When you find something on a competitor’s page that you don’t have, test it against your offer. If it increases response, keep it. If not, discard it. You are using the current market place offers to create a test battery of these elements:

• images
• offers
• price scenarios
• calls to action
• bonuses
• lay out
• emotional appeal
• headlines
• storylines
• deliverability options
• service options
• upsell
• downsells
• shipping options
• site searchability
• usability
• color schemes
• navigation
• e-mail capture mechanisms
• free report offerings
• form layout
• communication formats
• telephone display
• product layout
• descriptions of product
• buttons
• button size

If you can see an element on the page, it is something for you to evaluate and possibly test.

There is no reason to ever run out of things to test if you are in a market that has at least a fair amount of competition. By using this thinking and methodology, you will know more about your customer, the competiton and the market.

To learn more on conversion, testing and tracking, visit SEO Rainmaker.

That sets up an expectation in the customer’s mind that your business will be like a McDonald’s, meaning your service and delivery will be process-oriented and consistently meet expectations the first time. If they are a new customer, they have no experience with you; however, they do have experience with the rest of the world and the offers that they are providing. You need to know what offers they are exposed to and what their expectation for service and deliverability.

What can you do to make sure that you offer is not only competitive in the marketplace but superior to the current marketplace offerings? You just have to look.

You can see all of your competitors’ offers. There is no hiding. You can see and do all your competitive analysis within a few minutes of research online.

Here are the steps:

Create your PPC campaign and find the keywords that convert consistently.

Type a keyword into the search engine that you’re advertising on. The top ten websites are your informational and offer competitors, and your SEO competitors.

Next, open all of the pay-per-click ads that are related to that keyword and print out the associated landing pages. These are your lead capture and conversion-to-sale offers.

Now compare and find the common offers that the visitor will see as he or she moves in the marketplace looking for the products and services related to that keyword conversation.

To learn more on conversion, testing and tracking, visit SEO Rainmaker.

Let’s look at the mystery of conversion, better known as online salemanship.

With direct mail or any other offline media, it is very difficult to track what is happening with the sales cycle. You don’t know if the letter was delivered or opened. You don’t know anything until the person picks up the phone and makes an order. On the other hand, if you are using the internet as a communication media you can know a great deal about the visitor as it relates to your sales cycle:

• When they showed up on the site
• What pages they saw
• How long they stayed
• What links they clicked on
• Was the email opened
• What links inside the email were clicked

With all of this information available to the business owner, why aren’t they all tracking and testing their emails and websites?

The answer is simple. If their sites are working and making a profit, then they don’t care. Good enough is good enough. If you are going to maximize your profits, you have to track and test your traffic to see if you can find the proper market, message and media match to begin to make sales. Getting the most profit out of your traffic is called conversion. Plain and simple, it is the process of paying attention to your business.

It is not just a matter of leaving money on the table, it is a matter of good business practices. It only takes a few minutes to go to Google analytics (www.google.com/analytics) and set up an account. It takes another five minutes to put one piece of tracking code on one of your pages to start seeing what your customers are doing at a very basic level. You’ll know where they are coming from and how they are interacting with your site.

Isn’t your business worth knowing about?

With all the technology available for tracking your business, isn’t it time that you stopped guessing and knew for certain what your business was doing?

To learn more on conversion, testing and tracking, visit SEO Rainmaker.

Increase your chances of getting what you want. Define this week’s goals as precisely as possible. Weekly goals? Yes. By mapping out what you want each week, and how you will get there, you will be shocked at how much more you accomplish. After all, this business is all about accomplishment, not about hard work. Anyone can work hard … but not everyone can achieve consistent five-figure monthly draws from their business. Now, I don’t mean gross sales/income, I am referring to what you take home to spend. The first step towards it is goal setting.

Our Challenge: Pick up Pen — Write Out Details.

• Be Explicit – Have you defined your goal clearly enough? A goal that is vague is just words written on paper, there is no passion behind it, thus the chances of attaining it are slim to none.
• Be Focused – Is your goal specific and measurable? How will you know when you’ve accomplished it?
• Be Detailed – Are all your goals stated in the positive, with a specific time when they will be accomplished?

Writing down exactly what you want, and by when, is the first step to success. If you won’t commit to writing them down, you’ll never do what it takes to reach your goals. Review the welcome PDF (available in the back office) and pay attention to the goal setting and business journal sections.

Writing your goals in exquisite detail helps define them in your mind — and provides the exact specifications for what you want to accomplish. Writing your goals down with a pen and paper instead of an electronic version provides more of a tie with your brain. I have said it before, and I will say it again, something magical happens with the mind when you have a pen in your hand instead of a keyboard. Try it, you may have the same results.

Remember, the more desirable qualities you add to the goal, the greater will be your satisfaction when you attain it. Be sure to write SMART goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Tangible — and don’t forget a target date. (Because the difference between a dream and a goal is a date!)

‘Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend.’ ~ Laertius Diogenes 

A lack of commitment suggests you need to take more time to better define your goals — and write them into your calendar and daily To-Do list. Lacking the commitment to be more precise, your goals are really nothing more than ambiguous possibilities. With no specific targets in sight, it’s impossible to determine what you need to do next. When you fail to commit to a deadline in your calendar, some goals inevitably get cast aside for other things. And given that life in general — and everyone you work with in particular — always has some kind of time-critical deadlines, your ‘non-urgent,’ ‘non-defined’ goals tend to get pushed off your schedule forever.

There is no way you can achieve your goals if they are not clear. Negatives like ‘Vague, Uncertain and Uncommitted’ start to take their toll on your performance — quickly moving you away from the success you want.

Success is within you. Setting goals gets you into the habit of thinking "accomplishment based" in your business, instead of "work based." Accomplishing your most important tasks each day leads you to success. Accomplishing "non critical" tasks with no goals, leads you in circles and invites frustration.

End your frustration. Set your goals. Concentrate on accomplishing what is most vital. Relish in your new success!

Scientists call this "inattentive blindness." It happens because we have a limited ability to absorb and remember detail when our brains are overloaded with information. This commonly happens with any owner of a business, large or small.

What are you not seeing in your business? Find out at the SEO Rainmaker event Memorial Day Weekend.

His advice?

"Don’t Immediately Take the First Offer."

Here’s a quote from his book, "How to Get to the Top" and I’ll tell you what is wrong with it.

"If you are selling a building for $200,000, and the buyer offers $180,000, make a counter at, say, $192,000, even if you would jump at the original offer. If you accept the $180,000 and don’t counter, the buyer will think that he or she should have offered $170,000."

There are just so many things wrong with this advice, allow me to break them down in simple terms.

1) If you want to sell something and an offer comes in within the "range’ that you want to sell it you do. No need to counter, because countering can cause issues with the transaction, stress, and a fallen through deal.

2) If the seller thinks they could have acquired the building for $170,000 who cares? They are commited to buying the property for the amount agreed. This is a "non-issue" in my book.

3) My grandfather, Golden K. Driggs, thought countering is often childish, and if countering is needed, neither party is really worth dealing with.

Here is my issue with countering. It is often done in a very childish manner. The person countering is basically trying to do one thing and one thing only, to "win". And what often times happens is, they lose.

I’ll give you an example. When we made an offer on the house in North Carolina where we presently live, we offered MORE than what the sellers wanted. Our real estate agents thought we were crazy, "No, you don’t know how this works, you should offer at least $30,000 less."

My response?

It was pretty simple. This was the 42nd house we had seen. Our flight was leaving tomorrow. I didn’t want to look at another house, this was the one we wanted – hands down. I didn’t want the stress of flying back home wondering if they were going to accept the offer. I hate stress.

The result?

The offer was accepted immediately and the sellers were so happy how easy the transaction was they ended up leaving a lot of furniture in the house which helped the "move in" that much easier and stress free.

Bonus Gossip

I learned several months later that a couple had seen the house a few days before and was getting ready to put an offer on the house for $10,000 below the asking price. Had we come in lower, the sellers may have countered themselves, or they may have rejected it outright due to the new offer.

If you know what you want – get it. Be a Rainmaker.    

If you have a website that is supposed to make money, one of the most important activities that you can do is tracking.

Tracking is an electronic way of tagging the people who visit your website. Testing is an electronic way of showing the visitors on your website different versions of your website. Think of it this way. As someone comes into your online store, you greet them.

As you welcome them into the store you place a sticker on them that first counts them and lets you know that they are in the store. As the visitor walks around the store the sticker allows you to see where they are and what they are doing. That is all tracking is.

Testing is a matter of showing the visitors different displays, depending on when they come into the store. Look at it as though your visitors are standing in line waiting to get into the store. One enters via the right-hand door and the next enters through the left. Both are tagged and counted before they go into either door. This “right, left, right, left” continues with the other people who are in line.

Then you just wait to see if the people going into the right door buy more than the people who went into the left door.

If you are not tracking, you really don’t have an idea about what is going on at your website.

How will you know if what you are doing is working? Without tracking, you are hoping that what you are doing is working and you are hoping that it continues to work. Remember, the first step to testing is tracking, and once you understand tracking, testing is just one step away.

Once you start testing, all you are really doing is asking the market how they would like your website to look, what they would like your website to say and how they would like you to say it.

To learn more about testing and tracking, visit SEO Rainmaker.

This weekend’s gumbo hits an area you may be sick of hearing because it has been discussed in so many forums, conferences, courses, etc. Trust me, this one is different.

The picture to the right is of me and Phillip Kaplan, aka "Pud". He is the originator of the website Fu–edcompany.com (content warning), and a self-made millionaire. He is not only a laugh riot, but extremely intelligent. This picture was taken at the Boston PubCon in April of last year. For some reason, the person taking the picture put her finger over the flash. Nice.

On his advice site Pud.com (content warning) he gave one of the most concise explanations on finding your passion that it is a must share. I will post it in its entirety and then make a brief wrap-up comment.

Hi Pud,

Anne
22 years old
California

Anne, Anne, Anne…

ps – I’m still gonna be a famous heavy metal drummer. just you wait.

It’s Monday morning. Find some place quiet. Get your business journal and watch the sunrise and reflect deep in your mind what your "What" is … and then reach down deep and find your "Why". If you are an affiliate marketer, you will finally find the product or service that is perfect for you to market and success will come to you easier than it ever has. After all, successful affiliate marketing is based on marketing what you love. I am proof to that. Now prove it to yourself.

And you too will say, "Rock on. Thanks Pud!"

Eye tracking has been around for many years and I really never considered the practical nature of this type of measurement. Until, I was able to read this post that put eyetracking into a series of actionable steps that you can use to evaluate and improve your website.

Normally, eyetracking just takes note of where the eyes of the visitor are going. This (to me) is not relevant if you are looking for the action of the “click”. When visitor is clicking, it is obvious that they are looking at what they are clicking. Thus, I dismissed most of the eyetracking studies that were being generated.

That was until this post, which tell exactly what can be done to increase the interactivity and usability of a website. Talk about scientific tracking and web design. This is visitor interaction tracking that breaks the site down even further.

I don’t want pretty pictures. I want action items that can help me to better communicate with my visitors.

Scientific Web Design: 23 Actionable Lessons from Eye-Tracking Studies

Learning how to make the information practical in terms of profitability is what is important to a business. I try to keep that focus so that I don’t get distracted with all the new tools and techniques that are being introduced on a day to day basis.

My rule is: If I don’t know how to use a tool, I leave the tool in place until I have a clear plan and use for the tool.

For more information, visit SEO Rainmaker.

Tracking and analysis are the core of analytics. However, many times as I watch small-to-medium online businesses that are looking to make sales, there are little to no analytics processes in place. Basically, they are not paying attention to their businesses.

It starts with gathering the data to be monitored. Monitoring is equivilent to eyesight. If you can’t see anything, you have no chance of making any moves in a positive and profitable direction.

I am not speaking of the analytics program itself. I am talking about the thinking and the processes that should drive the need for analytics. It is easy enough to install a program like Google Analytics or Clicktracks and then do nothing with the data.

What I am speaking to is putting in an actionable process in place that will use the data to make decisions about the business.

Before the business owner can improve a selling process, he or she needs to define, design and document that process. Then, the tools (i.e., counters) that are required can be put to use. Here is how these steps break down: 

* Define – What should this page do? What is the purpose of this section of the site? What data is needed to show that this section is working?

* Design – Chart your process with a diagram. If you cannot chart it, then it is not real. (www.flowchart.com)

* Document – What are the metrics that are associated with this part of your selling cycle? How will they be measured?

* Data Gathering (Counters) – What tool(s) will gather the required data?

There is no way to improve something that you cannot see. As a process engineer, I know there is always a process and a flowchart in place for every manufacturing process. In fact, the process is designed, examined and dissected into small action loops long before any product is ever produced. Why not the same for business?

The online sales process is very similar to the manufacturing process. If you boil it down you only have:

* Inputs – visitors, content on website

* Processes – customer acquisition

* Process Environment – website, email

* Outputs – conversions

Those four items make up a system. That’s it.

The key is to create thinking that allows you to pay attention to, monitor and track the activity between input and the actual output. Bear in mind, you can make this very complicated if you so desire. Really, though, it is about simply paying attention and monitoring your business.

The gap between the expected and desired output and the actual output is where the opportunity for learning and improvement exists.

Because I am working with companies with smaller data sets and less sophisticated tools, the need to have processes in place is become more critical.

When you have the data, you can assess and act. Without data, you have no basis for action. Without processes, you are inventing, in the moment, with every new transaction. With a process in place you can create a standard operating procedure.

This thinking is not new. Make it real to you so that you are able to think and act with it.

For more information, visit SEO Rainmaker.