A recent study found that 65% of online shop­pers are “win­dow shop­pers,” and take on aver­age up to 33 hours to make a pur­chase — often over secu­rity concerns.

Some inter­est­ing find­ings show that most peo­ple who aban­don their shop­ping carts don’t do so permanently.

They tend to return within the first day to com­plete their pur­chase, likely after they had a chance to shop around, review their secu­rity, or prac­tice some due diligence.

Accord­ing to WebProNews who reported on the study, “65% of all shop­pers will wait a day or more to com­plete a pur­chase.” The most notable find­ing was the idea that just increas­ing secu­rity and buyer con­fi­dence can increase con­ver­sion by 11%.

Inter­est­ing, yes. But far from surprising.

In fact, I often tell my clients and stu­dents that, in order to boost sales, you should be a “con­ver­sion con­trar­ian.” In other words, don’t focus on increas­ing con­ver­sions. Not at first, any­way. Instead, you should focus on decreas­ing some­thing else…

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In my cri­tique con­sult­ing ser­vices, I’ve found the most com­mon mis­take clients make is the igno­rance of, or indif­fer­ence to, split-​​testing. Lit­tle do they know this under­uti­lized mar­ket­ing prac­tice can be one of the most profitable.

Split-​​testing is the sim­ple process of split­ting your audi­ence into read­ing two or more ver­sions of your copy — whether it’s your web­site, saleslet­ter, email, etc — to deter­mine which ver­sion pulls the best.

I’m a big fan of test­ing. And I teach it as much as I can, and if my cri­tiques are any indi­ca­tion, I also believe 99% of mar­keters out there do not test at all. It’s a shame, because they’re leav­ing so much money on the table.

I applaud those peo­ple who do test. The prob­lem, how­ever, is that some of them reveal their test results, share their insights, and make claims, which can be a bad thing.

Sure, test results are cool. Per­haps even insight­ful. But some may be mis­in­ter­preted, and doing so also feeds into this lack­adaisi­cal mind­set of those non-​​testers, think­ing that such test results are uni­ver­sally applic­a­ble and there­fore test­ing is unnecessary.

Tak­ing any test result as gospel, with­out val­i­da­tion, can be an expen­sive proposition…

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I love social media. And I love try­ing and test­ing new stuff. If there’s some new social media tool, web­site, or com­mu­nity, I’ll be one of the first ones to try it out.

But there is a limit. And I think we need to be care­ful. Because social media is like a drug. It can become dan­ger­ously addic­tive. It can even kill your business.

Social media seems to be the cur­rent fad. Everybody’s in on it like it’s one big cock­tail party you just don’t want to leave.

But the way social media is cur­rently being touted, hyped up, and used (or should I say, abused), is rem­i­nis­cent of some­thing that hap­pened way back in the 90s.

(I’ll come back to this in a moment.)

Yes­ter­day, I watched a bril­liant video by Loren Feld­man. Feld­man has a tell-​​it-​​like-​​it-​​is style. While he may be blunt and use strong lan­guage to voice his opin­ion, he is never afraid to voice it. Regard­less of what I think of his style, his video res­onated with me.

In it, he drove home an impor­tant point. I believe what he talked about is not only right, but also some­thing we need to real­ize and become wise about before we need­lessly kill our busi­nesses. And that’s ignor­ing the most impor­tant place on the web…

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It seems there’s a flurry these days of Inter­net mar­keters releas­ing “free reports.” (Admit­tedly, I’m just as guilty.)

But there’s one report I highly rec­om­mend you read right now. My good friend, Armand Morin, has just released his free report. In his no-​​nonsense, no-B.S. style, Armand explains how he made mil­lions online.

When I read the first draft, the first thing that came out of my mouth was, “It’s about time!”

(When you read it, you’ll under­stand what I mean.)

For­get the fluff and the pur­ported “secrets” some mar­keters spout. Unlike so many of the “death of” man­i­festos of late, in this 50-​​page report noth­ing is sug­ar­coated. Noth­ing is secret. And more impor­tantly, noth­ing “died.”

Warn­ing! This report con­tains strong lan­guage, obvi­ous truths, and mon­ey­mak­ing strate­gies some might find irri­tat­ing. Even offensive.

If you want to learn how Armand built his multi-​​million dol­lar busi­ness online, or how we quadru­pled our busi­ness using the same strate­gies Armand offers, then you need to down­load this free report and read it.

Click here to grab your free copy of “An Obvi­ous Truth.”

Just a lit­tle note to let you know that I’m in Raleigh, North Car­olina all week, as I’m record­ing a new prod­uct with my friend Armand Morin on blogging.

We lit­er­ally go step by step through the process of set­ting up a blog, adding all the plu­g­ins, tweak­ing it, dri­ving traf­fic to it, and of course, mon­e­tiz­ing it properly.

I will return next week, and have a few new arti­cles for you. In the mean­time, did you check out my coach­ing pro­gram? A few open­ings are left. At least take a moment to read it. There are some great copy lessons in there, too!

(I also added a few extra pic­tures, includ­ing one of me play­ing my new drum­set — like the photo at top of this post, which was taken at my 40th birth­day party gig in a local water­ing hole in Ottawa, Ontario.)

Click here for the com­plete details.

Since we’re get­ting ready to fly to Vegas to speak this week­end, I didn’t want to leave with­out mak­ing a quick post. But with no time to write an arti­cle myself, I decided to spread some link love.

Any­way, here are five of them…

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Well, we finally got it.

After close to ten long months, our wed­ding video arrived. I’ve con­verted it for the web using Flash (it’s small since it’s highly com­pressed — the orig­i­nal was over nine gigabytes!).

I used Cam­ta­sia since the new ver­sion allows you to break a large video into smaller parts, and cre­ates tables of con­tent on the left­hand side.

Click the next video in the list once the cur­rent one finishes.

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