Website Technique
Order Page Selling
Numerous studies have show that the order page is the main page where
people bag out of completing a web based transaction. They can get cold
feet, confused, and distracted at this critical point in the sales
process. It's your job to help them complete the order form and submit
it.
There are several things that can ruin a sale for you.
-
Worry that the site is not secure.
-
Pre-buyer's remorse
-
Other reluctance to put a credit card number in a website.
-
Confusion
-
More familiarity with other ordering methods.
Security
I'll combine the bullet points about worry that the site is not secure
and general reluctance to put a credit card number in a website.
Security on the Internet has been a big issue blown up by the media.
Certainly it is an important issue, but hardly the desperate situation
outlined by people who have never sold anything online.
What this means to you as a merchant is that you must put in the normal
safeguards, keep an eye out for suspected fraudulent orders and then go
on about your business of selling.
The general public, however, looks at this a little differently. Since
they believe security is so important you must ease their fears about
ordering from you. The first step in this is to smack them in the face
with your security measures when they hit the order page. I do this in
two ways. 1.) My shopping cart displays the Verisign logo which is a
pretty trusted symbol. 2.)
On bigger ticket products, I provide an extra security statement and a
pop up box that emphasizes the security issue even further. You
can see an example of this by visiting
http://www.antion.com/speakervideo.htm and clicking on the order
button. You will see a special section of my order page pop up that has
the all the elements we will be discussing about Order Page Selling.
Note: If this page doesn't show up it's because you have been
testing other things in my shopping system. The page I'm discussing
today would, however show up for someone who had not been playing around
with http://www.kickstartcart.com
.
It always cracks me up when people ask me so much about the security of
my ordering process when they are at infinitely more risk when they give
their credit card to a high school age waiter at a restaurant. But
people are generally protective of their credit (at least they think
they are) so you have to cater to their fears.
Buyer's Remorse
At your order page people are not really buyers yet. They are really
buyer's when your "Thank You" page displays and we'll show you how to
sell there too in a future issue.
Since people are not really buyers at your order page it is a good idea
to reinforce their good decision to keep them excited about the purchase
they are about to make. This is infinitely more important on big ticket
products than on small purchases. A customer's worry about the sale
increases significantly and in proportion to the amount of money they
are spending.
On my order page I use phraseology like "Yes, I want to become a
professional speaker," and "Yes, Tom I want you to help finance my
speaking education." Generally you can use anything that concentrates on
the affirmative and keeps them excited about completing the sale.
This is also a place to add testimonials and reinforce any bonuses you
are giving.
Confusion
Making your ordering instructions hard to understand has been the
downfall of many online marketers. What would seem to you to be a smooth
and easy process could be totally foreign to someone who is not web
savvy. It's a good idea to have people test out your ordering system
without you holding their hands and telling them where to click. Have
them write down the questions that come to mind while they are trying to
place an order. You'll probably be surprised at what you hear. Take
steps to answer those questions on the screen so people can get their
order placed.
Familiarity
To maximize your sales, make every traditional method available to order.
Here's what the top of my standard order form says:
To order by FAX, print out this page and fax to 301-552-0225
You can also mail your order to:
Antion & Associates
Box 2630
Landover Hills, MD 20784
For customer service call 800-448-6280 in the Continental United States and 301-459-0738 outside the US.
As you can see I give them every possible way to order and I do get lots
of fax and phone orders. It's most likely that I would have lost those
sales if I tried to force everyone to order on line.
One other note about order form selling is that anyone in the world can
see your order form. Although mine is not available in other languages,
I still make it clear that the 800 number only works in the Continental
USA and that the other number is good anywhere else. If you have a
significant international audience (especially from a particular country
or language base) you could put additional instructions in that language
prior to the order page to help make those people feel more comfortable.
Traffic Generation Technique
Contests
People love contests. My most famous
one was the "Tom is Single" contest. The way it was run was that the
phrase "Tom is Single" was inserted several times in my regular ezine. A
person had to count how many times the phrase was there and go to my
website to put in their count. The people that got the number correct
won prizes.
Besides driving traffic to my website, this
contest had several different benefits.
A. People
read that issue of my ezine thoroughly.
B. The contest
was crazy enough that it caused viral activity, i.e., people sent it
around to there friends to take a shot at winning the prizes.
C. The prizes were advertised because I had to tell the people what they
would win.
Another good contest to run is a testimonial
contest. You see laundry detergent companies doing this all the time . .
. "In 25 words or less tell us what you like about New Improved Albino
Creator and 2000 lucky Albino Creator users will receive a year's supply
of Albino Creator."
Of course the fine print says they
may print or use your comments just about any way they want, but people
still join and the Albino company has tons of people going on record
saying they loved the product.
Legal Stuff
Here's a link to a good and easily understandable articles about some
legal issues both in the USA and abroad. Apparently you have to jump
through hoops for the state of Rhode Island so many people exclude them
from participating. I wonder what pencil pushing legislators in Rhode
Island had nothing better to do than push through this legislation
http://www.howstuffworks.com/question541.htm
Contests vs Sweepstakes
A "contest" is a game of skill and a "sweepstakes" is a game of chance.
It's important you know the difference and it's important that you don't
cross the line accidentally and do something illegal.
I
can't explain this concept any better than the people who run the sites
at
http://www.contestcen.com/swcon.htm
and
http://www.arentfox.com/post/forum/csmessages/700.html
For more in depth coverage you can also visit
http://www.arentfox.com and click
the drop down box for "Area of Specialty" click on "contests and
sweepstakes"
Don't let a few legal things stop you from
this powerful form of marketing.
Product Development Technique
E-book Conversion to PDF
Now that you have your document formatted properly in Word which was
covered in the last issue (click
here to review), it's time to convert it to pdf which will be the
distribution format.
When I installed Adobe Acrobat 5.0 (the program, NOT the free reader) on
my computer it automatically connected itself to Microsoft Word. Right
after the "help" drop down menu an "Acrobat" menu appeared. When you
click on it a menu appears which includes "conversion settings." This is
where you make decisions about security, and usability.
I don't pretend to understand all the options available, so I usually
leave most of them at their default settings. I will, however, cover
here the settings you need to worry about to make a quality ebook. Below
will be a list of those you need to consider and a brief explanation of
your choices:
When you click on "conversion settings" you'll get a general screen with
some tabs across the top. You can pick different names from a drop down
box or create a new name so that the settings for different types of
documents can be set and remembered independently.
I just call mine "Ebooks"
Security
The next tab you see is labeled "Security" this is where you decide if
passcodes are needed to open or change the document. I do not require a
passcode to open the document, but I do require one to change the
document. This is one of the big advantages of using pdf over simply
distributing in Word. When you send a word document to someone, they
could simply replace your name with theirs and replace your sales links
with theirs and redistribute the document. In pdf you can shut off that
possibility unless the person robbing you is willing to scan or retype
the entire document.
In the security area is where I check off that I do want to allow
printing, because I know people will want to print out my ebooks to read
offline and I also check off "Do not allow adding comments" i.e. I don't
want them adding their two cents worth electronically and passing on my
work to someone else.
Office
The next tab refers to your Microsoft Office settings. I don't remember
what the defaults where, but I do want to make sure the following is
checked:
Convert document info
Convert cross document links
Convert Internet links
And everything else on this page is checked except "Save file
Automatically" (I like to have one more look before I save things)
I have zoom set to "Inherit Zoom" this refers to how large the file will
appear on the screen (which can always be changed later by the user)
Bookmarks
The next tab is "bookmarks" which refers to what will show up in your
clickable index after the conversion. I have a checkmark in the box
"Convert word headings to bookmark" Then in the list below I have an "X"
in headings 1 - 9 although the most I ever use is 1 - 3. This refers to
the heading tags put on Chapters and Subheads in the Word document
preparation. Adobe will recognize these and turn them into bookmarks.
I also scroll down the list to make sure "HTML Address" is checked. I'm
not totally sure what this does, but I want to make sure every link I
put in the document is clickable so I keep this checked.
Display Options
This is where I tell the program how to display itself when someone
opens up a document. They can always override this opening display
later. In this area I choose to open on "Page number 1" and I choose
"Default Magnification" and I choose "Bookmarks and Page." The reason I
choose "Bookmarks and Page" is that many people are not that savvy or
used to reading pdf files and they may not know that a clickable index
is available unless I display it for them as soon as the document opens.
The only other thing I check on this page is "invisible rectangle" in
the "Link Appearance" section. This is just a matter of preference and
you can set anything you want there. It only has to do in what a
clickable link inside the document looks like.
Once all the settings are checked, I click "OK" and go back to the
document. The only thing you have to do after that is click on the
"Acrobat" drop down menu again in Word and then click on "Convert to
Adobe pdf." If your document has not been saved, Adobe will prompt you
to save it. After you do that a screen will pop up to ask you to save
the pdf file as. You will then pick a name for your pdf file and where
you want to save it.
That's it. You just created an ebook ready for distribution.
Email Technique
Make Money with Your Sig File
This is one of those work, get paid, paid, paid, paid, paid techniques
that I'm always talking about. Don't expect rushes of big money coming
in from this one every day, but over time you will profit immensely from
this technique.
A sig file (short for signature file) is a brief section of text added
to the end of your outgoing emails. It is usually used to contain your
basic contact information and maybe a line about what you do. Sometimes
it is used to save you lots of repetitive typing as I covered in the
Dec. 2001 issue.
In this issue I'll cover some ways that a signature file can make you
money.
First things first. You have to be able to create a signature file. I'm
going to cover Microsoft Outlook 2000 here. You'll have to look for
"signature file" in your help menu if you are using another email
program.
In Outlook you click on "Tools" then "Options" then "Mail Formats" then
"Signature Picker" then "New." Enter a name for your signature like
"Speaking" or "Real Estate Inquiry" or anything that reminds you of what
is contained in the signature file. Then pick "Start with a blank
signature." You would use the other option of "Use this existing
signature as a template" if you already had one that you just wanted to
copy from." This would keep you from starting from scratch each time.
Let's say you worked from home as a professional speaker but you sold
real estate on the side. You wouldn't want to use the same signature
file for a real estate inquiry as you would for a speaking inquiry.
Here's a sample of one of my speaking sig files:
Get your free Subscription to Great Speaking Ezine
http://www.antion.com/ezinesubscribe.htm
===========================================
New Speaker Video http://www.antion.com/speakervideo.htm
Tom Antion Communications
http://www.antion.com
A Rare Mix of Business and Entertainment
Keynotes/Seminars and Advanced Presentation Skills
Voice 1-301-459-0738 Fax 1-301-552-0225
Box 2630, Landover Hills, Maryland USA 20784
Trade Links with Us - mailto:Linktrade@antion.com
============================================
Here's how I might change the original if I sold real estate:
I have listings in 12 counties and buyers waiting
===========================================
Search for Real Estate while sitting on your Butt
http://www.ButtEstates.com
Tom Antion
I can find you a home or sell yours FAST
Voice 1-301-459-0738 Fax 1-301-552-0225
Box 2630, Landover Hills, Maryland USA 20784
Ask me about a free home evaluation guide
============================================
If I got a speaking inquiry, I would simply click a button and the first
sig file would pop in to my email. If I got a real estate inquiry, it's
just as easy to pop in the real estate one. If you have way more
speaking inquiries than real estate emails, then you would set the
speaking sig file as the "default" so you didn't have to insert it every
time you write an email.
OK so how does this make money?
Believe it or not, people do look at these sig files. Not all people,
but some people. You can have links to your products and services in
your sig file as long as you don't overdo it. It's a little bit overkill
and downright hokey to have a two word email and a 20 line signature
file, so don't go wild with this.
I have several variation of sig files to promote different products and
services. The first one above promotes four things. My "Wake 'em Up
Video Professional Speaking System"
http://www.antion.com/speakervideo.htm , my link trade program, my
ezine and the little blurb about speaking. This is all in one concise
package, but just pushes the limits of acceptable size.
A good email program will allow you to make as many different sig files
as you want. Here's how I might use different sig files depending on how
busy I am when I send an email.
If I know you already bought a particular product or service, then I'm
most likely to send you a sig file that promotes a different product or
service that maybe you didn't know about. I've had lots of people over
the years say to me, "I saw X in your sig file. I didn't know you did
that/sold that etc."
Affiliate Programs
Sig files are another good place to put affiliate links when you don't
have lots of your own products to sell. This way you still have a chance
to make money if someone clicks and buys something from your affiliate
vendor.
Copywriting Technique
Features and Benefits
by Tom Antion
This one concept of copywriting made me $10,000.00 in one day.
When I first rolled out my "Wake 'em Up Video Professional Speaking
System"
http://www.antion.com/speakervideo.htm I went through the entire
course and wrote down all the features of the course, i.e.
everything you would learn if you had the course. I was really proud
of myself for writing a long sales letter that had bullet points
with all these great features. I sent a notice of the new product to
my ezine list which drove the readers to my long sales page. Ooohh
boy! I was about to make a ton of money . . .
Well not that day. Not one order came in. I was really shocked and
disappointed after all the work I had put into the product and all
the work I had put into writing the sales letter. So what was wrong.
I obviously didn't have a clue so I turned to a professional
copywriter and had him look at my work. He said, "It's all great Tom
except you didn't put any benefits in the sales letter."
Hmmmmmm. I had no idea what he meant by that. He went on to tell me
that I had done a stellar job of listing all the "features" of the
product, but a lousy job of listing the "benefits" of buying it. The
copywriter told me what to do to fix the problem.
My task to fix the sales letter was to match each feature with the
corresponding benefit.
For instance. One of my original first bullet points was.
Here's the same bullet point with the benefit added.
I did the best I could at going through most of the bullet points
and adding the benefits to the features. I sent the announcement
again to my list and sold $10,000.00 worth of videos in one day.
The lesson I learned from this is to never overestimate the
intelligence of your audience. You must tell them exactly how your
product or service will benefit them.
I just completed a two hour audiotape seminar on this topic called
Copywriting 901: The Fast Track to Writing Words that Sell.
It is awesome and could make you a thousand times it's cost by
learning the above technique and all the other techniques I put on
the tape.
Click here to order
Search Engine Tips
Keyword Placement Part V
URL
Another place to put keywords is in your URL. URL stands for Unique
Resource Locator and basically means the exact address to a particular
webpage on your website. Here's an example:
http://www.antion.com/public-speaking.htm Even though my main domain
name "antion.com" is not a keyword, I can still get a keyword in my URL
by putting a forward slash after the main domain name and naming an
exact page on my site using keywords. The dash between the keywords in
the keyword phrase "public speaking," although not great when someone
has to remember the URL to type it in, is actually better for search
engines because it clearly separates the words.
I could take this even further by naming all my pages on public speaking
http://www.antion.com/public-speaking-otherpage.htm. This way I could
have the keyword phrase "public speaking" in every single page I have on
my website that has anything to do with public speaking.
Send me your suggestions for future Search Engine related articles for
this section. mailto:tom@antion.com
Cool Software and Gadgets
Software
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/default.asp Windows XP
Since I upgraded to this operating system I can work my computer to
death and virtually never have to reboot. Windows 98 had me rebooting 4
or 5 times a day.
Link hiding software --
contributed by
Jeanatte Cates
http://www.techtamers.com and
John Cantu
http://www.humormall.com
Some of the links you want to promote may be
ridiculously long and many savvy web surfers know that they can cut off
your affiliate link and still get to where they want to go which cuts
you out of a commission.
Also, you may not want to make it so obvious that you are promoting an
affiliate link. Sometimes the affiliate program to which you belong puts
your name in the link to identify you. I have been given lots of links
like this. The sites below will let you hide the real link and will also
let you make a much shorter and easier to use link that can be put on
flyers, handouts, business cards and spoken very easily.
http://www.techtamers.com/linkto.htm
SnipURL
http://snipurl.com/
TinyURL
http://tinyurl.com/
MakeAShorterLink
http://makeashorterlink.com/
Gadgets
http://www.xybernaut.com/newxybernaut/home.htm Wearable computers.
http://www.scottevest.com/versiontrackerpop/versiontrackerpop.htm
A vest/coat with over a million pockets (not really) to carry all your
wearable computing accessories AND a bottle of water to keep you
hydrated while lugging all the stuff around :)
http://www.microopticalcorp.com/ Another wearable computer eyepiece
http://www.worldonline.co.za/tech/tech_center_Stealt.504762.html
Stealthcam allows you to view what's going on in your home or office
from anywhere in the world you can connect to the Internet.
http://www.brookstone.com/shop/product.asp?sku=348540 Too lazy to
rewind your water hose after you were too lazy to water your plants? Get
an automatic hose rewinder.
For the lazy person who has everything :)
http://www.global-merchants.com/home/solars.htm A bunch of cool
solar-powered stuff
Useful Websites
http://aolsvc.pcworld.aol.com/computercenter/aol/article/0,aid,93283,00.asp
Funny but instructive article about disastrous emails people
accidentally sent.
http://www.smallbiztechtalk.com They have a new book out "What Your
Computer Consultant Doesn't Want You To Know" This is a great book that
helps you do lots of things in house that would be very expensive
otherwise.
http://www.affiliateadvisor.com/main.html Great resource to teach
you all about marketing your products using affiliate programs.
http://www.broadbandbuyer.com/
Free site that gives you lots of broadband options and specials from the
providers.
Computer / Automation Technique
Ad Tracking
More techniques
Let's say you wanted to promote one of your products by
placing a classified ad in someone's ezine. How would you know if it was
a successful ad or not?
You could watch your sales and see if you got some extra
sales when the ezine came out, but how would you know for sure if the ad
pulled in more sales than it cost? How would you know exactly how
profitable the ad was or how much it lost? What if you had several ads
running in different ezines and you also sold the same product off your
own website? How would you know where the sales came from?
The Hard Way
The hard way would be to put a separate page on your website for
each ad you are running. You would then count the number of people who
came to that page by using some kind of statistics package to track the
number of times that page was viewed. This will give you the number of
people that actually came from a particular ad. This presumes that they
didn't trip on your page accidentally from a search engine listing if an
engine somehow indexed your page.
If you only had one ad running and you didn't have your
product promoted on your website, then you could compare the number of
sales that came in the first few days after the ad ran to the cost of
the ad and maybe even the number of visitors from the ad and get a
fairly accurate picture of whether the ad was worth it or not.
The problem with the above method is that it's
unrealistic to take that kind of time and effort to test just one ad.
Also, the accuracy would be really questionable if your product was
available even one other place because you would never know for sure
where any sales "actually" came from.
Software to the Rescue
So what do you do? Well you're probably getting tired about hearing
about
http://www.KickStartCart.com but it has an awesome module that
automatically tells you if your ad was worth it in no time flat with no
effort or hoops to jump through. Also, it's not limited to one campaign
at a time. You could have 50 different ads running concurrently and you
would know exactly which ones are worth it and which ones aren't.
Here's my latest real life example:
I have been selling wedding speech and wedding toast
ebooks at one page websites that I own like
http://www.wedding-toasts.org
and
http://www.wedding-speeches.org Most of my traffic has come from
purchasing pay-per-click ads at Overture.com and Google.com.
Here are some figures I got from my
http://www.KickStartCart.com
ad tracking module on the day this article was written.
A winner
One of the Google Ads produced 3499 clicks, 58 E-book sales, Revenue of
$1002.75, which represented a conversion rate of visitors to sales of
1.7 percent. The conversion tracking aspect of this also told me that
each click to my Wedding Toast site from that ad was worth 27 cents. The
cost per click at Google to get people to this site is only 5 cents, so
this is an extremely profitable ad that I want to run, run, run with.
A loser
Thinking that a very targeted wedding site would generate tons of sales,
I advertised at a site that had a pay-per-click program. I could buy
1000 clicks for $300.00 or 30 cents per click. I dutifully put my ad
tracker on the ads and when the program was finished found that the
wedding speech ad was worth only one cent per click and the wedding
toast ad was worth only six cents per click. These ads were big losers.
When the company came back trying to get me to go with a bigger program
whereby I would get 10,000 clicks for only 15 cents per click. guess
what I said . . .Thanks, but no thanks. I would still be losing 9 cents
to 14 cents per click.
Had I not had the exact figures, I would not have been
able to make that quick decision to cut my losses and if I hadn't had
the software to automate the entire process, I would never have taken
the time to track so closely. . . .I might have taken the 15 cent
deal because sales were increasing, but I wouldn't have know the sales
weren't profitable.
So, automate the process of tracking your ads and you
will identify the winners and the losers quickly.
More
automation techniques:
This section will be an ongoing effort to keep you
from grabbing your mouse which slows you down, and is bad for your
wrist.
-
Use ctrl-home to go to the
top of a web page. Use ctrl-end to go to the bottom of a webpage.
-
ctrl-N opens a new window.
For years whenever I wanted to visit a webpage and then come back to
the one I was looking at, I would lose the first one. I didn't
know you can have more than one browser window open. How dumb I was!
Now I routinely have six or seven open.
Case Study
Rick Butts
I have to be honest and
tell you that I cannot remember signing up for Tom Antion's Great
Speaking FREE eZine. I'll also tell you that it came in for several
months and I only read a bit, rarely all of it, and then I deleted it.
Other than a few mental a-ha's, I will bet I never took even the tiniest
baby step of action for what I read until one day...
Tom sent out an ad for "Click: The Ultimate Guide to Electronic
Marketing for Speakers"
http://www.antion.com/click.htm and I bought my first eBook.
Without question this book changed my business, opened up my creativity,
and literally changed my life.
AT the time I was a 100% bureau booked keynote speaker, selling my self
published personal development adventure novel, CDs and tapes and making
about $300K per year. I thought I was sitting on the top of my game, but
I was sitting on a lot of planes, too.
I would have to take up every page of this issue to tell you how many
things I've put into action since beginning with Tom, but here are a
just a few:
Through my work with Tom, and
the subsequent learning experiences generated by this experience, I have
effectively blitzed through a master's level education on marketing,
Internet selling, copywriting, technological awareness and savvy that
has transformed my speaking career, (I bumped my fee up 50% in May,) and
in my whole entrepreneurial focus.
Rick Butts
Just a few of Rick's Web Projects
http://www.RickButts.com
http://www.ZapTheGap.com
http://www.CustomerServiceVideos.com
http://www.MotivationalKeynoteSpeaker.com
ATTN: Authors, Writers, Speakers!
If you have information that solves a problem, sell your book at
http://www.eBookSource.com and earn 60%-70% commissions! We
will even help you convert your manuscript into eBook format.
For your FREE 5 Day Mini-course and learn how to create, publish,
and profit from the information you have that people are already
searching for...
mailto:mini-course@eBookSource.com and put eBook
Power in the Subject line.
Get Rick's Internet Magazine and get a free copy of the new book
The Big BUTTS of Life - Get Off Your Excuses and Do Big Things -
FREE!
http://www.RickButts.com/ezine
Rick Butts
9070 N 82nd St
Scottsdale, AZ. 85258
480-596-2691 voice
480-596-8019 fax
