Starting A Business

Copywriting Testing Secrets: How To Accurately And Quickly Test And Tweak Your Sales Page

2006-08-25T22:21:00.002-07:00

Writing copy for your sales letter can be a very tedious and nerve wracking experience. There is nothing like the feeling that you just wrote a killer sales letter just to find out that it will not make one single sale.

This is why testing your copy is so important. Testing and tweaking your copy could make the difference between a sales letter that converts at .005% and one that converts at .05%. This may not look like a lot to some people, but if you are familiar with the world of marketing you will know this is a huge difference. Actually the second of the two will pull in ten times more sales for you.

This ultimately means that you are leaving huge sums of cash on the table if you do not optimize your sales letters. But still there are a large amount of marketers that don't even try tweaking their copy to pull in more sales. They simply leave it the way it was originally made hoping that it will start converting for them.

Unfortunately testing your sales letter to the point you are satisfied with it can take weeks if not months. You have to make a change and see if it has improved your conversion. Then you have to repeat this process the whole way through the sales letter changing only one thing at a time until you believe and hope that you hit every troubled spot that is turning your visitors off and causing them to exit the page. There is a lot of guess work involved in this process.

If you don't want to deal with all of the waiting and guess work that goes into this the only thing I can suggest is to check out Intra Trakker. It will cut your testing time down from weeks to virtually over night. But we will assume that you don't have a copy of this software. So instead I will show you an advanced way to manually test your copy.

The first thing you want to do is install a hit counter like what StatCounter offers on your sales copy page that will keep track of how long a visitor stays on any certain page. This is one thing that many people do not do. This will give us a general idea of where we are loosing the reader.

Since this will be your first run the counters information should be zeroed out and we can get a semi accurate estimate of where the readers stopped reading by seeing how long they stayed on the page. Use some sort of PPC site like AdWords or Overture to direct some traffic to your site. This will help speed up the process a little bit.

After you have received about one hundred visitors check and see how long they stayed on the page. Then you need to go and time yourself while reading your sales page. If most people exited your page between 0 seconds and 30 seconds then you focus on the copy just above where you where at about 30 seconds into reading your sales copy. If this happened it is obviously your headline or subhead.

Once you have made a single change to your copy go ahead and reset your counter so it clears the old information out. You have to do this after every change. The information on how long people where visiting your site will be way off. I know it is a pain but you have to do it.

Tip: Never change more than one item on your copy at a time unless it is a blatant error on you part. If you change more than one thing you will not know exactly what was responsible for the change in your conversion.

Now that you know how to check how long your visitors stayed you will not be changing things that are already working in your favor. Many people will jump and change their headline right away when it really was the body or the bullet points that where not working for them.

Most of the times the headline may have been perfectly fine and it was half way through that the sales copy was loosing people. This is another major waste of time when writing copy. It is vital to know where your sales page is loosing the customer.

After you have found the troubled areas in your copy. Make changes one at a time until your copy is like a wet slide that leads customers right down to your order button.

Once you have achieved that you can change little things here and there to get your copy to convert better. Try to make it so you can get as many people as possible to at least read through the whole sales letter and then try harder to get more people to buy. As long as you keep at it you will make your copy work.

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technorati tags:copywriting, testing, tweaking, split, intra, trakker

Sites That Like The Starting A Business Blog

2006-04-25T07:32:00.000-07:00

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What Does it Take to be a Successful Entrepreneur?

2006-04-07T05:04:00.000-07:00

"What Does it Take to be a Successful Entrepreneur?"

People often ask me if I think they have what it takes to be an entrepreneur. There is no “one size fits all” quality. Entrepreneurs each have strengths in different areas. Some of them are amazing operators who make remarkable things happen on a limited budget. Others are geniuses in their area of expertise and they transform their entire industry. Still others have a knack for finding a hole in an existing market and successfully exploiting it to turn a profit.

Some of the most successful entrepreneurs I have seen are re-arrangers. They take existing solutions (sometimes from other industries) and they apply them in new ways/scenarios to create value.

If I were forced to pick one quality that is indicative of success in business it would be this ability to find new uses for existing solutions. Far too many people believe that you need to have the next big idea in order to start your own business. That is not true. It is equally effective to apply an old idea to the next big problem. Here is an example:

As part of one of my previous jobs I ran an apartment cleaning business. We cleaned over 1000 apartments in New York City. As part of a larger company, we had specific standards we were required to follow (in order to maintain brand integrity). One of these standards was that our apartments would not only be clean, they would be “hospital clean”. This required us to use cleaning products that were specifically developed for us. Theses products cleaned well and killed germs better than any other chemicals on the market. The challenge for our operations team was that our apartments were in many different buildings scattered all over the five boroughs of New York. The cleaning staff was required to travel (via public transportation) from location to location. How could they transport their tools and cleaning supplies from place to place?

The answer came from a trip to the airport. Roller-boards (suitcases on wheels) had been used by business travelers for years. We purchased a few pieces of luggage and adapted them to our challenge. Within eight weeks we had refined this idea to the point where the cleaning staff could carry the supplies they needed in a rolling bag the size of a large briefcase. This “lightening bolt” struck when one of our operations managers was taking a relative to the airport. Everyone was pulling their own bags – even children. These bags would have been too heavy for them to carry on their own if they didn’t have wheels. He thought to himself, “that’s what we need”.

Sharpening this skill takes practice. Here are three ways to begin to develop your powers of rearrangement.

View each problem as mutually exclusive. Many times we complicate situations before we solve them. Take apart each situation and you will discover several smaller issues that can readily be rectified. Each small issue you resolve will have implications. Sometimes these will take you in a slightly different direction than you expected. See if you can still get to the desired end result even though you are heading down a new path.

Start at the end result and work backwards. Too often people get caught up in solving a problem in a particular fashion. Identify the desired end result first then think about it deeply. As you reflect upon the end result begin to list the different ways to achieve it. List everything – even the processes you view as “crazy”. This will help you expand your thinking to the point where you might just apply an old solution to a new problem.

Bring in people who know nothing. Many big businesses use “cross functional teams” to solve problems. This is nothing more than bringing in people from other parts of the business to look at the situation with a fresh set of eyes. You should do the same thing in your business. Ask your accountant to look at your distribution system. Ask your attorney to take a shot at solving your customer traffic issue. Talk to your UPS delivery person about your fleet management concerns. Good ideas come from many different places. You may not receive the exact answer you are looking for, but you could receive some clues that will get you to the end result.

In the end, starting a business requires solving a million little problems (and a few big ones). Successful entrepreneurs are energized by this process. You can develop the skills of the re-arranger. All it takes is an open mind and the desire to succeed.

David Lorenzo has more than 20 years of business experience as a successful corporate executive, entrepreneur, strategist, author, and speaker. He has worked with and mentored some of the world’s most successful businesspeople while helping lead many large organizations to unprecedented success. His latest book is titled: Career Intensity: Business Strategy for Workplace Warriors and Entrepreneurs.

Mr. Lorenzo’s experience in starting new business enterprises and repositioning under-performing business units, along with his ability to implement innovative performance improvement solutions, makes him one of today’s most sought-after trusted advisors.

Mr. Lorenzo is a participant in the Wharton Fellows Program at the University of Pennsylvania, a management think tank that meets regularly to analyze and address timely business issues. He received his MBA from the Lubin School of Business at Pace University, and he received a Masters of Science in Strategic Communications from Columbia University in New York City.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dave_Lorenzo

15 Easy Steps to Starting Your Small Business

2006-04-07T05:00:00.000-07:00

"15 Easy Steps to Starting Your Small Business"

Yeah, sure it's easy, and of course, that title is a little tongue in cheek. It takes a lot of hard work to get a business off the ground. But, it's worth every hour I've spent getting to where I am now.

When I decided to start my communication and image consulting business, I tried hard to find a good startup guide. I couldn't find any that had all the steps. So, I decided to write one. So far, it's mostly just the bare-bones outline (which is long enough as it is) you see in this article.

I'll be adding to it every week or two, and writing more detailed articles on all the steps, so try to stop by and check it out from time to time. Let me know how I'm doing. Shoot off an email to me if I've forgotten something or you have questions.

Before you spend so much as a dollar, talk to a few experts. Go to the library or get on the internet and research, research, research. Take a little time to make sure entrepreneurship is right for you.

Make a pro and con list of business ownership, and evaluate yourself honestly. How many characteristics do you have in common with successful entrepreneurs? Is your financial position strong enough? Do you have the necessary technical and management skills?

You’re not going to be the perfect entrepreneur. Nobody is. But in order to make yourself the best entrepreneur you can be, consider ways to compensate for any weaknesses you might have. I’m from Canada, so the government agencies I’ve mentioned in this guide are Canadian, but really, it can be used by anyone.

All you have to do, if you’re from somewhere other than Canada, is find out where you need to find some of the things I’ll talk about. Some of the steps might be slightly different, and you may not have to worry about things like GST for example, but I’m sure you’ll find this discussion helpful all the same.

These steps to starting a business are in reasonably good order, but you might find yourself varying from it under your particular circumstances. That really isn’t a big deal, as long as you get most of it done. There are some steps you’ll be able to skip as well, but please don’t skip any of the “big ones”, which I’m sure you’ll pretty much figure out from taking a look at the list.

So, assuming you’ve done your evaluation and you still want to start a business, take a deep breath, and let's get started.

Conduct a feasibility study of your business. Describe your typical customer, your product and your competitors. Who will your suppliers be? What will you charge for your product? How will you market your product? These are just a few of the questions you need to answer.
Write a complete business plan for your company, using the information you gathered from your feasibility study. This vitally important, often overlooked step needs to include a description of your company, its goals, competitors, market, financial information, and of course, how you intend to meet your goals.

Get your financing in place. There are many ways to finance your business, from your own savings to personal credit cards to bank loans. If you need credit, know your business plan from front to back and maybe even sideways.

Decide what kind of structure your company will have. From a legal standpoint, there are three basic choices, sole proprietorship, partnership and incorporation, each with advantages and disadvantages.

Choose a name for your company and check on name availability. Naming your company is highly individual, but it’s the first thing associated with your business, so choose your name carefully. You’ll need to do a NUANS (Newly Upgraded Automated Name Search) report, which checks your name choices for uniqueness against a database of other business names. A reserved name is valid for 90 days.

Decide whether you want to register federally or provincially and register your company. If you register federally, you’ll also have to register provincially, which almost doubles the cost. You don’t have to have a lawyer process them for you, but it might be a good idea to at least consult with one. You can get the forms from your local government office, have them faxed to you or download them. You can fax or email printed copies, or complete the forms online.

Contact Canada Revenue Agency Business Window for your business number, and to register for GST/HST, payroll, corporate income tax and import/export (if applicable). You can also contact the CRA if you need general information about business expenses. Chances are you’ll have to collect GST, but you may want to register for a GST number even if you don’t have to collect it because of input tax credits.

Decide whether you need to collect PST. If you do, you need to submit “Registration as a Vendor” documents with your province.

Determine whether there are special permits or licenses in your municipality. It’s highly unlikely that your municipality does not have special permits or licenses.

Develop the marketing materials you decided on in your business plan. They should include at least a company identity package, press kit and website. Your identity package is your logo, business card and letterhead. A press kit can include letters of introduction, biography sheets, press releases, articles and a brochure. In today’s electronic age, printed materials aren’t enough. You need a website that looks professional, matches your printed material and has great copy. You’ll also want to make sure it’s optimized for search engines.

Set up your business bank account and record-keeping system. Your banker will need to see your incorporation documents, and you should probably set up more than one account so you can keep track of your finances better. Record-keeping is required, and can be done manually or with a computer program.

Purchase insurance. There are many different types of insurance, but most probably your company will need at least one. For example, if you’re going to have employees, you need to contact the Worker’s Compensation Board. Depending on your type of business, you might want to contact them even if you don’t have employees to insure yourself.

Contact potential creditors and set up credit terms. You should have researched suppliers when you were doing your feasibility study. Now is the time to contact them.

Decide where your business will be located. Lease your business’ space. Alternatively, you could choose to start your business from home if it’s feasible. There are advantages and disadvantages to starting your business from home. You have tax write-offs for example, but sometimes your image suffers.

Purchase supplies and office equipment. You’ll need too many things to list here, and of course, each business has different needs. You might need a fax machine and printer. You’ll probably need a computer. You’ll definitely need paper, pens, pencils and a calculator.

Congratulations! Go out, buy yourself a bottle of champagne and celebrate. You're about to embark on a most exciting journey. And may I be the first to wish you good luck and prosperous times in your business venture.

As promised, my email address is listed below so you can ask questions, make comments or add steps to my list. Or, if you want, you could just drop me a line to let me know how your small business is doing. I’d really like to know.

Eve Jackson owns and operates Details Small Business Solutions. . Details SBS is dedicated to helping small business do big business with communication and image consulting. We write small business business plans and direct mail sales letters, and we design company identity packages, websites and press kits, including all the copy.

DetailsSBS.com
info@DetailsSBS.com

Starting a Business Blog

2006-04-06T14:40:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Start A Business blog. Stay tuned for all sorts of business info and business opportunity. Starting a business is not a fast or simple process. But starting your business can be very rewarding. I will also show you recommended products that will help you jump start your new business.

Thanks
Terry Brazil