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Day 23 - From Traffic To Conversion
By Mike Mindel | August 24, 2007
You can’t manage what you don’t measure. -Dr. Deming
(Actually it’s an incorrect quote from Dr. Deming, but it’s interesting so why he is misquoted).
This content is summarised from Day 23 Training for the Thirty Day Challenge, presented by Ed Dale.
Moving From Traffic to Conversion
We are moving from traffic to todays topic, conversion.
If we have done our traffic work correctly, we should now be getting decent traffic numbers (200 a day). That’s our first challenge.
Some of you may not be getting decent traffic at all. If you haven’t installed Google Analytics or Statcounter, install the TDC Stats Tracker we made available to you yesterday. It’s also able to track the people who are clicking off your page. This is really important.
We Want a Slippery Site
We want people to come to your site, look at your article and want to know more, then get them to click the affiliate link and record that click. The difference between the number of poeple coming to your landing page, and then going from your site to the affiliate sales page is your slipperiness.
The conversion rate is the number of people who arrive at the affiliate sales page (after leaving your quality content) compared to the number of people who buy. If you get 1 in 200 then you’re doing well.
Key Principles
This year we’re going to show you some key principles. We were going to show you how to write copy but this hasn’t worked out so well the last two years. When people with no copy experience used the sales letter templates we provided to write salesletters, they ended up sounding like bad used car salesmen pitches.
But for the purposes of this challenge, you need a solution now. I think the best way to is just to write stories.
The eBay Example
Take this packet of opened pokemon cards.
This auction on ebay (pdf notes also available) was sent to me yesterday on Facebook.
A mum who had six kids, went shopping, the kids tried to sneak a packet of pokemon cards by her. This offended her no end, so she decided to sell them on eBay.
Something which cost about $2-$3 sold on eBay, an opened pack, for $161. Which is pretty extraordinary. Not bad for half an hour’s work.
This is really impressive. Grab that pdf and read through it. That’s how you should aim to write. It’s copywriting perfection. An engaging story where you don’t feel like you are being sold to once. There’s 59,765 who had a look at the auction at the time I (Ed) took this photo.
The trick of it is to not sell. She doesn’t sell once, not once. She just tells a great, engaging story that people will engage with and remember. She came across as a mum, out there, trying to do the best she can.
Fiction Writers Discover eBay
However, I did a little bit of searching and found ‘Fiction Writers Discover eBay‘
A frustrated mother has found an unlikely but potentially lucrative publisher for her short story…
Sound familiar? This is from 2005 and the same eBayer managed to drum up hundreds of dollars for her sons unremarkable, somewhat scuffed baseball by attaching 1,237 words of entertaining drama to the ball’s photograph.
I think the ball went for over $700. At the time they point out here is $0.27 a word for her first draft. Not bad for a fiction writer beginner.
But I suspect this person is a little more experienced than we would have let on. Again, for your edification, I have been able to locate that copy for you thanks to the wonders of Google. This is on this pdf document.
I’ve also found she not so successfully sold a couple of patterns using exactly the same engaging copy.
It is interesting to see the copy she used to sell her knitting patterns, compared to the copy used for selling the baseball and the copy used for the pokemon cards. To me, the difference is the quality of the story, and the depth to which she goes in the story. She goes into more depth in the ones which make more money.
(Here’s the pdf of the pattern copy).
This person is an old hand.
The Kicker
In any story you want a kicker. The unexpected element of this story is this.
After her baseball experience, she figured her family needed a trip to Disneyworld.
‘Here’s my proposal. The winning company pays to send our families to Disney World and all thirteen of us will wear T-shirts with your company name and/or logo on them for the tens days that we’re there,’ says seller dawnm5723.
The bids on this family advertising package deal have gone up to $14,100.00, with 41 bidders and 2 more days to go. If you know anything about ebay, it will get a lot higher. Here’s a thread which shows the seller posting on a forum about the auction and it’s momentum.
It’s very innovative.
Be Brilliant By Not Even Trying
Use your own experience to come up with a story. In the detail there is joy, pleasure and brilliance.
If I get you to try and do copywriting, it will kill you! In the last two challenges, the hardest part is writing the sales letter. We’re not going to use copywriting templates this year. Why bother?
In our testing phase we will write story articles using the guidelines I’m about to give you and let people put them in their own words.
If you can understand these fundamentals you’ll be set for life. You need to develop a love for writing and copy. The internet in 2007 is all about good content. Or get used to talking in front of a microphone and making slides like me (Ed). Dan (Raine) is good at both.
I’ve got about 480 things I could sell on eBay. I (Ed) sell guitars on eBay and I get much more than average because I tell a story around the guitar: where I got it or what funny thing happened.
People say ‘there’s no story, there’s nothing interesting in my…’ Listen there’s always something interesting. I’ve been looking at Speed Reading (we were using ’speed reading free’ throughout the challenge) and there was an amazing story. You could take this so many ways - death row prisoners reading ’speed reading techniques’. This is a real story in the news. Death row inmates learning speed reading to get the most in before…
I’ll pitch em up and let you hit them out of the park.
Speed Reading is not dull when you get news like that.
Why not do a search on YouTube and embed a YouTube video with some copy with your keyword in it as part of some interesting content. People love video.
Made to Stick
This book is astounding.
(Not an affiliate link)
I (Ed) immediately emailed all my mates and told them this is the book to read. For what we’re doing in this world today, this book is the internet bible in my humble opinion.
I initially thought this might contravene Thirty Day Challenge rules by asking you to go out and buy this book. But you guys have libraries. So go to your local library and get them to get this book in so you can read it and borrow it from the libary. If you have got some cash lying round it’s a very good investment. It’s $24.95 and I’m sure you can get it a discount from a bookstore of your choice.
I think I have three copies.
It reminds me of a book called Influence, by Robert B. Cialdini (jaw dropping brilliant) but nowhere near as academic.
Made to Stick is all about why some ideas survive and others die. I immediately thought of the uses for creating content on a daily basis. They actually have a six step guideline for whether a story will stick.
Guidelines For S.U.C.C.E.S
The acronym makes it easy to remember. Yes, I can spell SUCCESS. This is the acronym the book authors use.
Very rarely will get you a story with all six. If you can get one or two then that’s good. These are guidelines. If you don’t try to hardcore sell you can do just as well as the most hardcore used-car salesman out there. Just by being enthusiastic, being informative, telling a good story. People want to learn more and want to find out more. They’ll do it because it’s human nature.
We’re so tuned and sensitive to being sold to because of the thousands of offers being thrown at you all hours of the day and night, that a beautiful little story or anecdote or slice of life is such a breath of fresh air. That copywriter who wrote those eBay articles increased the enjoyment in people’s days right across the world. It went viral it was so good.
Simplicity
Making a story simple is a key part. Breaking things down. In the challenge you’ll notice that I come back to ideas and key concepts again and again and try to break them down as simply as I possibly can.
For the 10% of people who are really quick, this can be quite annoying. They’re saying to themselves ‘I’ve heard this Ed, now move on’. But for the majority of people coming to your sites they need things as simple as possible. If you want to make it memorable and motivate somebody, making it simple is good.
Think about the copy in the pdf’s for the ebay auctions. It’s a really simple concept. It’s a story about a trip to the mall and the kids slipping pokemon cards into the shopping trolly. It’s about a baseball smashing a window and the mum selling it on ebay. Very simple ideas.
Unexpectedness
How do you capture people’s attention and hold it. Going from a shopping excursion where a kid throws something in a trolley (and hasn’t that happened to everyone) to selling it on eBay. It’s unexpected. It’s memorable.
Concreteness
This is one of my favorites. How do you get people to understand your idea and remember it a lot later. People stuff this up because they skip into a lot of detail.
Levels of detail add concreteness and believability. If I say to you estimates of the crowd were around 10,000 people in this particular protest you get a certain level of concreteness. If I say to you there were 8,732 people at that protest notice the reaction in your brain is different. You can’t help it. It engages two different parts of your brain by being accurate, by having that level of detail. The level of detail opens up your brain to believing it’s more accurate data, more concreteness, more detail.
(Mike’s comment: I went to see the Arctic Monkeys for my 34th birthday this July. Brilliant! The crowd that swarmed on the football pitch looked like 20,000 people. But when I saw the 500 plastic toilets and the sea of people 5 rows thick clambering over each other to get into them - I realised it was more like 60,000).
Credibility
How do you get people to believe the whole process and the information. Again, detail is an excellent way to do that. Poeple will ask you how to do that on a blog article. References are a great way of doing it.
E.g. I saw this on a blog is one level. I saw this on blah blah’s blog is another level. I saw this on blah blah’s blog on the 19th makes it more concrete and more believable (see my Arctic Monkeys example above).
You don’t need to go overboard on it but it does help. If you line up all these tips together they all add a bit to the whole.
Emotional
We connected with that eBay mother. There are some people who won’t connect with it at all because they have no concept of what it is like to go shopping with children. I (Ed) can connect, intensely connect. There’s an attachment, an emotional story.
You hear the old adage ‘people buy an emotion and use the facts later, for logic’. So each chance you have to pull an emotional string is going to make that post more memorable. The more memorable, the more likely they are going to click on the link.
Stories
From the time we are fresh out of our mother’s womb we are taught through stories. Our entire growth, our entire learning, right through school is story based. In particular that first seven years. It’s all about stories.
That’s why it’s so impactful when you use stories, anecdotes, little colorful elements in any content that you create. Anytime you can bring in a story is a good thing.
Look at those wonderful eBay auctions. Just brilliant.
Action
- Install the TRACKING - I know you didn’t yesterday! It’s very hard to help without the numbers.
- Use todays lesson and create a new article on another platform (three is ideal, but my preference is four). If you use four different platforms (content holders e.g. blog, wiki, lens) hopefully you will appear four different times in Google. The more you appear the more chance you have of getting traffic.
- Tomorrow - the SECRET to conversion.
Resources
Technorati Tags: day 23 training, thirty day challenge, ed dale, moving from traffic to conversion, traffic, conversion, slippery site, google analytics, statcounter, tdc stats tracker, quality content, ebay, pokemon cards, pdf notes, facebook, fiction writers discover ebay, be brilliant without trying, speed reading on death row, made to stick, influence, robert cialdini, simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotional, stories, install the tracking
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Topics: Daily Summaries |
August 24th, 2007 at 4:59 am
Thanks Mike!
And you know, Ed could actually spell success correctly by adding one more thing . . .
• S - Simplicity
• U - Unexpectedness
• C - Concreteness
• C - Credibility
• E - Emotional
• S - Stories
And the last one -
• S - = Slippery
So - Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotional, Stories = Slippery.
Just what Ed was talking about!
~ Annie
August 24th, 2007 at 10:39 am
Should we really be expecting 200 visitors a day if we have done everything correctly so far?
I think I need to do a little more link building and promotion other than just bookmarking to get to the magic 200 a day visitor mark.
August 24th, 2007 at 11:23 am
I actually had a go at this style of writing ( see Name link) and I think I hit some of the buttons, but perhaps not the slippery one. Anyway, the “made to stick” book has had a lot of publicity and I’m sure there are some whole chapters around as excerpts on the web. Storytelling is also the latest buzz technique in Knowledge Management and practitioner community development as well as marketing. It’s certainly a more satisfying way of generating content than just regurgitating factoids from the research process.
August 24th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
Awesome summary! Thanks Mike, for all of the amazing summaries and additional tips, strategies and insights. Your time and effort is very much appreciated.
August 24th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
I’m playing catch up with the 30 day challenge and your blog is absolutely fabulous. Thank you for your brilliant content–analysis and tips. It would be wonderful if I could read all of the posts in chronological order from the first through to the current challenge day by scrolling down the page instead of backtracking.
I’m not complaining, I am so grateful for your input into the challenge. Is there any way to view it this way or maybe there already is and I don’t know how…
Thanks again.
August 25th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
Just click on the ‘Daily Summaries’ and it will list all the summaries in reverse order.
At the bottom of the page, click previous and it should take you to the first summary.
Then read forwards from there.
-Mike
August 25th, 2007 at 5:34 pm
Re: Daily Summaries
Thanks for fast response. Your input helps a lot. I just read your notes on WordPress agreement and I’m working on deciding where to start new blog; my personal 30 day challenge will start September 1st.
You’re the best; I’ve been recommending this site!
Leigh Anne
August 26th, 2007 at 8:42 am
I also think ‘made to stick’ is an awesome book - and a great read. Definitely must have for anyone interested in selling & marketing
PS Mike great notes as per usual
August 29th, 2007 at 8:28 pm
Once again, immense help, and sincere gratitude for all.
October 20th, 2007 at 6:46 am
Great article. It’s really encouraging.