Lady In The Water Is The Best Movie Ever…

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I know many of you are thinking, “does Adam really believe that?” Well the answer to that question is maybe not the best movie ever but if I don’t over hype it how else will I get people to see it.

Anyway, I was down in my theater room this morning (I built it after we sold “Diana”) watching the special features of Lady In The Water and it just reminded me how upset I get about the fact that the movie is not more popular.

theater-room-002

Truth be told Lady In The Water is a great movie. Probably M. Night Shyamalan’s best work and yet the movie tanked at the box office compared to his previous box office smashes. People were too busy seeing the latest (lame) installment of Pirates of the Caribbean to see Lady in the Water and so instead of seeing an awesome original movie they saw a sequel that was pretty bad.

Warner Bros did a horrible job marketing the movie touting it as a scary wolf story which totally missed what the movie was.

So bottom line here, if you have ever taken my advice before on this blog then take this advice:

Go buy Lady In The Water on DVD or BluRay. It is a clean well written, well acted movie that everyone should see.

LCD Test – Selling Two Products Is Better Than One

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For those of you that don’t know, on my lawn care website I sell a kit that helps people start a lawn care business. I sell two versions of the kit, a basic kit for $49.95 and a Premium kit for $99.95.

I just finished running a test through Google’s website optimizer tool where I tested just selling the Premium kit against selling both the basic and the Premium. To my surprise in a side by side AB test the original version where I push the basic and premium together converted 36% better than the version that only pushed the Premium. Ironically, during that time of testing 80% of the sales that came through the original version were for the premium kit.

What I learned from the test:
People like to have options. Even though the vast majority of the customers bought the Premium Kit, they seem to be more at ease knowing there is a cheaper version. At least the conversion rates would suggest so.

I will next be testing adding a third version of the kit. This should get interesting.

Want To Increase Sales? Give People What They Want

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I do a lot of testing and tweaking with my lawn care directory website. Because I sell a kit to help people start a lawn care business I am always looking to make the kit more enticing and more helpful to people getting started in that industry.

One of the common things lawn care business owners ask me for is other ways to get new clients. Many of the companies get leads and new clients just from being listed in my directory, but people are always looking for new ways to get more clients.

So recently I read an ebook about getting more referrals and one of the suggestions for a service business was to use this door hanger that had been very effective for the company that designed it. I decided to make my own lawn care version of the door hanger template and add it to the kit.

I finally got around to adding the door hanger template last month and was astonished at the results. When it comes to sales for this website, the best months for me are from March to June and then it steadily decreases and bottoms out at about the October to November range before it starts to climb again in December. So after an average August I was really surprised to see that in September instead of seeing a drop in revenue my revenue increased by 16% from $3177 in August to $3695 in September. The only change was the addition of the door hanger.

I learned a valuable lesson, if you give your customers what they ask for you will make more sales. It’s as simple as that. Instead of trying to sell them the product you put together, ask them what they want and then create that product and they will buy it.

Do you need a computer to succeed online?

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Well the obvious answer to this question is yes you do. But the reason I ask this is because my laptop crashed yesterday and the geek squad told me it would take at least 2 days before they can even diagnose the problem and then they still have to fix it. So I am writing this post from my iMac at my house.

My big question is now that I have website’s running on autopilot and making me money, could I personally still be really successful without owning my own business computer. Could I just go to a library or school computer lab to use a computer when I needed it and still make money.

Well yesterday was day one without my computer. I made $125 on Clearview, $50 on Lawncare Dir, and probably another $350 on my other sites (I can’t check exact numbers on those because the logins are on my crashed computer, but they always make at least that) which gives me a running total of $525 for the day.

That’s pretty good considering I went and played some golf yesterday and also worked on the movie me and my brother are writing.

Who needs a computer anyway?

How To Completely Redesign A Website Without Losing Rankings

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Recently I posted about how I had completely redesigned Clearvieweducation.com. We took it from a static site that had about 60 html pages and moved to WordPress where the site is dynamic and will have thousands of indexed pages. I knew that in order to compete with the big dogs like elearners.com I would have to make the switch.

I was most concerned about losing the solid Google rankings the site had achieved, for example it ranked in the top 10 of Google for “online college degree”, “accredited online colleges”, “online accredited colleges”, “top online business schools” and many more. We set up 301 redirects to tell Google that all of the old pages had changed to new pages and then waited hoping for the best.

Setting up the 301 redirects was the most important part because we had changed all of the file names/urls of every page of the website, including the home page. When Google or any search engine tries to access an old page the 301 tells them that the page has permanently moved to a new page and redirects them to the new page. (Here is a good tutorial on 301 redirects)

So we got the new design all ready and then we set up our .htaccess page with all of the 301’s. We added both the site and the .htaccess page to the live server and the new site was live. I started immediately doing link building getting links pointing to the new pages of the site and hoped for the best.

IMPORTANT: The one thing we didn’t change was the domain. If you have to change your domain name I don’t know that there is a way you can do it without losing rankings.

Well it has been about 3 weeks and we haven’t seen much of a drop off if at all in the rankings. If anything we have seen a traffic increase. The site is #5 on Google for “online college degree” and for “online accredited colleges”. Most of our other rankings have stayed the same or improved as well which has caused a consistent increase in traffic to the site. The big term “online degree” which was at about #40 is up to #25. If I get that to page one of Google, look out!