $11,650.85.

And that’s just one magazine and one cheap backend product.

Do you see the potential here? We not only profit from our first “free” product but we also use it as a Lead Generator for a more expensive backend product.

Then once you have the leads, you can easily sell them more diet related products well into the future.

I should admit that I haven’t tried this yet, but it seems like a good idea so I might give it a try in the future.

Now watch, somebodies going to see this and end up getting rich off my idea…

Oh well… I’ve got more ideas than I do time or motivation.

Failing is part of learning… Heck it’s a crucial part of Success.

Do you have any Ebooks that just wouldn’t sell?

If you’re a Niche Marketer, you almost certainly do. No matter how long you’ve been in this business, you’re still bound to have a few products flop.

When an ebook fails you have 3 options…

1. Forget about it and move on the next ebook product.

2. Try to change your product or copy so it sells.
or…
3. Figure out a way to turn the failure into a profitable asset.

There’s really no excuse for doing #1…

When an ebook fails, you should at least consider trying to improve your targeting and/or your copy so that it will sell. However, some products simple won’t sell no matter what you do.

So if #2 fails… Find a way to turn the failure into an asset.

On the web… Content is one of the main keys to getting traffic. Fortunately you have a book(or many books) full of content just sitting on your hard drive.

Instead of letting your ebook fade away as a forgotten failure, turn it into free web content.

Reformat it however you need to and put it up on a website with Adsense or some other type of ads and now you’ve got a content site that could provide a small income for years to come.

It’s not going to make you rich but it’s certainly better than forgetting about it and doing nothing.

Alright… I know I’ve been MIA from this blog for awhile and that’s pretty common. I’ve got ADD(eventhough I don’t believe there’s any such thing) or maybe I’m just interested in a lot of different things.

Anyways the blame goes to Battle Field 2, which is a addictive online computer game. Well that and about 10 other things.

After doing some thinking about my websites(which ones to keep and which ones to let expire), I’ve decided to change the whole way this site works.

I’m going to start giving away much of the software I’ve written. Some of it will be helpful to all marketers, and some of it will only be helpful to marketers who are at least average with PHP.

If you do know PHP you’re in luck because you can use some of the scripts I’m giving away to make your own software to sell or offer as a bonus.

The first step was to put a Statistical Significance Calculator on this website for other marketers to use.

It should be one of the most important tools used by any Marketer. Whether you’re doing Internet Marketing, Direct Mail, Magazine, or even Infomercials.

The key to making any Marketing business more profitable is testing, and testing is worthless if you can’t trust your test results.

So take a look over on the right side of this webpage and you’ll see a link to the new Calculator.