(Series) – Just an Update on Everything
Hey Cashtactics.net readers! I just wanted to give you an update as to what is going on with the series. I know I haven’t written anything in a while but that’s because there really isn’t anything to write about at this point in time. But I do apologize for not keeping you in the loop sooner. I’ve been in the process for the last week or so moving into a new office building as well as moving in one of my employees and a business partner.
So here is your update to the series.
First thing I did a couple of weeks ago is I put the site together. Not just a bunch of random pages like it was before, but now the site is hooked up and working. The first page you hit is the squeeze page. We used aweber for the autoresponder. After they sign up for aweber they get pushed off to a secret tip. This secret tip should be good enough to keep them coming back for more. At the bottom of the secret tip they are presented with a link to the sales letter.
For this product we used paypal as the payment gateway. If you don’t know how to set that up you can ask in the members forum. I’ll be more than happy to jump in there and help you out. Anyways, after they purchase the product paypal will push them off to a thank you page. This thank you page should only have a little thank you message and another autoresponder form. This form will be for a different mailing list. Not the original list we had people sign up to before. This is how we separate our buyers from the rest of the group. Once they sign up they get pushed on to a page so that they can download their product.
(Series) Building Out Our Site – The Squeeze Page
Before I begin this post I want you all to know that I am now taking two individuals through this case study/series. I will no longer be touching a thing but I will be training these two guys hands on. I flew out to their location in order to give them a basic lesson in HTML. Believe me when I say these guys have absolutely NO experience online!
If you go to http://www.bestgolfswingsecret.com the main page you first hit will be full of links that you can use to navigate your way around the site as it’s being built. We will be rotating between two different squeeze pages to find out which converts the best. After they hit the squeeze they will be taken to a page with the answer (something short yet powerful) and then off to the actual sales letter.
The key to the first page is to entice an individual to sign up to your mailing list. I’m not going to claim to you that I am some squeeze page guru… Trust me I’m not. I like to stick with what works and fortunately for us Perry Belcher and Ryan Deiss have tested plenty of squeeze pages for us. During this case study I will be using one of their squeeze page as my base for a split test. You can check it out by clicking here.
There are several basic elements that have been tried and tested to help boost your squeeze page conversion rates. Here are a list that I know for a fact work… These have been proven time and time again by marketers and have proven to help your conversion rates.
(Series) The Flow of Our New Site
As we go through this series I want you to realize the importance of having a mailing list. There is a huge amount of money in owning your own leads so that you can email to them over and over again. Our goal is to have two lists by the end of this series. The first list is going to be for free loaders. The second list will be our buyers list. The buyers list will be our money maker. Not only will we have sold them our own product, but chances are we will be able to sell them a product that someone else owns to make an affiliate commission.
Below is an image of our overall site flow.
Here are the steps to our site.
- Receive an opt-in for a free ebook or a free course.
- Upsell to a paid course or package – After they optin in they will be redirected to the offer AND the free auto responder series will direct them to the offer.
- Move them over to a buyers list. Once the person has completed their purchase through us we can move them over to a buyers list. This will be a more active list and will be more profitable for us. Our end goal is to move people over to our buyers.
The free auto responder series will have several emails that cover basic advice for our niche of choice. At the end of about 7 emails we’ll give one last hard push to buy the product and if they don’t… we’ll then chances are they aren’t going to pick anything up from us. But they are still good to have on a mailing list so that we can try and market other products to them.
(Series) New Niche and Research
Ok before I begin I went ahead and picked a new niche. “NF” posted this in a comment on the last series post
The Dog training niche has been used extensively by all case studies i have seen and reports, ebooks, etc… It is like the only non-im niche all IM marketers are able to explain.
I think it would be more useful if you chose something else.
This is quite a good point. But let me explain why. It has everything to do with the ease of the market. The dog training niche is what we call an evergreen niche. Meaning you can make money in the niche all year long. Why? Because people don’t stop buying dogs. Golf on the other hand (My new niche choice) is down right now and about to hit an upswing as we get into spring.
That image is the basic graph of all keywords relating to golf. If you notice, at the beginning of the year is the low point. Then throughout the year there is an upswing. This will be good for this case study/series as I start off slow and build the momentum.
About halfway through the year you’ll notice from that graph that there is a sharp decline in searches. I don’t golf so I don’t know what big turn happens around July. I can only make a guess.
I’ve gone ahead and purchased a URL – bestgolfswingsecret.com
You’re more than welcome to follow along in this niche with me. However, it would be nice if you picked your own niche to jump into. I definitely understand. But please respect the fact that I am going to try and make this niche profitable. I only give you the URL so you can see what I am doing with the website as I move along.
(Series) This is what we are going to do.
Basically over the next few weeks I am going to show you how to build a list and how to make money from the beginning.
We’ll build out a complete site and then begin marketing to free sources. While our money is building up for the free sources we will open the doors to PPC advertising, move over to some banners/media buys, and then PPV advertising. Don’t forget the SEO that we will be receiving as well.
So I guess to start out we will need to pick a niche to jump into. I recommend that you watch the 40 minute video on niche research that I set up a few months back.
For the case of this series I am going to use dog training as the niche of choice. So before I jump into anything serious I need to so some research on the niche. What kind of products are out there and what kind of search volume is this getting?
Unfortunately for us Google has removed the sponsored links search so it might be a little more difficult to see what your competition is doing. You can always use the Google external keyword tool to gauge the competition. Make sure you do a good amount of surfing the web to see what kind of product competition there will be for your niche.
Once you have a good understanding of the competition you can begin your plan of attack. So for now I am going to surf some sites and I’ll get back to you in my next post with where I searched and what I found. Till then why don’t you watch that video on niche research and begin to pick a niche. Remember… You can make any niche profitable… It’s just a matter of how you attack it.
Landing Page Tutorial Part 3
Review – Landing Page Tutorial Part 1 and Part 2
Ok people, sorry for the lack of posts the last week or so, things have been busy busy. The private and Free PPC Mentoring section of the forum is alive and well and I will be posting some hot stuff in there this week! I’ve already answered tons of questions that would have taken a lot of trial and error to figure out, so if you haven’t joined our Free PPC Mentoring yet, better hurry. I’ve already talked about finding your targeted demographics and designing your landing pages accordingly. And in part 2 we identified key components in a landing page. In this post I want to cover some basic optimization tips and things you need to continually focus on to improve your landing pages. So let’s begin!
Landing Page Testing and Optimization
Here is a very important tip when you are first about to launch a campaign. You want to create atleast 3-4 different landing page designs. And when I say different, I mean completely different. Each one should have their different colors, header, layout, HEADLINE (the attention grabbing one), different approaches, so instead of saying “Check out these Reviews”, a secondary test would be “The Most Trusted Products are” or whatever creativity you want to put into your market. Try with a picture of your product, try without, try with a video, try without, test it all.
So the Basic Steps Are:
1. Create atleast 3-4 completely different LP designs, with different approaches, colors, looks and headline. (Most of the time you can keep the same body content but it wouldn’t hurt to test different body copy too.)
Landing Page Tutorial Part 2
In Part 1 of this tutorial we went over a few things on market research and understanding your demographics, that not only applies to landing pages but to your entire marketing efforts. A very important step. Glad to see there were some questions asked and many comments made. You can find the Questions & Answers from Part 1 at the end of todays post. Let us jump right in to today’s topics.
Styles of Landing Pages
1. Review Style – Shows and reviews mutliple products in the same niche.
2. Comparison Style – Similar to review style except you go more into detail on the pros and cons of each product and do a cross product comparison.
3. Single Offer Style – Focused on promoting a single offer or product.
4. Multi-Offer Style – Pitching mutliple offers such as a main offer and a complimentary offer, in an attempt to increase EPCs.
5. Testimonial Style – Usually involves a personal testimony (most of the time its a fictional story) but be careful with fake testimonials, the BBB can come and bite you on the butt.
6. Email Opt-in Style – The main purpose is to develop a list of emails that are related to a certain niche or theme for later email distributions that you will send offers to.
Key Elements of Landing Pages
There are a few very important elements to consider when designing a landing page.
1. Color Scheme – Be sure to use coloring that best fits your demographics of people. For example, if you are targeting elderly people, ages 50+ don’t use a lot of colors that blend really easy together. Instead choose more bold colors with better contrast. We all know that with age comes the deterioration of eyesight. Make your landing page easy to read and easy on the eyes for your demographics.
