Why Can't Johnny Get Conversion?

I’m usu­ally full of good news. But alas, today I need to share an ugly real­ity with you.

Right this minute, we’re star­ing down the bar­rel of a full blown Con­ver­sion Cri­sis. It used to be “Johnny can’t read,” now it’s “Johnny can’t con­vert.” It’s an epidemic.

I’m not telling you this to start a riot in the vir­tual streets. (Or to make fun of any Johnny.) It just is what it is. And know­ing the rea­son why will help you weather the hur­ri­cane that is the Con­ver­sion Crisis.

Before I dive in, I want to make a pub­lic announcement…

I want to take a moment and thank Michel Fortin for invit­ing me as a guest blog­ger. Michel was one of the ear­li­est influ­ences in my copy­writ­ing career.

I learned so much from his blog, his Copy Doc­tor site and a live event along with Gary Hal­bert, John Carl­ton and Mark Joyner. So I want to pub­licly thank him for help­ing me become a million-​​dollar online copywriter.

Okay, now back to the busi­ness of blogging…

I’ve iden­ti­fied four pow­er­ful forces that form the root of the Con­ver­sion Cri­sis (I call them “The Four Horse­men”), and I want to share one of these with you in this posting.

As the Inter­net grows as a mar­ket­ing medium, it’s rapidly cre­at­ing “Instant Mar­keters” and spit­ting them out when they fail to hit the money-​​zone. Why?

That’s the $20,000 ques­tion. It boils down to two fun­da­men­tal issues. Peo­ple either have prob­lems with:

• A. Gen­er­at­ing Traffic
• B. Get­ting Accept­able Conversion

If you’ve been online for a while, you’ve got a basic under­stand­ing about how to get rel­e­vant traf­fic to your web­site. And, I’m not a traf­fic expert, so I’ll focus on prob­lem “B” because that’s what the con­ver­sion cri­sis is all about.

If you’re like the hordes of peo­ple con­tact­ing me on an almost daily basis, des­per­ate about turn­ing their traf­fic into sales, then pay close atten­tion to what I’m about to tell you.

One of the biggest forces dri­ving the “Four Horse­men” is Mar­ket Sat­u­ra­tion.

What does that mean?

Well, for starters it means more competition.

I’m not telling you you should be afraid of com­pe­ti­tion. In fact, quite the con­trary. If you’re niche mar­ket­ing, that’s one of the things you want to look for. Because if you’re seek­ing your “thirsty crowd,” com­pe­ti­tion is a great sign that there is money to be made.

The prob­lem with Mar­ket Sat­u­ra­tion is the fact that there’s just more mar­ket­ing out there. And the more mar­ket­ing there is, the more mar­ket­ing “noise” clut­ters the eye­balls and ears of your market.

And the prob­lem with more mar­ket­ing noise is our prospects become increas­ingly numb to our mes­sages — because most of them, after a while, sim­ply sound the same. By nature, human beings com­pare almost every­thing. You’ve got to stand out from “me too!” crowd before you can even get someone’s atten­tion, much less sell them.

The only way to come out on top in this envi­ron­ment is to out-​​strategize, out-​​convert and out-​​sell your com­peti­tors and drive them into the dirt. Then, nat­ural selec­tion takes over.

You know this is true. Pic­ture how you make deci­sions right now about who to learn from, and who you avoid. You’re look­ing for the sig­nal amidst all of the noise. You want VALUE. That’s why you come to Michel’s blog in the first place, right? Because he deliv­ers it in spades.

More value means more traction.

The Inter­net is the fastest grow­ing medium in his­tory. No other mass media has grown as fast as it did. News­pa­pers, Radio, and Tele­vi­sion all took decades to pen­e­trate the mass mar­ket, while the Inter­net took less than one.

Accord­ing to a PBS report in 2006, Robert X. Cringely reported Ad sales, view­er­ship and read­er­ship for tra­di­tional media — e.g., tele­vi­sion, mag­a­zines and news­pa­per — are all trend­ing down. (And recent stud­ies show that Inter­net growth is slow­ing down, too.)

But what struck me is when Cringely said, “Tele­vi­sion, radio, tele­phones, even elec­tric­ity grew to about 70 per­cent mar­ket pen­e­tra­tion and stalled until a gen­er­a­tion shift made ubiq­uity pos­si­ble. Each of these indus­tries lit­er­ally had to wait until their non-​​users died.”

Where is Inter­net pen­e­tra­tion now in the US?

Accord­ing to the CIA World Fact­book (2006), roughly 63% of Amer­i­cans are con­nected to the Web. And in the last year, it’s still man­aged to grow. That clearly proves we are near that mag­i­cal 70% fig­ure… and the mar­ket is now offi­cially sat­u­rated. (You can see more evi­dence in my spe­cial report.)

Does that mean we should all pack up out vir­tual bags and look for the next big thing? No, I think not.

But it does mean that mar­keters who want to “make the cut” need to beef up their con­ver­sion skills — or suf­fer the con­se­quences. And the fall­out will be severe for those who fail to heed the warning.

How do you con­quer the Con­ver­sion Crisis?

Well, a great start to insu­lat­ing your online busi­ness is to get sci­en­tific. No, I’m not talk­ing slide rules and pocket pro­tec­tors, I’m talk­ing test­ing.

In fact, I have per­son­ally seen mediocre copy­writ­ers and mar­keters achieve phe­nom­e­nal con­ver­sion rates by sim­ply imple­ment­ing aggres­sive test­ing practices.

And I’m firmly con­vinced that any­one with the desire can do it, too. Only then will you rule the roost in your market.

I was in Invest­ment sales for over a decade, and we had an old saying:

“The Mar­ket Is Always Right.”

When I got into direct response copy­writ­ing, I never imag­ined that tru­ism would carry over into this world. (Oh boy, does it ever.)

And the great­est thing about the the direct response biz is the fact that we can actu­ally ask our mar­ket what would make them buy. We do it through test­ing… and it always gives us the cor­rect answer…

… that is, if we allow it to.

Now I real­ize that many of us are walk­ing around in the “yeah, I already know that” trance. Heck, I’ve been guilty of that myself. So, don’t let this rev­e­la­tion (if you want to call it that) land on you that way.

Do some­thing about it.

Because chances are, either you’re not test­ing at all or, if you are, you may be test­ing the wrong things the wrong way.

It’s never been eas­ier (or cheaper) with some of the test­ing tools avail­able for free (like Google Ana­lyt­ics and Google Web­site Opti­mizer, for instance).

And the dirty lit­tle secret online is that many of the gurus who always tell you to “test, test, test” don’t do it them­selves. (I know this because they want me to cre­ate their ads.) I shud­der to think how much money they were leav­ing on the table before I made them test.

So, get hip to test­ing, let the mar­ket tell you what works, and side-​​step the Con­ver­sion Cri­sis — before it’s too late. For more on this, I encour­age you to down­load my free white paper, “Con­ver­sion Cri­sis,” by click­ing here.

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