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…

Read the rest of this post or share it »

I know Paul Hancox.

Paul is a fanat­i­cal tester. He’s also an excel­lent copywriter.

But what you may not know is that Paul is also the cre­ator of the very first split-​​testing soft­ware I’ve ever used. We’re talk­ing, um, circa 1999, I believe. It was called “Sales Page Mas­ter Pro.” (Paul has a new ver­sion out now.)

Well, another copy­writer, Paul Myers, rec­om­mended this new “report” writ­ten by Paul Han­cox. I snatched it up in a heart­beat. I did because the sim­ple title piqued my curios­ity. In it you dis­cover how to raise the con­ver­sion rate of any piece of online copy you write.

Not to 2% or 3%. Not even to 5%.

It shows you how to boost your con­ver­sion rate…

Read the rest of this post or share it »

Want to upload and share your video on sites like YouTube, Revver, Meta­Cafe, Google Video, and more, but it’s too cum­ber­some since you have to log into each one and upload mul­ti­ple times?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do it all in just one step?

Recently, I stum­bled upon a free — yes, free! — video sub­mis­sion ser­vice, which allows for auto­mated sub­mis­sion of your video to not one, not two or three, but to all the 12 big video sites all at once — includ­ing YouTube, MySpace, Meta­Cafe, Revver, Google Video, AOL, Yahoo!, and more.

Plus, there’s no setup, and it’s free to boot! It’s…

Read the rest of this post or share it »

I often get made fun of for this, but one of my favorite movies of all time is “Signs,” directed by M. Night Shya­malan. Why do I like it so much?

Prob­a­bly because it shares many char­ac­ter­is­tics with Alfred Hitch­cock films. (Hitch­cock is my favorite direc­tor of all time.) But it’s also a bit funny, a bit scary, a bit emo­tional, and very sus­pense­ful. The premise is an alien inva­sion, but the plot is really about a min­is­ter regain­ing his faith.

Talk about some­thing for everyone!

That brings up a good ques­tion. How do you adver­tise a film that has some­thing for every­one? Do you try to appeal to every­one? Or do you choose the most prof­itable seg­ment of the market?

Read the rest of this post or share it »

Some peo­ple have asked what Web 2.0 tools do I use. Now, that ques­tion is two-​​sided. One is, what tools do I use with my copy? And the answer is, “not many.” I do use a few, and I’m test­ing a lot more, too.

Other than video and graph­ics, such as using YouTube​.com and Flickr​.com, which are the most pop­u­lar but not really impor­tant when you have your own ded­i­cated server like I do, there are some tools to allow my web­sites to be a lit­tle more interactive.

(If you remem­ber from my report, The Death of The Saleslet­ter,” I talk about the rise in “sam­pli­fi­ca­tion.” If there are any tools that I would pre­fer, other than video and audio, they would cer­tainly be those that helped to give my read­ers more proof, and to make their buy­ing expe­ri­ences eas­ier and more secure.)

I will blog about those once I get more sta­tis­tics to share with you.

But the sec­ond part of that ques­tion is, when it comes to run­ning my busi­ness, there are a few Web 2.0 tools and ser­vices that have helped my life quite tremen­dously. Here’s a list of some of them.

Read the rest of this post or share it »

Just a quick message.

I’m going to post a new arti­cle later this after­noon. But I real­ize that some­times I don’t broad­cast an email notice to you. Either I sim­ply for­get, or I don’t have the time.

The RSS-​​to-​​email noti­fi­ca­tion is still being upgraded, so until then, the only way to make sure you’re noti­fied of any new blog posts is to sub­scribe to my RSS feed.

RSS feeds allow you to add the blog to your favorite RSS reader (like Feed­De­mon, News­ga­tor, etc), or start page (Page­Flakes, NetVibes, YahooWeb, Google Reader, etc).

I highly rec­om­mend that you add my feed.

Read the rest of this post or share it »

Nowa­days, it’s no longer a choice between the A and B piles. It’s no longer a choice between hun­dreds of sta­tions or chan­nels. It’s a choice between mil­lions if not bil­lions of options called “websites.”

But there’s some­thing else.

The Inter­net has mul­ti­plied not only the num­ber of options but also the num­ber of choices, too! (If you want a hint, think of those choices as “applications.”)

From mil­lions of web pages (as opposed to just hun­dreds of direct mail pieces, TV chan­nels or radio sta­tions), to var­i­ous deliv­ery meth­ods for each one (e.g., text, audio and video), to addi­tional appli­ca­tions that equally demand atten­tion (on the web as well as on a com­puter desk­top), a user’s choices have there­fore become expo­nen­tially more complex.

Read the rest of this post or share it »