by Todd Brown

While hanging out at the ETR Bootcamp last week I heard a great little “gold nugget” about testing and optimizing your marketing results.

Mary Ellen Tribby, one of the sharpest business women I’ve ever encountered and good friend of our little Strategic Profits crew, was on stage along with the the other expert panelists.  Attendees were lining up at the microphone to grab their few minutes of “consulting time” during the Q&A portion of the event.

Personally, I was in the back of the room checking my email on my iphone.  So, I didn’t hear the exact question posed.  But, the moment I heard Mary Ellen’s answer I perked up. Here’s what she said…

“You want to test the things that scream. Not the things that whisper”

What a great way to articulate the importance of testing the truly impactful things, I thought to myself.

And, it’s totally and completely a savvy point.

Testing and tracking is essential to optimizing your marketing results. In fact, you can’ t improve the results you’re getting without proper testing and tracking. And, that’s really where the beauty of marketing online comes into play.

No matter how poor your results are today, you can always improve what’s happening by optimizing the key areas within your marketing and sales funnel. And, your optimization efforts come from the tests you conduct on the areas within your marketing and sales funnel that can have the biggest impact on the bottom line.

As I explained in our recent Conversion Clinic, when testing to improve conversions, you want to invest your time and attention on the big things. On the things that can have a significant impact on the numbers.

You don’t want to invest your time on minor aspects of your promotion or funnel (i.e. the color of your signature, the font you’re using, words that are bolded or underlined, etc.).

You want to focus on the things that play a massive role in conversions (i.e. the big idea or hook behind your promotion, the headline, the lead, the offer, etc.).

Think of it like this:

If your job was to double, triple, or even quadruple conversions and sales, what would you test? Whatever the answer; go test it.

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*****

MAY 29TH: Special Note From Rich Schefren:

HOLY MOLY… we did it again!

REPLAY #1 – Filled to CAPACITY

REPLAY #2 – Filled to CAPACITY

Just like the first time… we CRUSHED the capacity of the Teleseminar Replay tonight and not only had to have the Teleseminar company add more lines…  but… we actually had to have them immediately schedule a SECOND back-to-back replay at 9PM ET to accommodate all of the marketers who registered!

CRAZY thing is…

We STILL weren’t sure if we’d be able to accommodate everyone who registered.  So, Brian, our resident Chief Operations Officer, was thankfully able to work his magic and convince the Teleseminar company to let us do a desperately needed THIRD REPLAY early this morning May 29th.

ONLY PROBLEM WAS… in the midst of all of the craziness going on with all of these replays, our VP of Marketing posted the WRONG TIME for the replay.

So, to make it up to you, we’ve just decided to give you the AUDIO RECORDING and WORD-FOR-WORD TRANSCRIPT of the entire Teleseminar so you can listen right now, instead of waiting for another replay or something.

>>>> You can GET YOUR FREE RECORDING AND TRANSCRIPT HERE –
CLICK HERE

To Higher Profits,
Rich

P.S. If you were able to get on one of the replays tonight, I’d love hear what was your biggest takeaway from the call.  Share your comments below.

*****

Whew…just trying to catch my breath after a whirlwind past couple of days…

As you may already know, I spent over 2 hours on the phone with a group of friends, business associates, and former coaching clients who are now world famous gurus.

And I’m proud to say that it was an unprecedented call for several different reasons–two of which I saw coming, and one of which was COMPLETELY unexpected.

Let me explain…

First of all, this call was completely the opposite of what most people expect on a teleseminar.

Usually, it’s YOU with the problem and THEM offering a solution, right?

Well, in this case, we made a 180 degree turn–it was THEM with the problem instead of you. And it was my job to find out how they solved it.

My goal in this call was to delve into their biggest issues, going straight to the heart of the matter by simply asking each participant 4 quick questions:

• What was your biggest constraint to your business?
• How did you overcome that?
• What was the quantifiable results of your solution?
• What did you take away from it?

Then I moved on to the next guru in the queue. Which brings me to the second unprecedented occurrence…

A group of this magnitude and million-dollar firepower has never–EVER–been assembled for one call.

Usually, a couple of gurus will tag team on a call. And once in a while you’ll see a third swoop in for a few minutes.

But THIRTEEN? At ONCE?

I mean, take a look at this lineup:

• Mike Filsaime
• Brad Fallon
• Jeff Walker
• Frank Kern
• Willie Crawford
• Joel Comm
• Liz Thompson
• John Carlton
• Yaro Starak
• Tellman Knudsen
• Michael Cheney
• Kevin Hogan

Pretty amazing, isn’t it? But there they were, waiting patiently for their turn to spill their secrets.

And the answers they gave were MIND-BLOWING. For example…

Joel Comm revealed how playing to his strengths took him from a struggling one-man show to almost $10 million a year in profits…

Mike Filsaime talked about taking his $30,000 a month business and multiplying it by tenfold, hitting the $375,000 a month mark in less than a year by making one simple mindset shift (that you can easily implement today)…

Frank Kern recently got over a hump that plopped 2000 new customers into his lap in 65 minutes. And all came from one realization: “Your brain will lie to you.” In the call, Frank hands you the warning signs to know if your brain is helping–or hurting–your business…

Brad Fallon shows us why his past business attempts all ended up going south, and how he discovered the key connection between strategy and execution that helped create not one–but two 8 figures-a-year businesses…

Tellman Knudson had a business plan that was flawed from the start. But once he and I focused on a single change in his strategy, Tellman turned a small coaching program into an $894,600 profit windfall…

Willie Crawford was trying to do everything himself (sound familiar?) and heading towards burnout. But after learning this secret technique, he began adding talented resources–and big time profits…

I floored Yaro Starak with my out-of-the-blue recommendation. But he reluctantly followed my lead and saw an immediate jump in his income. Get the whole story inside…

Fantastic stuff. And there’s MANY more content-rich tidbits where those came from.

But as if that wasn’t enough, now it gets even better…

Because you people decided to trump both of my accomplishments with something that completely took me by surprise.

See, we had scheduled the first call and we filled up those lines in a heartbeat.

“No biggie”, we thought. “We’ll just add a replay for those few hundred entrepreneurs who got shut out.”

Those “few hundred”…seems almost comical to say that now–especially after what transpired next.

To put it bluntly, when the word went out about the replay, the floodgates didn’t just open–they were BLOWN TO BITS.

If you saw my last Twitter post, you know I was up at 3:00 am last night, watching the registrations roll in at an average of 6-10 per minute.

That’s up to 60 a minute, or 3600 an hour. At 3:00 am on a Monday night.

Yeah, that’s what I thought too.

Needless to say, this was not only our biggest call ever…but by far the biggest call in the history of our industry.

But honestly, if it didn’t do a thing for you…if it didn’t help transform your mindset…if it didn’t turn on the light and reveal the ugly, nasty thing that’s holding you back from success…

Then it wasn’t worth a dime.

So with that said, I want to know what you thought about this call….

Tell me everything–and I mean EVERYTHING. I want to know what you learned…when you had that “aha” moment…and how it’s going to change your business.

And if I didn’t deliver, then let me know that too.

Go ahead–fire with both barrels. I can take it.

In fact, feel free to post your comments below so everyone can see. I’ll be monitoring them and chiming in from time to time, and you never know when I might shoot a message right back at you.

Sound good?

Great–thanks for joining me on the call, and I can’t wait to see what your thoughts are…

To Higher Profits,
Rich

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If you read the Attention Age Doctrine 2, then you know how important your reputation is when marketing online.

You need to know what people are saying about you, your products, and your business. Because if you ignore it, things can spin out of control very quickly.

Companies like Kryptonite Locks…AOL…Dell…McDonaald’s…even Wal-Mart learned this the hard way. They saw their reputations tarnished with internet revelations of shoddy workmanship, underhanded marketing techniques, and poor customer service.

These billion dollar corporations paid dearly for their mistakes. (In fact, Kryptonite Locks has never really recovered from their ball-point-pen fiasco.)

But you don’t have to go through all that. In fact, you can monitor every online discussion your market is having about you and your products on a daily basis–starting right now.

…continue reading Who’s Been Talking About You?

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Recently on a Q+A call I was asked – why have so many of the internet marketing gurus switched to macs?

My Answer – Because they can, it’s cooler (power of positioning), and the internet is moving more and more to multimedia and macs are simply superior when it comes to anything multimedia. Oh yeah, and lastly they are the most powerful computers on the market.

Along those lines, I’ve gotten several requests to see my setup so here it. It’s an 8 core processor, with 16 gigs of RAM, and 3 X 30 inch monitors. Perfect for creating presentations!

…continue reading Even Bill Gates Loves Apple?

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It’s late at night and I’m burning the midnight oil. Why? Because I am working on my next report, and it’s shaping up to be my best one yet. It happens everytime… I get so absorbed in my writing that I just click away on my keyboard until I look up – and everyone is gone!

Anyway, during my research I happened to stumble across a really cool new site. It’s SearchMe and it completely changes the way you surf online. I think you’re going to love it.

…continue reading Using Visual Search

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Did you notice?

We installed a favicon.

It’s just one more detail that scores you a few extra points in the credibility index (Can I trust you?)

Do you know what I am talking about?

It’s the little logo you see in the address bar. It’s also shows up  in bookmarks (yep, social ones too!), which means you need to get one right now!

Fortunately you can have one in a few minutes for free:

here’s a copy of ours:

You can create one too! It’s easy… Here’s how:

Go to: favicongenerator 

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Keyword Research

Whether you are an online marketing veteran or a raw rookie, you’ve done your share of keyword research.

Odds are you think you’ve probably seen everything under the sun by now. Maybe you have, but maybe you haven’t thought of this…

Wednesdays are special days for me. It’s the one day a week where I spend between two-to-four hours answering questions from business coaching clients live on the phone.  We usually get a few hundred callers with about 30 to 40 questions.

There’s a lot of great tactics shared in those calls, and it’s an easy way to make sure clients who are confused, challenged or especially motivated are only a phone call away from getting me to focus on their business and their action steps.

On today’s call we got on the topic of offers, and how to tap into what the market was craving. I listed many of the methods I use to determine what’s on the market’s mind, and everyone could see the logic in what I shared, except…

Using Google Trends

What I found fascinating is I took for granted that everyone understood the power of this tool. Apparently not.

It should be no big secret that I’ll be releasing The Attention Age Doctrine Part 2 in a matter of weeks now. One of the areas where I’ll be sharing some incredibly killer tactics is in the social marketing realm.  So I decided to share two screenshots that highlight just one of the uses of Google Trends.

Above and below are graphs of the overall search volume (top) and the news reference volume (below) for the three keywords: (1) social bookmarking, (2) social networking, and (3) blogging.

Do you see what I see?

Well, if you’ve noticed that the trend on the red line (social networking) is really gaining momentum, then you’re paying attention.

This has profound implications if you think about it…

It means if you’re thinking about creating a product in an area that’s hot and growing hotter – social networking is your baby.

or… 

It means if you are going to an SEO program to sell your Web 2.0 course, it would be wise to work on social networking and it’s long tail offspring.

or…

It means a great upsell, bonus, or follow-up offer on an Internet marketing product would be social networking.

I could go on and on, and if it wasn’t late and I wasn’t tired I probably would. But then again I’ve recently been accused of being a little too wordy, so I’ll keep the rest of my examples to myself, and press on.

If you’ve never used Google Trends you can check it out here

Then tell us what you think.

If you’ve used Google Trends before and got information that helped you in your business, please share with us how it helped you.

Time to hit the sack…

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Website visitors…

No matter how many you’ve got, you want more.  To get more you must know your market, your visitors, and your customers cold.

Sadly, most online entrepreneurs know more about their favorite sitcom characters than they do their customers or visitors.

Here’s a painless way to make immediate progress in knowing your site, your visitors, and your market slightly better than you do now.

Last night while surfing, I stumbled onto this nifty little demographics predictor from Microsoft. All you have to do is type in your URL or keyword. (sure beats analyzing analytics – but unfortunately it’s not a replacement.)

Anyway, once you hit "go" immediately you’re greeted with a predicted male-female distribution of your site visitors, and a breakdown by age group.

I wasn’t really shocked by my results, let me know if you are.

You can use the tool here: Microsoft Demographics Predictor 

Also, if you are interested in small little tidbits like this, let me know. My bookmarks are overflowing with lots of cool stuff like this and better.

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