Instant Marketing Fix – Why Direct Response Advertising Sell More?
If you have been in business, then you know how advertising and marketing are back bone of any business. Even if you understand that, chances are you are still running ads that are costing you more than the returns on it.
For example.
If your newspaper advertisement costs you X dollars and you are not sure how much business this ad generates then you are just wasting your money.
If your newspaper advertisement costs you X dollars and it’s gives you return on X dollars too, then you should understand there are ways you can increase profit on your advertisement.
In New Delhi, One of the magazine publishing company asked for a critique in their on-going advertisement. The headache was they were getting almost no subscribers (close to 400–500 subscriber a month).
Now for a magazine these numbers are very important. One of the monetization method that they use depends on “how much people are ready to spend in their magazine”.
Now When I was critiquing their full page ad. I told their marketing manager to create a better offer and show him what kind of offer it’d work. Plus I re-wrote few key lines in the ads that helped generate subscribers.
My critique gave them 12–15 things to change immediately. (NOTE: All of this is about copywriting that sells, click here for more info).
When the next time they ran they changed 3–4 things and improve their offer for subscription.
Can you guess how the change worked?
Their subscription jumped from 500 a month to 15,000 a month.
They didn’t pay anything extra to run this advertising. They didn’t pay anything extra to create new offer. All they changed was few words on the advertising.
The key to success here was “Direct response advertising”. In DR ads, the reader is engaged and directed to act (or buy). There’s nothing un-ethical about this as all the ad discuss the benefits of working with your company, the product or the service in detail.
This kind of advertising works in print, Audio(radio), Video (infomercials) and internet (web copy). You’d be surprised by the results you see after you make few key changes in the copy.
Remember a Good marketing strategy + Good Advertisement = Good Results.
Good marketing strategy + Good Advertisement + Good product/service = Damn Good Results.
This is as simple as that. So if you want to improve your chances, you should think about how to improve your advertising to succeed.
If you need help with critiques, you can check with me here.
Varun Pratap
Desire. Commit. Succeed.
Use these strategies to Improve sales on your website.
Well, you have your website, and people are coming in hordes and buying stuff from your website. And..
What if I tell you, “You can easily increase your sales by 30–50% by doing few things differently”, are you going to be interested?
If the answer is yes, then keep reading as this is what I am going to talk about it here.
Which Do you Chose?
80 Unique Visitors = $3 income or 80 Unique Visitors $70 Income per day.
I once had a website, which had very little traffic and was making $3 a day. For some reason, I decided to work on my website design, offer to improve visitors to sales conversion. I spent lot of time working on every small detail I could think of and end result was $70/day Income from same numbers of visitors.
Can you believe with same amount of visitors I increased my income by 23 times?
Holy crap!!!. Yes, that was my response.
When I realized how much money I was leaving at the table, I instantly become convert to the idea of testing.
Test Your Headline, Offer, Price and dramatically Improve your sales.
Now when I started testing. I didn’t had any good software script that could help me. But you don’t have to worry about it.
If you have a google account (which you can create anytime), you can start experimenting with your website content and find out how to convert more visitors into sales.
Google Web Optimizer Script : You don’t have to worry about installing it to your webserver. You just have to create a web optimizer account and get started.
Try with an A/B Split Test experiment.
When you are testing, you should at least start with A/B split test experiment (Check Wikipedia for more info).
From Google Answers. An A/B experiment allows you to test the performance of two (or more!) entirely different versions of a page. Start with your original test page — the page whose content you want to test — then create alternate versions of that page. You can change the content of a page, alter the look and feel, or move around the layout of your alternate pages — whatever you choose. We’ll vary traffic to your original page and your alternate versions, to see what users respond to best.
A/B experiments are the simpler version of testing with Website Optimizer. If you have a low amount of traffic and want results fast, creating an A/B test may be the right place to start.
A/B experiment testings 2 different elements of your website.
For example. If you have a headline something like
“How to lose 10 pounds fast?”.
You can try testing another headline against this
“How to lose 10 pounds in 20 days with this secret calorie shifting technique”
All you need to do is create an A/B experiment in google web optimizer and copy and paste a simple script which will show different variation of your headline to your visitors.
And then it’ll generate a report on which version produce better results.
Video on how to do A/B Split Test experiment.
Now when you start with a testing your headline like this, you’ll be surprised to see the results. Often marketers don’t know which of their version of content will perform better. But as you start testing and keep records of these tests, you’ll start getting into the psyche of your visitors and perform better.
This is the reasoning behind split testing.
You should test these elements in the decreasing order.
1. Headline (MOST IMPORTANT)
2. Price
3. Offer
4. Audio/Video demo
5. Layout
Just This simple A/B split test will open the doors of wonder for you. You’ll start seeing the numbers complete differently. I hope this post at least get you started on the right track of testing.
Best Regards
Varun Pratap
Desire. Commit. Succeed.
My Way of Putting together a Website.
I have been working online since 2004 and I had my shares of up and downs when it came to internet marketing. One of the biggest headache or pain in the ass while starting online is putting together a website.
I don’t mean in technical terms. You can hire anyone to get a website in a week or less. No I meant in terms of Marketing, Producing, it’s like giving a birth to website.
1. What’s Your Goal? – When I am starting out, I ask myself a very simple question. What’s my goal? Now of course, your goal can be, saving the world, making money, just plain old vanilla putting your business offline.
But in this phase, you have to find out how you are going to achieve your end goal.
For example, this website http://www.varunpratap.com/ went through many phases (from a personal website to fitness blog to again a personal website to professional website to phew… tooo many). I ended up scraping all of these earlier versions just because I wasn’t satisfied.
I am a creative person and I need an outlet where I can speak, shout, rant or just be darn creative.
Currently my slogan “Desire. Commit. Succeed” is something I want others to experience. And to me, there’s nothing better using a blog to share your experience. With my experience in many diverse fields, I know I’ll end up talking about tons of different things on this blog.
So you have to decide what’s your ultimate goal? And how you are going to achieve it?
2. How are you going to create a connection? – Websites do not exists in solitude. In fact nothing exists in solitude. So when you are going to make a website, you have to find a way to create a connection with people who are going to visit your website.
There’s no other way. You cannot avoid this. No matter who you are. No matter what business you are in. No matter what your race is or where you live.
Your website cannot live without visitors and there has to be a way to connect with them.
2 Easiest way to connect with them are
1. Blog Like this one.
2. Newsletter
3. Forum (I am adding this one but it takes lots of efforts to maintain a forum).
You also have to understand about the media (Audio and Video). Because they ultimately create a connection. You have to check whether you can use it or not.
3. Potential to monetize or not – Third thing I think about potential to monetize a website. It’s very simple, If you are already making an effort to build and maintain a website, then why not monetize it?
There are many ways to monetize. The easiest to implement are :-
1. Sell advertisement space.
2. You can create a list and sell advertisement.
3. Create a product/s and sell it.
4. Promote affiliate products.
5. Sell your services.
Now this is how I start even before I order a website design to be done. I worry about my prospects. I prepare about how I am going to connect. I prepare about how to market. I prepare about how to sell.
Like I said, any one can put a website online. These days even toddlers and their pets have one. But all of this underestimates the real though that goes behind putting a website together.
It’s not that complicated. In fact it’s easiest the moment you decide “What’s my Ultimate goal with this website?”.
This is first of my 3 part formula “Decide. Commit. Succeed”. The moment you decide and decide to commit, things changes. Everything will work in your favor depending on your will. And Succeeding is just next step.
Notice, there’s no where I talked about SEO (search engine optimization) or any other new internet technologies. Because we don’t have to worry about them.
First build a website in mind, then on paper and only then come online.
Best Regards,
Varun Pratap
Desire. Commit. Succeed.
What’s The Singlemost Factor Behind ANY Successful Website?
If I were to ask you, what’s the singlemost factor behind any successful website then what would be your answer?
This factor is common to Catalog sites, Personal sites, business sites, content sites, portal sites and every other sites that exists.
Here are few of the answers people believe are right-
1. Website Design
2. Slogan
3. Graphics and Logo
4. Marketing approach
5. Any latest Internet Technology (web 2.0, blog and ping, rss feeds etc)
5. any other answer (any answer that talks about getting traffic is not right, we are talking about website)
If your answer is any of the above, then it’s wrong.
The right answer is “The Words You use on your website”.
I know this is surprising but imagine how a website would look like without any words. Imagine what your graphics, design alone without words would say?
In fact if you take any B2B website, remove their words and then look, you’ll get Same design, Same style that it’ll be hard to differentiate between them.
You are on my blog not because you like the design or you just know me or you think this is the next coming of internet technology. No. You are here because of the words I wrote. You are spending time because the Words jump out to you and resonate with you.
Just take google.com the world’s best search engine website. What’d happen if I remove the words.
Can you make head or tail of it? You have no idea what to do? Heck even their logo is made up of word google.
What I did was erase “Google Search” and “I’m Feeling Lucky” from the buttons above.
Before you came at google, you knew what’ll happen if you enter a term and click “Google Search”. But now you are clueless.
That’s why I suggest in the website, the most important factor is the words you use.
It’ll help differentiate your website than your competitors.
It’ll help you connect with your customers/prospects easily.
It’ll give meaning to your pictures, graphics on your website.
It’ll help you build trust with your visitors.
It’ll help you share information with your visitors/prospects/customers (isn’t that’s the whole reason you got your website?)
Words will help you brand your business and website.
Now the question is does any kind of word will help you? Of course the answer is NO.
You have to use words, that helps your visitors to guide through your website, understand how your website can help, and show them how to get solution to their problems.
Words will make a heck a lot difference if you just open your eyes and listen to your customers voice.
Click Here if your goal is to create a High performing website.
What has internet marketing taught me in last 5 years.
Whew, it has been 5 years and right now I am looking back at the lessons Internet marketing taught me over the years. Of course I am not discussing marketing tactics and techniques here otherwise this blog post will probably turn in a huge book.
First lesson :- Strike and Grab the Opportunity fast whenever it presents
This is the first and most important lesson that you’ll learn while doing Internet Marketing.
It all comes down to speed of implementation. If you are slow, time will move on and chances of your profiting from the opportunity has left you by.
If you compare internet time line to offline line real world time line, then time is moving at least 4 times faster on internet (that’s due to advancement in Internet technologies). The cause and effect can be seen almost immediately of internet technology and time.
People who sit on the side line and wait and check are often late and broke.
That’s why I said speed of implementation is important.
Second Lesson : Ideas are dime a dozen, Action is rarer.
Too many people have way too many ideas… but people who take action are rarer. And thats true in harshest of terms for people on internet. With the access to ever changing technologies, people can exchange ideas in a blink. But People who take action on those ideas are rare and those who do, often succeeds.
Again complimented with first lesson of speed of implementation, this will help you tremendously.
Third lesson : Sell whenever the damn you can
Someone told me, “Every attempt at communication is an attempt of persuasion. Either you are persuading someone or being persuaded by someone”. When I am writing as “Sell whenever the damn you can”, it sounds like a sleazy salesman or slick opportunist.
But that’s not my intent at all.
In internet, the method of communication changes a LOT and if you have a business, you have to learn, adapt and implement different communication methods. If you are selling online you have to utilize every opportunity to communicate efficiently otherwise you’ll not sell at all.
Fourth Lesson : Learn to communicate with written word.
Now as you can guess, learning to write is going to be one of the most important way to communicate online. If you can’t write, you can’t communicate. Oh yes there are videos, audios too but let me say it again, written communication is a HUGE part of Online communities. You just cannot ignore it.
Fifth Lesson : It only takes one silly mistake to get crushed in the time
Doing business ethically is important. With internet and the ease of communication methods, you can be easily crushed. If you are a good businessman, then people won’t be able to slander you even with internet. Why ? because your evangelists(customers) will help you fight against them.
You are nothing but a speck of dirt in the time line and trust me, it’s going to be important to do your business ethically and grow and succeed.
There are many other things I can write here but I think the long laundry list is unnecessary. 5 lessons will suffice for now.
Varun Pratap
Desire. Commit. Succeed.
Beware of Sharks When You are Getting Your Business Online
How to harness the true power of Internet for an Offline Business?
Business Owners tend to get burned by greedy sharks when it comes to getting their business online. One of the simplest way they get burned is by SEO (Search engine optimization) Experts. Typical SEO techniques might not work for offline business, Infact I dare say, often they don’t need those services at all.
And often these services are quite pricey even at their lowest packages (at around $5000).
Just couple of days I got a call from one of my reader asking about XYZ SEO company’s package. So I checked out their package and I almost spilled my evening tea on my PC’s screen.
SEO services are expensive and they are the kind of the expense sometimes you can live without. Their price ranges from $5000 – $50,000+. If you are wondering if it’s right decision to buy a package like that, then step back and again rationalize.
The worst part is most business owners can’t differentiate between good service or bad service when it comes to SEO. Heck this field is so complicated it even makes most online marketers sweat. And it’s purposely set that way to wring more money out of you.
When it comes to harnessing the true power for an offline business.
You are better off if you focus more towards creating and building relationships with your customer base.
You are better off spending more time utilizing Audio and Video to help create more trust in your visitors.
You are better off spending more time creating product demos which can help you sell more products.
Think of your website as platform which will help you sell more in real world. Do not worry about Typical SEO or things like that.
Think how can your website help your current marketing efforts in your business?
Think how can your website help you relate with your customers?
These questions will help you understand what kind of marketing approach you should use on your website. Without a sound marketing approach all the SEO, all the bells and whistles, all the graphics on your website is just waste of space.
Think about your marketing first, then about your website.
Own Your Business, Don’t get Owned By it.
Yesterday evening, I spent 3 hrs in meeting with one of the sharpest marketing mind in New Delhi. We discussed content, marketing strategies and many others things that we are going to cover in my upcoming seminar on building business.
One of my foundational base is “Scientific advertising”. In this, you have to understand the nature of your product, your company, your customer base and so much more so that you can create a marketing frenzy. It goes beyond what you might think about marketing or selling.
And because I have worked with pretty darn successful companies in New Delhi. I realized they have no concept of marketing and selling. Often their marketers are doing the job of salesman (and doing a piss poor job of it) and their marketing is literally man-handled by people who should have nothing to do with marketing at all.
For Example :– One of the Marketer for this publishing company was more worried about selling the advertisement page for the magazine rather than creating a strategy which results in automatically selling those pages, building a database or may be more effective brand awareness.
And these marketers have gall to brag about how successful their last campaign was. When you ask them what are they going to do afterwards, their silence give you the answer. Sometimes I wonder what exactly they think their job as marketer is?
Ah, I digress.
The problem with institutional advertising is, it’s too time consuming, too resource hogging, too pricey and almost always gets results which cannot be substantiated. This is where most business owners get owned and swallowed by their own business.
And this is exactly where I am going to show how anyone can handle their own marketing with just a shift in mindset. If your base is “scientific advertising”, then you’ll see results of your campaign and be able to realize and make informed decisions whether you should scrap this campaign or not before it starts bleeding your account dry.
And that’s how exactly you should be doing your business.
For example :– I helped a marketer with a full page advertisement which was going on 4 national monthly magazines with re-creating the offer, changing image position and improving the overall impact of the advertisement. The results was staggering. He could not believe how much response his ad got. His office was swamped with calls and people tried to get their hands on the offer.
The best part was he knew when to scrap this campaign as it started losing steam and instantly changed the offer with new advertisement improving his results.
Now this is what I call smart marketing. I did help create the advertisement, but it’s his job to make sure he runs it and follows it afterwards. Most MBA grads spend spray shinning their diploma/degree rather than understand how to actually successful market and campaign their products.
GOOOooooNNNN… That’s sound like Trouble
GOOOOoooonNNNNN… That’s the sound (rather noise) my Hard disk is making right now. At first I didn’t notice it but as the noise kept growing. And that sounds like Trouble with Capital T.
Now I am bit worried.
I am worried because I know it is happening one of the 2 reasons.
1. My Hard disk is dieing.
2. Data cable is not processing data properly.
If you have a business like mine, you’d be shit scared right now. WHY? because most of my stuff related to business is in computers. I don’t have to worry about Data back up as I do it often. But more of the passwords, settings my computer has, important email accounts and emails.
Today is Deewali, and I can’t buy a new hard disk because of the festival holiday. ARGHHH…
First is my to Do list for saving back up is
File & User settings. It’ll keep take care of basic User settings.
Next I am going to back up my Outlook Express (incidently I don’t know how, DAMN).
Third I am going to take complete back up of my Master Boot Record and C Drive. So that I can re-install all the softwares and settings in new hard disk. I am worried because this is going to be my first time trying to do this. I’ll Keep my finger crossed and pray it works in 1st attempt.
As I am taking back up, I am bit stressed.
Before all of this happened, I was working on my Live Online Marketing Seminar Next Week and My 3 Week Workshop on “Effortless writing”. It’s scary because now my focus is divided into many things including seminar and workshop, taking care of seminar attendees etc. Of course, I am worried. But even then I am planning to prepare for it mentally and physically and make my seminar and workshop a SUPER SUCCESS.
I know the distraction caused by this hard disk problem will cost me at least a day. If you are wondering how I am going to cope with it? Well I don’t know. When I focus, I focus completely to my goals. That’s always how I did it and It’s how I am going to do it.
I know, I should have listened to my Hardware friend about backups. But hey, there are always things we learn the hard way. 
Varun Pratap
Desire. Commit. Succeed.
My 5 Key points of designing website.
When it comes to your website, extra attention should be paid to every minute detail to make sure it performs optimally to serve its purpose. Here are seven important rules of thumb to observe to make sure your website performs well.
1) Do not use splash pages
Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website. They normally have a very beautiful image with words like “welcome” or “click here to enter”. In fact, they are just that — pretty vases with no real purpose. Do not let your visitors have a reason to click on the “back” button! Give them the value of your site up front without the splash page.
2) Do not use excessive banner advertisements
Even the least net savvy people have trained themselves to ignore banner advertisements so you will be wasting valuable website real estate. Instead, provide more valueable content and weave relevant affiliate links into your content, and let your visitors feel that they want to buy instead of being pushed to buy.
3) Have a simple and clear navigation
You have to provide a simple and very straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don’t know how to navigate, they will leave your site.
4) Have a clear indication of where the user is
When visitors are deeply engrossed in browsing your site, you will want to make sure they know which part of the site they are in at that moment. That way, they will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site easily. Don’t confuse your visitors because confusion means “abandon ship”!
5) Should have a content management system which provides RSS feeds.
RSS feeds will help you promote your website. Whenever you update your website, RSS feed let the whole world know about the updation. Its like Self-promotion on steroids. In a nutshell – you’re nuts NOT to use an RSS feed. The Internet is changing, just like everything else
Are You making this List building mistake?
Most people who know of list building online assumes that it is important for people who have products to sell. They assume if they have a content based model of monetization, they don’t have to worry about list building or building relationship with subscribers.
Guess what, This is web 2.0 (where your relationship with your subscriber/visitor counts). You have to build list regardless of your business model.
If you own one-page sales letter business models or content-based websites, you should turn every webpage possible into subscriber snatching devices for you. The good news is that not only is this method extra effective, it is just as extra effortless when it comes to applying the concept.
Since visitors can come and leave without remembering your website in the future (which is very likely to happen), you can still follow up with your visitors easily by seeking their permission to opt into your mailing list through your web pages – on autopilot!
You can create a pop up window to appear after your visitor attempts to close the window or leaves your website, asking for your visitor’s name and email address so that you can follow up with him or her in the near future via subscribing to your mailing list for free.
This way, you can convert a big portion of your visitors into subscribers, giving you a chance to follow up with them on other offers you may have in the future.
Alternatively, you can insert an opt-in form within the spaces of your web pages. This method is effective, especially if you are afraid of Internet users who have pop up killers installed in their web browsers, set to block any pop up windows.
In conclusion, turning every webpage you own into subscriber snatching devices with little effort can be responsible for huge subscriber-pulling results.
Check Out For more information on Email & List Building Strategies.
Strategic Internet Marketing- Article Writing – Turn Articles Into Ebooks and get paid
- Why You should Ignore Search Engines?
- Affiliate Marketers – Can You reduce Your Time/Money expenditure by 70%?
- How Not To Suck at making Money?
- Internet Marketing Strategy – Why Do Some Affiliate Marketers Fail?
- My Secret Behind High Speed Writing.
- Market Positioning – 4 Tips to Position Yourself As an Expert in Any Market
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