I find mistakes all the time, some mistakes bigger than others.

Recently, I was helping a friend with a landing page and something came up about Disclaimers.

He basically had a disclaimer that was VERY scary, and it was positioned before his content.

It was setup like this:

DISCLAIMER

CONTENT

CONTENT

BIGGER DISCLAIMER

Essentially, the content was surrounded by a very scary disclaimer. And, it would never convert in a million years that way, because nobody is even looking at the content and the very small percentage that skip the disclaimer which appears first when reading the page, are already freaked out by the scary disclaimer to give any credit to the content.

The way it should be is this:

CONTENT

CONTENT

DISCLAIMER

Or at the very least like this:

CONTENT

DISCLAIMER

CONTENT

BIGGER DISCLAIMER

In an ideal scenario you will find a good way to truncate your disclaimer so its not more than 4-5 lines. If it’s multiple paragraphs with bold red text, you are going to freak your audience out. I think that disclaimers are generally used to protect yourself legally, not to inform anything that you wouldn’t have already mentioned in the body of your offer. Don’t try to stuff an extra shipping charge in your disclaimer unless you are looking for trouble, people wont see it and then they will charge back.

All in all, a disclaimer is for legal purposes and if it’s not in the traditional position (bottom of the page) you are going to be drawing  unusually high attention to it and freaking your readers out. Don’t make them read your offer/content after seeing a scary disclaimer or you are going to get lower conversions. In fact, I bet there’s a lawyer out there somewhere that would make the argument that if your disclaimer is anywhere but the traditional position that people would normally see one at the bottom of your page, then you are trying to hide it somewhere else (even if it does get more attention at the top). That means lower conversions and more legal trouble, doesn’t sound fun does it?

Keep those disclaimers where they should be unless you don’t want anyone to buy your offer or want to cause unusually high attention to it for some crazy reason. Let it serve it’s purpose and that’s it.

Disclaimer: This is not a legal opinion, I’m not a lawyer. (See how I put this at the end so I didn’t freak you out while reading the content? If I put it at the top you would be thinking about legal nonsense the whole time, and half way through reading you would convince yourself that this would put you in legal trouble … i.e., reading too much into my disclaimer!)

The plugin is similar to one I used to use called Pop Up Domination. Let’s just say, WPSubscribers is the new plugin that I will be using to take care of opt-ins on Daily Conversions from here out.

The features alone on this plugin are not matched anywhere else right now. This is the most dynamic plugin around that lets you control exactly where you want your opt-ins and exactly when they should show and for WHO they should show. It’s all automatic, you don’t have to copy and paste a code or anything like that.

They use a WYSIWYG editor so that you can automatically make Opt-In Forms look good.

Additionally, and this is a really nice feature, they have a feature to automatically setup your AWeber, iContact or whatever form you use. So you just copy and paste the master code from your provider and it automatically figures it out for you, no manual code editing at all.

Many ways to collect optins

• Pop up Opt-in Form
• In Post Opt-in Form
• On exit Opt-in Form
• Facebook Opt-In
• Referral Opt-In
• Post Comment Opt-In Form

There are many different customization options to make your Opt-In Forms unique to your site. You can select from templates, make something from scratch or modify one of the pre-defined templates.

Frequency to show Opt-in Form

You can set the frequency to show basically however you want, whenever you want. You can base it on many different factors such as Pageviews. Additionally, you can have it display only for X pageviews or after X pageviews. The frequency features are very nice, because you can make it seem basically random rather than consistent and annoying.

Everyone is using it

• Ian Fernando.com
• MrGreen.am
• MarketingOracles.com
• DailyConversions.com!

WPSubscribers is the most dynamic, the most powerful, the best WordPress Opt-in manager around. It’s not just a plugin, it’s a complete solution to manage your Opt-ins for your wordpress blog.

Increase your wordpress subscribers now!

If someone is advertising a lot and you see their landing page or website all over the place, should you copy them?

Before you go out copying your competitors here’s a few things to keep in mind.

Just because you see a banner all over the place, doesn’t mean it’s making any money for them.

There are such things as monthly ad placement deals and minimum spends. If your competitor buys a 1 month banner spot, that certainly doesn’t mean it’s making money. In fact, it could be horribly losing money.

Just because you see a landing page all over the place, doesn’t mean it’s making any money for them.

People tend to copy landing pages that they see out there a lot. If everyone copies something that doesn’t work, this could be a falsely viral landing page rip, that doesn’t have any traction in the first place. Everyone copies the losing landing page and everyone falsely assumes it works because they keep seeing it.

Just because it’s making someone else money, doesn’t mean it’s going to make you money.

Even if you are 100% sure a landing page works for someone else, that doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you with YOUR traffic source, YOUR offer payout, YOUR list, YOUR offer… and YOU.

The amount of time people spend copying their competitors they could be just figuring it for themselves and find a winning strategy that works for their offer/product, their traffic source, their landing page and their mentality. This strategy will make you more money.

If all you know how to do is copy, you’re not going to know what to do when that traffic source gets depleted or that landing page stops converting or the affiliate offer or product becomes unavailable. (Even if by some miraculous act of god that copying did work.)

Should a newbie affiliate marketer or internet entrepreneur copy?

No. However, I do recommend LOOKING at what others are doing if you are brand new. But, I most certainly don’t recommend copying. You could lose a LOT of money, by making a seemingly appropriate analysis that someone else is making money, when in fact they might be losing money. Copying could lose you more money than you would have otherwise. Plus, do you really want some pissed off guy trying to crash your hosting and harm you because you copied him?

80% of List Playbook students took my advice and were successful, 20% did not and lost money by copying.

Take it from me first hand that around 80% of my students on List Playbook over the last 8 months took my advice and created new landing pages, found their own unique traffic and made it work without copying. They mostly all made money, good money. 20% went against the grain and tried to copy exactly what they saw out there, most of them failed until they started listening to me.

There’s nothing wrong with watching or even legally “spying” on your competitors, to see what’s going on. Just don’t copy.

I always feel that it’s better to be informed, and know what your competition is doing. Heck, even “spy” on them by refreshing some commonly utilized websites for media buying and see what they are advertising.

Be unique and never ever ever assume that someone is making money just because you see them all over the place!

1. The headline is the most important thing on the page. If that doesn’t capture their attention, they won’t read the rest. Use a red headline, and use quotation marks. The red color is a signal color, and the quotation marks signal importance. Try it!

2. The headline should convey the main benefit that your prospect is going to get from visiting your page. Here is where lots of people fail, because they list the features of the product or service, when the visitor is really more interested in the benefits – the good old “what’s in it for me?”

3. In your copy, pair the features with the benefits. For example for bullet points, what most people do is:

This Product Has This Cool Thing

It’s Tested And Proven

when they should be doing:

This Product Has This Cool Thing – And This Is What That Means To You

It’s Tested And Proven – So That You Can Enjoy The Same Benefits As…

4. If you use a video capture page, don’t forget to autoplay the video (meaning it starts right when they load the webpage). Also, what usually works best is if it’s placed on the left side, with the opt-in box to the right. For the video, it HAS TO start with an introduction that explains what it contains and why the heck they should view it (benefits, anyone?)… much like a headline. The intro delivery should not take more than 7-10 seconds. Capture them!

5. You’ve probably seen this on lots of CPV/PPC landing pages, and it’s because it works:
Put an arrow that points to the opt-in form. This will both make a connection between the copy/video, and it will emphasize the importance of filling out that form.

6. Last but not least, don’t forget to keep it clean. No bling bling, no weird fonts, no graphics that will take the attention away from what they’re there for (filling out the opt-in, duh), and don’t use language that your prospects won’t understand (very common mistake).

Now go out and test your new knowledge, and send 10% of your increased profits to my account… Or come join us at ListPlayBook.com and we’ll teach you how to build a massive list and even more cool ways to increase conversions… Was that just a shameless plug? You bet!

A couple focal points that I want your opinions on:

Is it easy to navigate?

Do you like the logo?

Is there anything you would change?

Answers to any of these questions would be appreciated!

It’s much faster than starting and stopping Google’s tool every time I want to make a small change or add another page.

All you have to do is put this code in your index.php and then all the links in here will rotate randomly and show the visitor those other pages on a random rotation. You can have more or less than 4, just add or remove another as necessary.

Here’s the code (don’t forget to wrap it in PHP tags):

$sites = array(
"http://listplaybook.com/promo1/",
"http://listplaybook.com/promo2/",
"http://listplaybook.com/promo3/",
"http://listplaybook.com/promo4/");

$randomSite = array_rand(array_flip($sites), 1);
header("Location: $randomSite");


This will make index.php rotate to promo1/, promo2/, promo3/, and promo4/ on a random rotation (which at the end of the day is evenly rotated.)

Think it applies to Internet Marketing?

You’d be sadly mistaken if you didn’t answer Yes.

In the sales world the “impression” determines if they are going to buy from you or not.

In Internet Marketing, it determines… guess what? If they are going to buy from you or not

And, if you aren’t directly selling something, it determines how much (or little) of a value they associate with you.

The higher the value, the more trust they have put into you.

How do you get people to give you a higher perceived value and more trust?

Your humanity and the quality of your knowledge, amongst some more complicated stuff that we’ll get into later.

If you are giving someone a load of you know what and they realize they are telling them a load of you know what…..then….. you know what? Their first impression was pretty bad and they probably aren’t going to follow you or buy anything from you.

Now you might be wondering what happens when you make a bad impression. Can you redeem yourself? Yes and no. Think of it like a video game of real life. If you start out with a -5 , you need to work that much harder to build up someones trust and impression of you again.

How does this all apply to Internet Marketing? If you have any type of presence online, you have some type of value associated with you by each and every person that knows about you. Obviously, people don’t sit around writing down numbers of how they value someone, but in the back of their mind they have some sort of subconscious value of you or your product/website.

Another good example is with Email Marketing, List Building and Newsletters (all the same thing.) When you have an email list, you are starting off because someone had a good (or bad) impression of you which triggered them to join your email list. Over the course of 1, 2, 3, 4 (and more) emails they will associate a value to how good or bad you are. Each email will make you look better or worse. The impression of you that they got last week might be different this week because of something you said (or didn’t say.) FYI, if you want to learn more about email marketing and how it be can used in any business, I strongly recommend that you check out my coaching program at ListPlaybook.com.

Impressions are made even on landing pages. However, on landing page, they are made VERY last. A minute at the MOST, usually a matter of seconds is all you have. You need to capture their attention and give the highest value you can to what you are trying to do. When someone goes to your landing page they immediately get an impression. They associate a value to what they are looking at. This time its both numeric and textual. When someone goes to your landing page they associate a small phrase to it. Sometimes this is conscious, sometimes its sub-conscious. That phrase could be as simple as “garbage eBook” because of the poor job you did in trying to sell something with a big sloppy buy button right in the middle of the page that looks like some lame Clickbank product.

The point of all of this is so that you realize that you need to be dealing in quality and it needs to be transparent the second a visitor gets to your website, reads your email or sees whatever it is that you are showing them.

Surveys are a great way to determine what people are seeing. Do some random surveys with friends, pay strangers to do a survey and find other creative ways to get people to give you their honest opinion. Then, go back and increase the quality of what you’re working on so that the next person gets a better impression from your content!

Boring. The rate of people giving him money is low. Time for a split test.

Split testing is extremely important. I’m going to explain to you why it’s so important, using a real life example with a homeless man.

I’m going to show you that there’s always a way to be testing something else, never settle for the industry norm, no matter what you are doing.

Realistically this is BARELY split testing, this is only scratching the surface as to how far you should go in your efforts. You could be testing many many more variations on top of the single change I’m showing you in the below examples. But, the article is to get the point across that you should be doing it in the first place, rather than going in depth about it with my volunteer, Kevin.

So, let’s go through an example of an experiment that I did with Keith, a homeless man. First, realize this… This experiment improved this mans earnings by over 100% over several days thanks to me and on top of that I paid him to let me take pictures (which he was very happy about being featured in a blog article online, especially after I explained exactly what I was doing). I truly believe it was not so much about the actual sign in this case and people would have been donating anyways if he REALLY got their attention in some other way (obviously the cardboard wasn’t working) because he was a really cool guy with a great story once I actually talked to him. Nonetheless, on to the story…

As you can see in the first picture, he was using a very standard “I’m homeless, help me” sign with no major call to action. Just bullets of what is wrong with him. The biggest call to action on this sign is “Hi, I’m Keith” which is not really a call to action, and isn’t anything that would really motivate many people to come over on. So, that’s the biggest flaws in his banner.

The next problem was that his cup (goal) of what he wanted people to do , was tucked between his sign between that and his leg and was not very inviting. This would be like putting an opt-in form or buy button on the footer of a lengthy website tucked in the corner blended with the website colors so you can barely see it, etc. You need to call action to what you want someone to do, not tuck it away in the corner.

So now we move on to a split test. The first thing we always do is make slight modifications to what we already have. In this case it wasn’t practical to change the copy on his banner, so we decided to at least make the goal of what he wanted people to do at least a little more appealing, so we asked him to pick up the cup and try that for a while. This didn’t help his conversions much at all.

Next, we’re going to do an actual split test by comparing the results of another choice with the results and information that we already have about how well his current setup works (not very well).

What we did here was quite different than what most homeless people would do. We focused on a different angle. We already have the “I’m homeless, help me” stigma attached to people that are sitting on the side of the street with a cup, so we don’t necessary need to make that a prominent part of our banner. The next big difference is that we changed colors and went from cardboard to white to spark the interest of people walking by instead of automatically having negative associations that they have with cardboard and homeless people. We want this to look like a new age homeless man who is really trying to make it work for himself. The biggest difference, is that we are now introducing a bribe. We are basically saying “hey I’m homeless, help me, donate to help feed my family and pay my medical bills… but not only that, if you donate right now I’ll give you a free squirt of hand sanitizer”. This can be applied to list building and all sorts of other aspects of Internet Marketing almost as is (don’t try to bribe people to complete offers though, just bribe them to get on your email list). One solid strategy of building a list is that you get people looking at your opt-in form then give them something for free aka a bribe to get them to pull the trigger and fill out the opt-in form for your email list.

By the way, this experiment wasn’t just for shits and giggles, the homeless man started to draw a crowd VERY quickly on this busy street and people were genuinely intrigued by the fact that a homeless man was giving away free hand sanitizer for donations to help his family/medical bills. I talked to a few people walking by on the street and asked them what was going on (playing stupid) and they were saying how there was this “genius” homeless man who they were happy to give money to because he was showing that he must be sober and really trying to make things happen based on his cool concept. In fact, this may have even have made the local news.

Moral of the story, always be split testing and trying different minor tweaks on your landing pages to try to increase conversions. Things as little as colors can play a major factor. I wrote in black as if a homeless man wrote the sign) then I added an “out of place” kind of irrational element to the equation by using a red cup. In affect, what it did was create a buzz of the people walking by and got them talking about it and debating where he got the cup and if it was a joke or if he was a genius.

P.S. This BARELY touches the surface of how far you can go with your split tests. The next avenue to explore would to be see how many different variations of the 2nd sign we can do (with the copy moved around and the product switched/moved around etc – there would be many more tests from that point).

P.S.S. This is a visual example from real life that’s meant to show you, hopefully you weren’t offended by it. If you were then you got the wrong message out of this. The homeless man, Keith, was proud and happy to do it. I may bring him in for an interview and do a video on him. He really has an amazing life story. I’d like to feature him in something that can potentially help others avoid his unfortunate situation and put some more money in his pocket to get back on track with his life.

If you enjoyed this, you’ll love our newsletter.

Secrets So Exclusive We Don’t Even Publish Them On Our Blog. They are totally free!

Building your landing page or opt-in page ON Facebook is EXTREMELY POWERFUL and will increase your conversions.

This is the new way of marketing. It creates authority, increases conversions and you should set one up ASAP!

–Brian

You may have the best ideas in the world as far as what’s going to work on your landing page and ads. You may even have data that shows what has worked in the past. But that doesn’t mean its going to work today or forever! And it certainly doesn’t mean that you have found the best way and most profitable way to do it.

There is always something else to split test. There are literally so many factors that go into the decision making process people have wrote hundreds of page books on the process and still are barely scratching the surface.

The bottom line as Dan Ariely proves in his book Predictably Irrational, is that behavior is NOT always Rational (even when our MONEY is on the line!) And that sometimes even the silliest changes can yield more profits. Sometimes it’s literally the one idea that you say “nah, that’s too simple that wouldn’t work… would it?” sometimes those ideas the ones u dismiss right away in your mind  (the sometimes irrational ones) can be the ones that work so well.

Here’s some other factors in landing pages that are usually overlooked or not given enough attention.

Colors alone play a major role, the wrong “non sales” color can turn people off who may have bought otherwise. A creative google search will link you to many studies on this.

You can have the best sales page in the world but if you leave out the trust building process then you are skipping a major step! Read the book Trust Agents or listen to any of the new Frank Kern List Control stuff.

Make sure to have a control in your split test so you have something to compare to. Base all of your additional testing pages off of the control page so that you can say that 1 simple factor showed improvement, rather than trying to guess which modification yield better results.

The landing page is not the only thing you should be split testing, you should be split testing your ads, keywords, demographic targeting and sources of traffic as well.

Whenever possible get them to opt-in to an email list on your sales pages so that you have additional chances to build a relationship with them and ultimately get them to buy something.

Questions to ask yourself to help improve your landing page:

What is the “Call to Action” on this page? In other words, what is the most important thing that I want them to do on the page. If you have more than 1 page make sure that each page has a clear Call to Action and then focus your efforts around getting them to take that action. Always favor the shortest simplest process that you can. I’m not saying to write a short sales page but always favor short over long if you can make the sale quickly rather than prolong it. (Sometimes it takes a long sales page to make a conversion depending on various factors).

“SO What?” Ask yourself this question after READING your landing page. This is a question to ask based on the particular offer on the page. Say “So what?” and keep answering your own question by re-writing your landing page until its extremely powerful, simple and motivates you to do something (this question can also work well for ad writing too).

Surveys can be very useful and are rarely used by Internet Marketers for the purposes of improving their own sales process. When you build a list, segment it into a few parts then ask them to reply to your email with what they think of the product/what they would like to see added on/what they dislike/ etc.  People will generally be pretty honest, especially when saying what they dislike about your sales offer. You can then put this information in your future ads, future emails and future sales/landing pages for the particular product or campaign. It’s a very commonly overlooked part of the process and surveying is a great way to really be able to get to know your list/customers. Then, if you’re able to squash all the common questions or dislikes about your product before sending them to the actual sales page, then you are way ahead of the game and your conversion rates are going to sky-rocket. You could even make jokes about the common misunderstandings people have of your product, to put them at ease about it. You might be asking yourself what if you don’t have a list? Well, if you have customers buying products of yours and you aren’t capturing their email even on the checkout process then you need to take a close look at your business model for these kinds of gaps. You should at minimum be capturing on the checkout process to upsell and keep them a long term customer for future products.

If you are an affiliate marketer running offers, this also still applies to you. You should be building that list of ultra highly qualified customers before they buy anything. Then you can keep selling them over and over on related products BY building a relationship with them through email! The better the relationship you build with them by telling them stories that involve you and the products (amongst other things) the better they are going to convert for you time and time again. Being an affiliate is no excuse not to be split testing, building lists or surveying.

Always be split testing. There’s always something to test. Don’t let yourself go crazy with it, make sure that you can properly analyze all of your split tests. Do them small at first and work yourself up to running several split tests for a single campaign. Always be aware that several factors go into the decision making process and that you may never figure them all out. The best way to figure something out in Internet Marketing is to give your visitors these slight variations and let them tell you both by surveying and by their actions on your split test pages.

–Brian