Make More Money From Your Ideas

"I have found long sales letters to be very effective in some of my public course promotions. What do you think of the website essentially being a highly persuasive, long sales letter addressed directly to the conference organiser from me the speaker?"

Yes, yes, yes.

In fact, I highly recommend it, though I have trouble convincing many speakers of their value because they think it's too long, too boring and too tacky. But if you've already got experience in writing them, great - go for it!

Labels: copywriting, sales letter

"I am trying to encourage more people to subscribe to my newsletter. I would like to offer a free report to everyone who subscribes through the website. The report would be "7 easy ways to improve xxx" or some such."

A free report is an excellent idea. I suggest using the opposite psychology - e.g. "7 dumb things that people do to wreck xxx... and how to avoid them". I think you'll get more responses that way.

Also consider some of these ideas:

• Offer an incentive for people to refer others - e.g. another free e-book. I do this with my newsletter.
  
• Consider giving away the reprint rights to the e-book, like I do with my "Seven Fatal Mistakes" e-book. That allows people to distribute it to their own network, which brings more people to your site.
  
• List your e-book on Web sites that list e-books (Search Google for ebook directories). This is a good reason for calling it an e-book rather than a report.
  
• Submit your articles to other Web sites, including a short bio at the bottom, including a Web site link. This is time-consuming, but probably has the best chance of success. Search Google for article directories - this will give you suitable places to submit your articles.
  

Labels: e-mail newsletter, free products, providing value

"My business has two separate components to it. Is it better to have two separate Web sites, each with their own domain name, or to have one Web site with one domain name?"

This is a difficult question to answer without more information about your business and how it works. However, this is my general rule of thumb:

If the two parts of your business serve totally different markets (i.e. different people), then get two Web sites. If they serve one market, or two markets with a lot of overlap, then get one Web site.

In other words, make your decision based on the people who you would like to attract to the Web site(s). If there's very little overlap between the two markets, then it makes sense to have two Web sites; otherwise, everybody who comes to your site is going to be distracted and confused by the other part of your business. Equally, if there's a lot of overlap, then everybody who comes to your site might be interested in both parts of your business.

Remember that this is only a rule of thumb, and your mileage might vary!

You can always find exceptions to the rule. For example, many top Internet marketers believe that you should have one Web site for each product you sell, even if you're selling them to the same market. And other Web site owners prefer to have a single Web site for everything they do, with clear pointers on the home page to direct different people to different parts of the site.

(See, I told you this was a difficult question!)

Labels: niche marketing

"I thought the video of you demonstrating how to add search engine tags was great. How did you do that?"

I use a program called Camtasia Studio, which takes videos of your computer screen in action. You speak into a microphone, which records your voice, while you're doing stuff on your PC screen.

Camtasia Studio is available here.

Labels: multimedia, product creation, video

"I received an e-mail from somebody who promised to get me a top 10 listing in the search engines. Is this a good deal?"

Probably not.

Most of this e-mail is spam, and if the company is resorting to spamming YOU, they will probably use spam when they promote you as well, and that's bad.

If search engine marketing is important to you, then you require help from a company that specialises in this area. I highly recommend Ed Keay-Smith of Adwords Marketing, who is Australia's leading expert on Google AdWords and other search engine marketing techniques.

Labels: search engine listings

By far the best thing you can do is to put your main key words and phrases in the "title" tag of your page. This can dramatically improve your search engine rankings, especially if you're not doing this already.

Every page should have a title that is appropriate for the content of that page. So most pages will have different titles, but that doesn't HAVE to be the case - it depends on the page content.

This is just one of the tools for getting free traffic.

Click here for a free tutorial on this topic.

Labels: search engine listings

"What software do you use to create e-book covers?"

We use www.ecovergenerator.com to create e-book covers.

Labels: e-books

"If I were to add four or five META Keywords to a page of my website, how should the words be displayed or separated (eg on a single line separated by commas, or or separate lines for each Key word). And how many key words can I use for a page?"

It doesn't seem to matter much; however, the conventional wisdom
is to have them on a single line separated by commas. The most common advice for length seems to be 100-150 characters (Note: This is characters, not words!)

Having said this, most search engines nowadays do NOT consider META keywords as important. It's just too easy to put in keywords that are unrelated to the page content, so the search engines tend to ignore the keywords and just look at the page content instead.

So you're better off using your keywords in the title, sub-headings and text of the page (in that order).

Labels: search engine listings

"I now have two ebooks. My first thought was to offer a special bonus to anyone who purchased the book, say, within the first two months – as an incentive. I was talked out of it – ‘why give away something for free?’. I then thought ‘what if I offer the two books at a slightly reduced price’? Again, I was talked out it, this time
citing it as being unfair to those who had already purchased the first book.

I’m in two minds about bonuses. Do buyers ever get cross about missing out on bonuses because they purchased at the wrong time?

I would love to boost my sales, but I also don’t want to lose customers because they’ve missed out because either they’ve already purchased the first book, or the bonus wasn’t applicable at the time."

You do ask some very good questions, and even the fact that you're asking them puts you ahead of most other people I know.

You asked whether buyers ever get cross about missing out on bonuses. Yes, I think this does happen, but not often. After all, if you go into a shop in February, you don't expect to buy at those post-Christmas sale prices.

My policy has always been to honour the bonus if it's only a day or two after the deadline, but not after that. I think people are OK with that, as long as you give them a good reason for offering the bonus - e.g. it's a special Christmas offer, or a
small publishing run (but that doesn't work with e-books!), a personal goal that you've set yourself, or even just to say that it's a marketing experiment you're conducting for a limited time.

You do have to be careful not to upset your existing customers. My policy is always to make sure that anything I offer is AT LEAST AS GOOD OR BETTER for past customers than for new customers. So, in your example, you could definitely offer the two books as a bundle, as long as past customers could buy the second book by itself at a reduced price. Or they buy the second book at full price but get a $500 phone coaching session with you. Or whatever.

Overall, I'm in favour of bonuses. Yes, you're giving something away free, but it can lead to an increase in sales. The only real way to find out is to test it.

A bonus is almost always better for you than a discount. For example, if you give a $10 bonus report to people who buy both books together, that report won't cost you much (or nothing at all, if you send it electronically). But if you drop the price by $10, that's $10 in cold, hard cash that you now have to make up elsewhere. On the other hand, some people ARE price-sensitive, so again you have to test both options to find out what works best for you.

Labels: sales conversion

"I'd like to give away an e-book to people who sign up for a consulting session, and I'd also like to give them permission to distribute it to their friends. What is the best way to do this?"

If you're giving away "reprint rights", you just have to make sure that it's "re-sold" properly. I suggest you say that it can be give away free, but if it's sold the MINIMUM price is $97 (or whatever retail price you put on it). That way, you allow them to share it with their database without having $19.95 copies floating around.

I suggest you also put a value on the reprint rights. A common figure I've seen is 10 times the retail price - e.g. $970 on a $97 product.

Labels: e-books, free products, sales conversion

"Check this guy out: www.21stcenturysalestraining.com. It's everything your little heart could desire in a killer sales making website. He's gotta be making the bucks. I'd love to know. However he conflicts with design. He looks home made and crummy doesn't he, or doesn't that matter?"

No, it doesn't matter FOR HIM. He's building a single-page Web site with a single-minded purpose: To sell his product. That's it. He's not worried about branding, reputation as a speaker, pandering to
bureaus, etc. He doesn't even care about flogging other products (for all we know, he could have thousands). Instead, he's focussed on a carefully crafted, highly motivating direct mail sales letter.

You could do the same if you choose. It's not part of your Web site (though you put it on the same Web server as the rest of your site); it's a completely independent sales letter page. The key is in the words, not the design. In other words, you use a compelling headline, magnify the problem, offer the benefits of your solution, quantify the features, offer tons of bonuses, add a time-limited offer, provide a rock-solid money-back guarantee, etc.

Labels: copywriting, sales letter

"When guys like you say there are newsletters out there that I can tap into, are they only in the mainstream lines of sales, marketing, leadership, motivation etc., or is there also a plethora of newsletters that I can hook into in my area (music education)?"

You might have to dig deeper than the sales/marketing folk to
find suitable newsletters. However, it also means that there's less competition, so editors will be more willing to print your articles.

Check out ezinesearch.com. I would guess that there are lots of education-related newsletters that might be suitable for you.

Labels: articles, traffic generation

"To have an audio file transcribed does it need to be in mp3 format or will a wav file be acceptable?"

The challenge with wav files is that they tend to be very big, which means that they take a long time to transfer to your transcriber.

For example, I recorded a 1-hour mentoring session today that was 60Mb as a wav file, and only 9Mb when I converted it to MP3. The wav file would take me a couple of hours to upload, even on broadband.

Labels: mp3, outsourcing, writing

"How do I include my various aspects of interest (and potential sale) on one site?"

The best answer: Don't. Use a different site for each and every product. Focus on getting exactly the right customer for that product to that site, and write a compelling sales letter that persuades them to buy.

However, I realise that this might be impractical, especially if you're not planning to spend much time working on your site. If that's the case, it's OK to combine different products on the one site. The way to decide whether to split into multiple sites is to consider whether the products are all serving the same market. If not, then you really do require different sites.

Labels: niche marketing, Web strategy

"I have a site called [Web address suppressed] and I do not have one sale as of yet, what am I doing wrong or should I say what can I do to start making sales on this site? I am already max out and more on any more money that I can spend trying to promote this site."

Ask your site visitors.

The first thing I would do is to create a survey on the site where you ask site visitors for their opinion of the site, and the reason they chose not to buy. This will give you better feedback than anything you'll get from me or any other Internet marketer.

There's an excellent e-book on conducting surveys in my Make More Sales product.

Labels: market research, survey

"How do I create awesome 'subject headlines' that make people WANT to open my message & not send it straight to their Recycle Bin?"

The simple (but unpopular) answer is: Write consistently good information, so that when people see that the e-mail is from you, they will open it. They are more likely to take action based on you rather than your headline.

The reason I say this is unpopular is that many Internet marketers think there's some magic secret that they can use to compel people to take action. Not so. That might have been the case in the past, but Internet users are getting smarter now. Build a relationship with your readers, based on delivering consistently high value.

If you're still keen on writing great headlines, get Make More Sales, which includes an e-book with 350 of the world's best headlines.

Labels: copywriting, e-mail newsletter, providing value