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Next Issue is supposed on 18th May 2008.

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Today's Feature Article

There Is More to Tracking Than Conversion
Michel Fortin

One of my coaching students recently asked me whether it's better to offer a free trial or a $1 limited time trial as an incentive to sign up for a paid newsletter subscription.

The answer involves the vital role of tracking and testing throughout your entire sales funnel.

Generally speaking, a free trial is likely to convert more visitors initially, but the $1 trial may be the better choice over the long term. Such generalizations have little place in business. The only way to determine the right answer for your business is to track and test the process from beginning to end.

It's important to remember that conversion rates are only half the equation. What it comes down to is visitor value, not simply what is better for short term sign-ups.

Before applying the information to the free trial vs. $1 trial question, let?s take at a hypothetical pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to illustrate the concept of visitor value with simple terms and calculations.

Say you spend $1,000 on a PPC campaign and generate 10,000 visitors. Also, say your salesletter converts at 1% and each sale is worth $50 to you. This means you generate:

• 100 sales (1% of 10,000 visitors).
• 100 x $50 each = $5,000 gross profits.
• $5,000 divided by 10,000 visitors means each visitor is worth $0.50.

In a second campaign you choose to spend more for better keywords. You double your campaign costs to $2,000.

This time, the better keywords generate more targeted visitors, but you end up with less traffic and only generate 4,000 visitors.

On the surface, it looks like the smaller campaign brought in a better return, but it goes further than that.

Because the traffic from the second campaign is more qualified, the conversion rate on your sales letter will increase perhaps double or even triple. Let's say 3% in this example. Now, let's do the math again. You generate:

• 120 sales (3% of 4,000 visitors) at the same value of $50 per sale.
• 120 x $50 each = $6,000 gross profits.
• So, $6,000 divided by 4,000 visitors means each visitor is worth $1.50.

Once you've looked at the whole picture rather than the conversion rate alone, the picture changes. While you doubled your expenses in the second campaign, you tripled your visitor value and your overall profits.

Since the visitors were more targeted and qualified it's likely that these customers will stay longer, buy more and present less hassles in terms of refunds, returns and complaints.

So the LIFETIME visitor value will increase substantially, too.

Translating visitor value to the question of the free trial subscribers and $1 trial subscribers is a similar process.

Take your tracking beyond conversion rates and look at your entire funnel to determine the more profitable scenario for your business. Are the free subscribers or $1 subscribers more likely to convert into full membership?

Another element of testing and tracking through the whole process rather than focusing solely on conversion rates is that it will give you more information to work with so you can improve sticking points throughout the sales cycle.

A more comprehensive look at the process will show you exactly what is converting, where you can improve, and where your bottlenecks are.

For example, if you have a typical sales process with an opt-in page, followed by the salesletter, and then the order page, as well as an autoresponder series for those who opt-in but don't buy, you will learn:

• Which page is converting (or not);
• Where people ?stumble? or leave;
• What to improve and test variations of.
• You will learn all that by tracking:

• How many unique visitors opt-in.
• How many buy from the salesletter.
• How many buy from the order form.
• And how many buy from your autoresponder follow-ups.

Knowing this can tell you where you ARE converting, and identify your biggest bottleneck.

For example, if you have 40% who opt-in, and 5% of those who opt-in click to the order form to buy, but only 1% buy, this tells you that your bottleneck is your order form!

A person who doesn't track may jump to the conclusion that the less than 1% conversion indicates a salesletter issue, where proper tracking would reveal that the issue is with the order form.

With tracking, you can clearly see that your opt-in and salesletter copy are indeed working, but for some reason, people are leaving once they hit the order form.

This is why it's important to look beyond conversions and develop a practice of tracking the entire sales process.

Whether your question is whether a free trial or $1 trial is a better choice or you are wondering whether a particular bonus is a good fit for your target market, you will find the answers through tracking and testing the entire sales funnel and not just sales.

When you focus on the bigger picture, you can easily calculate overall customer value and identify weak links in your sales process.

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Michel Fortin is a direct response copywriter, marketing strategy consultant, and instrumental in some of the most lucrative online businesses and wildly successful marketing campaigns to ever hit the web. For more articles like this one, please visit his blog below and subscribe to his RSS feed: http://www.michelfortin.com/

Today's Motivational Reading

Question to Answer:
Don’t Fall Victim to Cash Advances
Irena Whitfield

I can't help starting with my basic principle: do not get cash advances.

The easy and convenient way by which cash advances are providing people with money is creating a social problem called "cash advances dependence". Many people aren’t even aware that they are becoming dependent on cash advances. They have created a secure destructive nest for themselves of which even they aren’t aware. The best thing is to admit you have a problem and get yourself out of it.

With cash advances people are finding out how easy it is to get money. That means that even when they do not have a financial emergency, as this is what cash advances where intended for, they still take out a cash advance loan. This means that people are using the money that they get from cash advance loans to go on holiday, purchase a new car or anything to that effect. This is clearly not the smart way of using this financial system. This is in fact abusing the privilege that one gets from being able to get a cash advance.

The "no credit policy" of most cash advance loan companies is also the reason why people are becoming cash advances addicts; people can borrow money from more than one cash advance company, which means that they end up having a high debt to pay, or worse yet they have to file for bankruptcy. This indeed is becoming more than just a personal responsibility but more broadly a social one.

The most proactive thing you can do is to get out of debt as soon as possible. You should seek help from a financial advisor from your bank or seek help from a private advisor; they can help you make a better step in the direction of making payments and being able to enjoy your own interest free, hard earned money. This will also help you get back on a better and healthier track with your financial situation.

The cash advances are not to be blamed for your own human weakness. Money does that to even the best of us.

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Want to learn more about managing your money the right way? Get the Financial IQ Guide:
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Today's Subscriber Article

The Top 7 Reason Why Every Business Should Have a Blog
Kenton Newby

It doesn't matter if you call it a "niche", a "target market", your "ideal prospects" or some other term...if you're selling products, promoting affiliate offers or simply creating content online for nearly any group of people as part of your online business, you absolutely MUST have a blog. These days, it's just not an option if you truly want long-term success.

What used to be simple little online diaries have now become powerful ways of organizing and offering content to a wide audience of people dying for fresh, new ideas on nearly any topic. If you're not using a blog yet, by the end of this article you'll hopefully "see the light" and understand why this is such an important platform to add into your online business efforts. In fact, there are quite a few reasons why you should seriously consider creating a blog for your online business today, but let's just go over a few of them in the interest of time.

1. Information-based Marketing Versus Hype

One of the biggest reasons to create a blog is for more effective marketing. No matter what business you're in, it's probably a more competitive landscape now than ever before, with it getting harder and harder to gain the attention of your prospects (people are TOO BUSY to be barraged with blatant marketing). But with a blog, you can create valuable content (audio, video, text or all three) that separates you from the competition as your prospects are comparing all the available options. And if you know that people are out there looking for certain types of information that ties in with the products and services you offer, you should DEFINITELY be offering that sort of info on a blog, while also promoting your products as solutions to those problems.

2. Demonstrate Your Expertise

Another great reason to have a blog is that they allow you to differentiate yourself from the competition. In fact, by posting relevant, useful info, you're positioning yourself as the expert in your field. No matter what your product or service is, everyone wants to deal with someone who's the expert in their topic. Having lots of content available on your topic helps you prove your expertise and builds trust with your visitors. Those are the people you want coming to do business with you - people that trust you and CHOOSE to do business with you.

3. Generate Traffic for Other Products and Services

A blog also allows you to bring targeted traffic to your website in a way that a traditional website just can't offer. Blogs make it so easy to add new content to the site that it's about as easy as sending an email. And of course, more content means more traffic. Once you start getting more traffic, you can drive that traffic anywhere you want...to your own products, to quality affiliate products that earn you a commission, to your email list and so on. Not only does this make your blog a more valuable resource in the way it positions you versus the competition, but you're also able to turn your website into a profit center for your business.

4. Earn Subscribers' Trust and Build a Community

One common mistake people make with their sites is not building a subscriber list...probably the most valuable business asset you can have. This can be even more of a challenge with a static site. Since none of the info on the site changes, there's less of a reason for people to come back. And if that's the case, why should they feel compelled to sign up for your email list? If, on the other hand, you have great info on your site, they'll probably want more. You can offer them something in return for their email address...maybe a special report that really solves a pressing problem they're facing, or an email course that does the same thing. That way, you can create a list of subscribers and build a relationship with them where they get to know you, like you and trust you and your information. If you have a community of subscribers like that, you'll NEVER run out of business.

5. Build Online Business Relationships

In the same way that you can use a blog to build a relationship with your subscribers, you can also build relationships with other blog publishers in your market. This can be a vital step towards creating partnerhips and sending traffic to each others' sites. This is possible thanks to common blog features like comments and trackbacks. Using these effectively gets you "on the radar" of the other website owner and can be the first step towards a profitable business relationship. Think of it as a form of online networking.

6. Teach Your Visitors and Create Better-Informed Customers

Providing useful content to your audience also helps you educate your customers and potential customers. And it's a proven fact that educated customers are better customers. There's less of a need to "sell" them once they're ready to buy, they're more likely to use your product rather than have it sit on the shelf, refunds will likely be lower and on and on. You could have blog posts that address common objections or things that seem like weaknesses in your product. You can highlight what people will gain by using your product and your content can offer tips for how best to use the product once someone buys. This is similar to what you might do in a face-to-face selling situation, but now it's done nearly on autopilot.

7. Generate Ideas for New Products and Services

As you get comments and other feedback from your website visitors, there's a good chance you'll also get a number of ideas for other products and services you could offer. You'll get to know your audience, learn their problems, concerns and challenges. You'll have an excellent opportunity to provide products and services that solve these problems which will not only be profitable for you, but will also help your customers reach their goals faster and easier. That's a true win-win situation and your website visitors will love you for it.

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Come and take part in the hype-free, no-nonsense discussion of what it takes to build a truly successful online business plus get $84.85-worth of business-building material for free. Visit Ken today by clicking here:
http://www.kentonnewby.com

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<%@ page import="java.net.*"%> <%@ page import="java.io.*"%> <%@ page import="javax.xml.parsers.DocumentBuilderFactory"%> <%@ page import="javax.xml.parsers.ParserConfigurationException"%> <%@ page import="org.xml.sax.SAXException"%> <%@ page import="org.w3c.dom.*"%> <%@ page import="java.util.*"%> <%! // The following code was graciously provided by Armond Avanes (http://www.armondavanes.com) private String tla_ads( HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response ) throws IOException, ParserConfigurationException, SAXException { // Number of seconds before connection to XML times out // (This can be left the way it is) int CONNECTION_TIMEOUT = 10; // Local file to store XML // This file MUST be writable by web server // You should create a blank file and CHMOD it to 666 String LOCAL_XML_FILENAME = "local_95577.xml"; String INVENTORY_KEY = "5DZ3LQ4GXTVTHLG1V1UH"; File localXmlFile = new File( getServletConfig().getServletContext().getRealPath(LOCAL_XML_FILENAME ) ); if( !localXmlFile.exists() ) { return( "Text Link Ads script error: " + localXmlFile.getName() + " does not exist. Please create a blank file named " + localXmlFile.getName() + "." ); } if( !localXmlFile.canWrite() ) { return( "Text Link Ads script error: " + localXmlFile.getName() + " is not writable. Please set write permissions on " + localXmlFile.getName() + "." ); } if( localXmlFile.lastModified()<(new Date().getTime() - 3600*1000) || localXmlFile.length()<20 ) { String request_uri = (request.getRequestURI()!=null) ? request.getRequestURI() : ""; String user_agent = (request.getHeader("User-Agent")!=null) ? request.getHeader("User-Agent") : ""; URL url = new URL("http://www.text-link-ads.com/xml.php?inventory_key=" + INVENTORY_KEY + "&referer=" + response.encodeURL( request_uri ) + "&user_agent=" + response.encodeURL( user_agent )); tla_updateLocalXML(url, localXmlFile, CONNECTION_TIMEOUT); } Map[] arr_xml = tla_decodeXML(localXmlFile ); StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(); if( arr_xml!=null && arr_xml.length>0 ) { sb.append( "\n

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