As I watched John Reese’s new video which is part of his pre-launch for Opportunity.com I was struck by a couple of things. First, I always like his style. His presentation skills are top notch. Second, this video epitomizes the idea of “flawless execution of the bacis” — it’s not complicated to build effective online selling systems.  And third, without good tracking, metrics, and reporting, anyone who uses a system like this will leave a lot of money on the table.

If you watch the video, you will see that “Sales Per Subscriber” is one of the key metrics that John uses — a very powerful metric indeed.

Right now, VisiOlo provides these kinds of metrics, but not for “other” people’s products — in other words, we can show you key metrics like this for *all* of your products, but it is difficult (if not impossible if you stay in the white hat side of the ring) to track sales for affiliate products in one place.  Of course, you can log in to multiple accounts and transfer all of the information to a spreadsheet to calculate a metric like this, but that takes lots of time and — as such — people won’t do it for long.

I have a solution in mind, or at least a possible solution, that would allow VisiOlo to track affiliate sales and add these into the overall metrics for users.  Only time and testing will proove if I am right or wrong.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Last week, I launched my first beta test for a VisiOlo offer.

Do you beta test your offers before launch?  At this point, I won’t launch anything without testing first. I elaborated on the need for beta testing of offers on this guest blog post on testing offers in the Internet Marketing Niche at The How To Project.

Here’s an excerpt of that post:

Before you launch a product, it’s extremely important to launch with the confidence that comes from testing your sales process before you do a launch.

JV partners and affiliates are much more responsive to an invitation to join a launch if they can see evidence that you’ve at least worked out the kinks in your sales process and at best optimized your sales process for maximum conversion.

I would say that no one likes to be a guinea pig, but that’s not true. If you ask close partners and friends to help you test, they will. But they like to know that it’s a test.

If your promotional partners feel that you are attempting to launch a ‘green’ untested system, they will shy away from your launch or they won’t get behind it with the gusto that you would like.

There are ways to test in *any* niche, but since I do my testing in the IM niche, let me share with you some ideas that will help you do effective beta testing.

My initial test gave me some great insights into my offer. The test included mailing to a specific group of my past customers, a WSO (Warrior Special Offer) in the Warrior Forum, and a single mailing from a JV partner.

Here are the results:

My List

• Impressions: 516
• Clicks: 30
• Click Conversion: 5.8%
• Sales: 2
• Sales Conversion: 6.6%
• Revenue: $154
• Revenue Per Click: $5.13

WSO

• Impressions: 239
• Clicks: 33
• Click conversion: 13.8%
• Sales: 0
• Sales Conversion: 0%

Partner Promo

• Impressions: 7100
• Clicks: 255
• Click Conversion: 3.5%
• Sales: 2
• Sales Conversion: .8%
• Affiliate revenue: $77
• Revenue per click: $.30

Keeping mind that there are multiple moving parts here, I think it’s safe to say that the offer is converting at a dismal rate.  Out of a total of 320 visitors to the sales page (some visitors came from different sources) only 4 sales were made. That’s a sales conversion rate of 1.3% – not stellar to say the least.

These were, for the most part, the most qualified prospects I would expect to have. The conversion rate *should* be much higher — like 10X higher.

I think, with tweaks to the sale page, I could easily double the conversion rate, but with results this far “off” I really think that the offer itself needs to be revised.

My guess is that VisiOlo is something that one has to *experience* in order to really understand it.  I can do more on the sales letter to explain how VisiOlo works and how it can transform one’s business, but it’s far better to let prospects experience it for themselves.

It’s a guess, but probably a pretty accurate one.

Next Actions

Armed with the information that I collected in my test, I feel that adding a ‘trial period’ to the offer will greatly improve results. I’ve already asked members of my advisory team about introducing a trial period and they concur. I’ll ask the rest of the team just for a reality check, but more than likely, the next test will include a 14-day $1 trial period with automatic billing of the remainder of the offer on day 15. This will give users a chance to log in to their accounts, set up a system or two and collect some data.

I couldn’t come close to that kind of engagement in a sales letter, so it makes sense to me.  Spending $1 for a 14-day trial is an easy decision for the target audience to make.  The next test will probably occur after the new year, but as soon as I have more data, I’ll report back.

Note: I know you would like to see the offer, but since this was a closed offer, I’ve chosen not to post links.

Related posts:

1. Lead Generation Offer (LGO): Purpose and Common Types The LGO serves only one purpose.  It gets qualified...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I wanted to play with Animoto based on J-Mo’s recommendation. It’s a great tool!  You upload a bunch of images, pick music, and the tool creates a video (like the one below) that is ready to share and upload. I used the one-click publishing to YouTube. Nice!

As you can see from the video, I’ve done a lot of mind-mapping and system mapping over the last few years.  I’m a system geek, what can I say?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I’ve found that there can be a lot of confusion around the idea of a ’selling system.’ It tends to mean different things to different people, but I have a pretty simple definition.

A selling system is simply a reproducible set of steps through which a prospect becomes a buyer.

It is the series of web pages that your prospects see on their way to buying your product as well as the traffic sources that bring prospects into the system.

Each product has at least one selling system that drives sales, and some products may be sold through multiple systems.

Traffic -> Sales Letter -> Download Page is an example of a simple system.

Traffic -> Opt-in Offer -> Thank You Page is also an example of a simple system.

Of course, many systems can be more complex than these examples. They might include one-time offers, upsells, and other elements.  But each discrete path your prospects take in order to become buyers is a system.

So how many systems do you manage in your business?

I have four active systems and a few dormant ones that I’m not doing much with.

Related posts:

1. Is Online Selling *Really* a Number’s Game? I’m sure you’ve heard the term “it’s a numbers...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I don’t hear people talk about ’system management’ much when it comes to online selling.

I mean, I hear a lot about the importance of testing, tracking and optimization, but those are three big words.  Taken separately, testing, tracking, and optimization can each include a significant number of tasks and an equally significant learning curve.

When taken together, testing, tracking, and optimization are all part of ’system management.’

Want to know why you don’t hear a lot of people talking about system management when it comes to online selling systems?

It’s because nobody does it.

Of course, there are always a few exceptions, but the VAST majority of Infopreneurs are not doing anything that comes close to true system management.

And that, plain and simple, means they are not making the profits they should be making.

Why?

Because in order to manage a system you must have at least two things:

1) a system

and

2) a way to easily measure the effectiveness of each component of that system

Most people have #1 and most people don’t have #2.

You can’t manage a system if you don’t have feedback — a way of knowing (easily) if your testing and optimization efforts are having any effect.

Update: Stuart Tan, has continued this conversation on his blog.

Related posts:

1. Is Online Selling *Really* a Number’s Game? I’m sure you’ve heard the term “it’s a numbers...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.