|pros • per • ly|

As I have worked as an SEO consultant over the last few years it always amazes me how caught up people get with their competitors. It seems that some times they spend more time looking at their competition to see what they are doing than they do building their own business.

What is the benefit of knowing what your competition is doing? Do you just believe that everything they do is the right way to do things and you want to copy them? You have absolutely no control over what they are doing.

Spend time worrying about what YOU are doing. Look at your own site. Ask yourself, what can I be testing to increase conversion? How can I increase traffic? What new product can I create? What article can I write to add good content to my site?

Go back and read my guide to SEO and make sure you are doing everything you need to be doing on your site to increase your rankings.

The focus needs to be on what YOU are doing to YOUR site. Don’t worry about your competitors. Do the right things and you will eventually beat out your competitors, or at least steal a large piece of the pie. Don’t worry, there is enough to go around.

Adam mentioned list building as one of the best things you can do to make money online.  I want to talk about that in much greater detail.  Basically I want to talk about why.

When you’re building your internet business, you focus a lot on traffic acquisition.  Without traffic, this whole venture becomes dull very quickly.  The problem with traffic though? It’s fleeting.  Your SERPs are fleeting.  They’ll fluctuate.  Google could change their algorithm…

This traffic is key toward business growth, but lasting growth comes from your list.

You’re standing on a beach and I’m Google.  I shovel a bunch of sand in your face, you squint, and hold a cup in the air.  Some sand lands in your cup.   That’s yours to keep.  It’s the beginning of your sandcastle.  I shovel more sand, you hold the cup in the air and catch some more.  You add that sand to your castle.  Eventually, you’re castle’s going to be HUGE and you don’t have to worry nearly as much about getting sand thrown in your face.  You have a castle!

You can monetize your one-time visitors with ads, or offers, but when they’re gone…they’re gone.  When you’re shooting for the list and building a quality list, you’re investing in your business for the long term.  You can call on that list when you have a new product launch, a new offer, etc.  As your list grows, your opportunities grow right in step with it.  Do you have a related product idea (or affiliate relationship) that your list would want?  Make it and sell it.

There’s quite a bit of this that goes on in the internet marketing industry.  A lot of times it feels like one big inter-linked JV.  You push Guru A’s product to your list and Guru A will push your product on his list…

Your list will soon become your goto resource for ideas, feedback, insight, etc.  If you’re launching a new product, why not ask your list what they would want to know?  Why not ask them what problems they’re facing?  Have them help you betatest a new software product…the opportunities, as I mentioned above, are limitless.

I’ll reiterate:  focus on that list.  Focus on email address acquisition and stay completely above the board with how you get the emails and how you treat the people on your list.  You have their permission, so don’t squander it (read Seth Godin’s book Permission Marketing) if you want more insight into that.

Let’s do a bit of math for kicks.  You first start out and you have 100 people on your list.  You send out a great, relevant, targeted offer and you get 5% to convert.  5 people pay you — for the sake of easy math — $20.  You made $100.  ($1 per person in your list per offer is not out of the question — it actually is eerie how much that appears to be the norm).

Six months down the road your list is now at 6,000 people.  You send out a targeted, relevant, great offer and 300 people pay you $20 each.  You made $6,000.

Six months later you look back and see you’ve busted your butt to build some great tool that’s going to help your list however you’re qualified to help them.  You made quite a push during the pre-launch and added another 10,000 people to your list (this isn’t at all out of the question by the way — gotta have some sand shoveled in your face though for sure!).  You’re up to 16,000 people and you’re likely to make $32,000 (why $2 per person on your list?  Because you made the tool yourself so your margin is a lot higher).

And 16,000 people is not a big list.

But do you see where the long-term value is coming from?  Suddenly you have a bit of leverage.  You can leverage your list for all sorts of cool things that will help you and help your list.  If you do it correctly, it truly is a win-win.

You should always be gathering email addresses.

I have been in the internet marketing world for many years now, but I don’t know everything. In fact there is so much I don’t know that I continually spend time trying to learn new principles. I will attend webinars, join email lists of other internet guru’s and so forth.

As I was reading an email this morning from a internet marketing guy (Jimmy Brown) that specializes in building email lists. We haven’t discussed list building much on Prosperly yet but we will be covering it because it is vital to the success and growth of an internet business.

Anyway, this guru was talking about the 3 things you can spend your time doing that will have the biggest effect on you making more money with your website.

1. Develop your offer – even though I teach that it is effective to push other people’s products as an affiliate, I also teach that if you want to sell your own product that is great too, just make it a digital product. – Anyway you need to have something to offer to sell to people. So spend one day a week working on something you can offer to your visitors. Even if it is a $8 ebook, you should work on this.

2. Build your email list – Again this guru specializes in email lists and I am a very strong proponent of building email lists so this is the second thing you can do. Get a email list going and do all that you can to get more people to sign up. Offer a free report, give a discount on your product but do whatever you can to get them to sign up.

3. Traffic Development – He mentioned this in terms of both increasing the amount of traffic you get to your website, and increasing the conversion of the traffic you are getting. You should always be trying to increase traffic and testing things on your site to get better conversions.

If you spend most of your time doing these 3 things, I guarantee you will make money online.

On one of my sites I decided to add some inline video (hosted via YouTube) to demonstrate some important aspects of the product.  I made four videos in about 20 minutes and was all set.  These are not professionally done at all — simple screencasts of me working through the software and talking.

At any rate, I placed the four videos in their relevant sections of the sales copy and began a splittest:

Original:  The user would click on a link, which would open a new browser window and launch a screencast I had made using Camtasia.  There was no audio, just popup bubbles explaining things.

New: The user sees the embedded videos right there inline.  The videos are about the same content-wise, but have audio of me explaining things as I go — no popup bubbles requiring reading.

The results have been phenomenal:

As you can see it’s holding very strong (98 conversions are enough for a statistically significant result…standing on its own) at 3.34% conversion.  Granted, Google’s Website Optimizer says it doesn’t have enough data to declare a high-confidence winner yet, but 97.4% was high enough to merit writing this post.

So what are some key takeaways from this?

1. It’s fairly obvious that visitors (at least in my niche) respond well to video.
2. 20 minutes of work can boost sales 33%.

I talk a lot about using tools like Google’s Website Optimizer, Google Analytics and Crazy Egg. These are all tools that can give you valuable information what your users are doing, how well your website is converting visitors and much more.

One thing I have found myself doing is getting into the habit of checking analytics or crazy egg reports everyday and just thinking about how the reports give interesting data. For example I will look at a report and think, “Oh, that is very interesting that people are clicking on the link in the footer when they should be clicking on the top order button.”

I will then move onto the next report and do the same thing. “Oh that is interesting that 18 people found my site searching for “10 day trip to hawaii”.

This is ineffective reporting. What I need to do is examine a report, take away the major points that standout and then put an action plan into place. For example, if I look at a crazy egg report and see that visitors to a particular page of a website are not clicking on links that I want them clicking on, I will make an action plan to make the links I want clicked more prominent. Maybe I will remove other links that are not important to me but are distracting visitors from the sales path.

The point is all of these awesome tools exist not just to keep me interested during the day, but to make changes to my websites that will ultimately make me more money.