….
It’s awfully quiet.
….
Nothing? Really?

Making money with your website by leaving your profits to chance is like buying a lottery ticket. You might win — anything is possible — but the odds are against you.

If you’re serious about making money online, make testing part of your web marketing strategy. Let’s look at why testing matters and what to test and when.

Why Testing Matters
A couple of weeks ago I headed out after work for a quick 20 mile bike ride. Nice evening, not too much traffic - everything was going great until my rear tire went flat.

I thought, no problem, I’ve got spare tubes and a sleek, lightweight carbon fiber pump I paid a premium for. Within seconds I had the new tube in the tire. But when I went to inflate it, I discovered, much to my chagrin, that my pump didn’t fit the tire valve.

I’d never tested my pump. I didn’t know that I’d chosen a great looking and expensive pump that only worked on one type of tire valve. More importantly, it didn’t work on the valves I had with me. There I was by the side of the road with all the tools to fix a flat, but they didn’t work together to get me rolling again.

Is your web site broken down leaving you stuck?
Find out how to fix it >>

You have a home page, a couple of additional supporting pages, an email address for people to contact you. Your site looks great, but is it working to generate leads, sales and profits?

What’s the solution?

Testing!

You want to optimize your site’s performance so it brings in a steady stream of profits. Without testing, you won’t know what’s working and what’s not. Each element of your web site needs to be tested to see if it is actually doing the job you expect it to do.

Here are the top 3 things to test.

1. Your Marketing Message
Test the headline you put at the top of the page that tells people why they should stay on your site. You can use Google Ads to run split tests to two different pages and see which headline keeps people on the page the longest or which prompts the most number of people to contact you.

2. Your Free Offer
One of the fastest ways to generate leads with your site is to offer something for free, but just adding a free offer subscribe form on your page won’t get you the most leads. The key is to provide your site visitors with a compelling reason to give you their contact information.

Test the offers you provide, even if it’s just for something you are giving away, to see which offers generate the most leads and sales. The wrong offer won’t generate leads. Find the right one, and you can easily prompt dozens of people to contact you each day and double or triple your profits.

3. Your Page Design
The size, color and placement of different elements on the page determine how well your visitors understand what you want them to do. Changing the size and color of your headline and subhead, for example, can make all the difference in whether or not visitors take the action you want them to take.

For example, I recently did a test with the sign up form on my home page. Instead of asking people to sign up for my free report in two places at the top of the page, I designed a larger sign-up form and asked them once. The larger, single sign up form converted twice as well.

You could spend the next 10 years figuring out what works to sell online — or you could use proven web marketing strategies and techniques to get results right away.

Here’s the shortcut to online success >>

How Much Can Testing Improve Your Sales?
I had one client who was a big believer in testing. Every time I suggested a change to their site, they’d test it to see if they wanted to make it a permanent one.

Within the first three months that I worked with them, they tripled their lead acquisition and sales. Over the next three years we continued to test the elements of their site and ultimately increased their conversion rates by a factor of 17.

Want to increase your online sales by a factor of 17?
Here’s how >>

Testing is the key. To make it simple for you, I’ve spent the last 10 years testing what works to get more people to come to your site, to contact you and to buy from you.

Many web site owners leave their online profits to chance. I know you’re smarter than that and would rather put proven techniques and strategies to use to jump-start your sales.

Don’t get stranded beside the road, as I did when I forgot to test my bike pump. Discover what works to make your web site a success.

To your success,

Charlie

P.S. Try this one test to evaluate whether you’re web site is working. Is it making a profit of $10,000 or more each month?

Smart people like you know when to stop doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If your web site isn’t making as much money as you want it to make, you know it’s time to take action and get back on the road to success.

Here’s how >>

What’s the one web marketing disaster that happens every day?

It happens to almost every website owner dozens, if not hundreds, of times a day.

A visitor clicks to your site. They take a look at your home page and then they leave without so much as an email or phone call to you.

If you have a top search engine position, this may happen hundreds of times a day. If you’re using pay-per-click advertising, this happens as often as you can afford to pay for it.

In the first case, you’ve probably invested a lot of hard work into achieving a top search engine ranking and in the second, a lot of money in advertising. The result? You’re losing money or barely breaking even on your web site investment.

Most business owners with well-planned sites get hundreds, or even thousands, of interested prospects visiting their sites each week and then - nothing. Your prospects don’t come back and they don’t buy from you in spite of all your efforts.

“What’s going on?” you ask yourself, as you try to make sense of all these lost opportunities to generate a lead or a sale. “What did I do wrong? Aren’t people interested in my products and services?”

It just doesn’t compute. You know that your existing customers are happy, so why don’t more people contact you and buy from your website? Find the answer here >>

For most business owners, the problem has nothing to do with you. You provide top quality products and services, don’t you!?

Yet, something happened when your prospect visited your website and left without a word. And this, more likely than not, is what that something was…

One of three things could have happened when your prospect landed on your site to make them leave without contacting you or buying from you.

1. They were looking for something different.
Your site sells jewelry and they were looking for dog treats. Unless the copy on your site has nothing to do with what you sell and the keywords you’re using for your pay-per-click ads are totally wrong - this is highly unlikely which brings me to…

2. Your prospects only had a passing interest.
When they saw your site they lost interest in looking for a solution to their problem. While anything can happen, most people are much more dogged about finding answers.

What’s the web marketing secret to that will get your prospects to come back? Find the answer here >>

Most people will search for hours online until they find what they want, which brings me to the third and most likely reason your prospects left without contacting you…

3. Your site didn’t show them what they wanted to see.
The key information they were searching for was missing entirely or wasn’t readily available. Or your site may not have given them information in the order they were expecting. Prospects are picky that way.

If you want your prospect to stay on your website, contact you and buy from you, you need to know:

- What your prospects want to read at the top of your homepage.

- How to get them to contact you before they leave your site and forget about you.

- How to lay out your web page to get your prospects to take action and buy from you.

- The common design mistakes that will send your prospects packing.

When you know this and build your site around the information your prospects want, you can easily convert up to 20% of all the visitors to your site into qualified prospects and up to 10% into clients and customers.

Let me ask you something. Who built your website?

Most business owners are way too busy to master the technology to build their sites themselves. They hire web designers and programmers. Sounds like a good idea.

Unfortunately, hardly any web designers know how to create sites that sell, either!

Let me repeat that. Web designers don’t know how to build a site that sells.

Most web designers know nothing about converting prospects into customers, which after all is what your site is supposed to do. If they had any formal training it was in design or programming, not in generating leads or sales or in how to make a profit with your site.

It’s not that some web designers aren’t creative and smart but without the right copy or a clear plan you’re asking them to do something that they don’t know how to do. It’d be like hiring a carpenter and telling him to build your dream house but not bothering to give him the plans for the foundation or layout of the house.

Want to make a profit with your web site? Discover what works >>

Leaving your site up and hoping your response rate will change and you’ll start raking in the sales is a waste of time, too. The truth is that you can be successful online if you have great products and services and if you know what works to get prospects to contact you and buy from you.

Ready to find out how make your site sell? Get the web marketing details here >>

Charlie
Web Marketing Ideas that Sell

To listen to the podcast online, use this link >>

Do a search on popular web site marketing topics and “List Building” comes up as one of the most popular. If you don’t have a large in-house qualified list to mail to then, you should.

A few tactics to use are a free giveaway to motivate people to fill in a simple form on your site and give you their contact information. The best ways to get people to your site to fill in the form is top search engine placement, articles, links from other sites and Google Ads. But just building your list is only the start to making your online marketing work…

The key to online marketing success isn’t just having a big list of qualified prospects, it’s using it correctly to convert prospects to clients. Here are a couple of key things to remember.

Unless your prospects receive and open the emails you send them you’re wasting your time. Many email broadcast services happily charge you to send your mailings, but only a few actually deliver.

That’s right. You could have list of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of prospects but when most email broadcast services send your emails, only a very small percentage receive them much less open them. More important than a great subject line to get them to open your email, or great copy to get them to read it is how many people actually receive your email.

Want to know if your email campaigns are working?

Send your email in html and then check the open rates. If only a couple of percent of people are reading it you’ve got a problem. With a top quality email broadcast service 20-30% of your audience should at least open your emails.

What’s more important than building your list?

The number of people who actually get your email and open it.

- Charlie
Small Business Marketing - Time Tested and Proven Ideas