Scale Up—Massively
Once you’ve tested and done your homework—once you’re scratching the right itches, once you’re converting people at a healthy rate, you can massively expand your business.
Expanding into Other Media: Profiting from the Winner-Take-All Phenomenon The winner-take-all phenomenon is the disproportionate advantage that any top dog has over all the others—that the top three players have over all the rest combined. It’s like in the Olympics, where the gold medalist is world-famous and the silver and bronze medalists are busing tables two weeks later. Winner-take-all is when 80/20 works in your favor. This is true on Google as well, and there’s a snowball effect. You enter a market,
you start split testing right away, and you use sound marketing techniques, copywriting, and all of the tools at your disposal. How fast can you go from zero to dominating a market? As fast as you can split test.
80/20 for Ads I’ve got a friend named Carlos Garcia. He’s bought billions of clicks in his career. He’s a maverick banner ad buyer, an invisible kingpin who steers huge volumes of web traffic. One time I asked him, “What’s the secret of banner ads?” “Test 50 ads. One of them’s going to be a crazy winner.” You write 50 ads. Eventually, one of them’s gonna fetch as much traffic as the other 49 put together. The good news is most people don’t even test five. That’s the 80/20 of ad writing, and in online advertising, testing is what separates the men from the boys.
Increase Your Sales 50 Times in 10 Steps Let’s say your chosen keywords get 100,000 searches per month on Google. Your ad shows every time someone does a search, and you start out with a 0.5 percent Click-Through Rate. That’s your starting point. Here’s what you do next: 1. Initially you’re getting 17 clicks a day. You immediately test two ads against each other. Four days later, you’ve gotten 70 clicks, and you declare a new winner. You’ve doubled your CTR to 1 percent. 2. Now you’re getting 33 clicks a day. After another three to five days you double your CTR again to 2 percent. Now you’re getting 66 clicks a day, enough to declare a split test winner every day. 3. Your CTR inches up to 2.5 percent and to 3 percent. In two weeks you’ve already gone from 0.5 percent CTR to 3 percent CTR, a sixfold improvement—and your bid price remains the same. 4. Two weeks have gone by, and you’ve gotten a total of 400 visitors. Ten percent (40 of them) have opted in to your newsletter or downloaded your report, white paper, or whatever. 5. You start split testing different opt-in pages. You try a new headline or change some of your bullets. You’re getting 100 visitors a day. That’s 70 new sales leads per week. 7. Within two to three weeks you can realistically double your opt-in rate from 10 percent to 20 percent. Now you’re getting 140 leads per week. In time you may get that number up to 25 percent or 30 percent. 8. Now let’s start counting the number of people who go from the sales page to the order form. You start out at 10 percent. That’s 14 per week. Within a month you can test two to three new sales pages, and you have a realistic chance of doubling that 10 percent to 20 percent. 9. Testing conversion from the order form to actual orders is no different—28 per week. From what I’ve seen, a 10-percent conversion from order form page views to orders is reasonable. That’s six orders per week, and within a month and a half we can probably improve your order form by 50 percent. 10. Another angle on the order form is to test different price points, multiple offers, and upsells. Multiple price levels and upsells can easily double or triple your profitability. When you multiply all those numbers, your improvement from step 1 to step 9 is about fiftyfold. It took you two months to one year to do this. At this point, you’re probably one of the best-performing players in your entire category. Whether your product costs a hundred dollars or a million dollars, whether the last few steps are automated or manual, the principle is the same. Ari Galper from Sydney, Australia, accomplished this in 10 months, growing his monthly sales from $5,000 per month to $100,000 per month. Ari added an interesting twist: He worked the early ingredients in his sales funnel (like Google ads) with A-B split testing. But he improved his lead capture pages and sales pages by talking to customers on his website via live chat. Every time his chats indicated confusion on the page, he would change the page and alleviate the confusion. Not only did Ari go from a fledgling business to a six-figure income, he transformed his Unlock The Game™ program into a respected international brand.
When you execute the 10 steps I described above, you get a world-class sales funnel. You dominate your market, and you easily expand far beyond AdWords.
Re-Inventing a Website from the Inside Out Every website needs a makeover. Everybody’s dissatisfied with their website. Most people spend months and months re-doing everything. You could spend the rest of your life chasing perfection. Half the time, the improvements don’t really make things better. Many of these projects cost tons of money and blatantly violate 80/20, because redoing a 500-page website takes months of labor and hardly anyone visits 80 percent of the pages. Before you tackle the whole website, just pick the single most important page and split test variations. Improve, improve, improve, and you’ll get half the total benefit and have to worry about only one page. You can get almost all the improvement that is possible by optimizing a handful of key sales pages and perhaps your overall template. Whenever you find yourself obsessing over everything, you’re making a mistake. As for perfection: 80/20 inherently means that “good enough is good enough.” When you embrace 80/20 there’s always going to be some unfinished detail. Sometimes this will bother you. The question is: Do you want perfection, or do you want success? There will always be something in your success formula that demands perfection. If you’re a concert pianist, then every note must be right; 80 percent right will not do when you’re performing at Lincoln Center in Manhattan. And in any company, profession, or success story, there is a very small number of things that truly have to be perfect. Be encouraged to know that you can become successful and even famous by achieving perfection in one tiny corner of your world. And please remember that everything else just needs to be good enough. You might be able to close 50 percent of the customers you present to, and your salespeople may be able to close only 25 percent. But if you want
your company to grow, you’ll need to accept their imperfection and move on to higher-value tasks.
The 21st-Century Path to Stardom Have you heard of Tim Ferris’ book The Four-Hour Work Week? The original title was Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit, a tongue-in-cheek name for what was essentially a book about outsourcing. His book publisher said, “No way, Jose, we’re not using that title.” They bickered back and forth about titles. Finally Tim went to the court of last resort—real-world testing on real people. He posted book titles as Google ads, and the phrase “Four-Hour Work Week” magically spiked the response. He renamed his book and organized it around that concept. It became a New York Times bestseller. Later came his bestsellers The Four-Hour Body and The Four-Hour Chef, and now he’s the maestro of a hit series of books and much more. By the way, I take my own medicine. The title of my AdWords book, The Definitive Guide to Google AdWords, was perfected with Google ads, as was the title of the book you’re reading right now.
OK, So You Have a Killer Sales Process—Now What? What you’ve done so far would have been very hard to do in the offline world. Before Google, it was not a whole lot easier in the online world, because there was never a consistent, controllable source of traffic. Paid search engine traffic, like what you get from Google and Bing, is generally consistent. It’s always 100 percent controllable. Within two to six months (not two to three years) you’ve tested several dozen ideas and eliminated all but the best. You’ve polished a sales process to the point where it delivers killer results. You’re making a killer ROI on your sales process. And because you’re so effective at turning visitors into dollars, you can afford to pay more for your traffic than all your competitors. You’re becoming unstoppable. What now? Now we go out with our growing war chest and buy all the traffic we can get, using my expanding universe theory of online marketing.
Applying the Expanding Universe Theory to Your Business You’ve started out buying clicks literally one at a time and meticulously, patiently refined your marketing machine. So you take the same messages and sales process and roll out your product in this order: 1. Google AdWords 2. SEO 3. Other PPCs like Bing and display advertising 4. Email promotions 5. Social media* 6. Affiliates 7. Direct mail 8. Banner ads and ad networks 9. Press releases 10. Print advertising, TV, and radio Items 2 through 10 are more expensive and/or less controllable than Google. Get it right with Google first, where you have total control, AND THEN do email. THEN get help from affiliates. Don’t let any of these other things or people be your guinea pig—if it works on Google AdWords first, then you can invest in these other things and be fairly certain it will work. Do you remember the famous self-help video The Secret? The creators used a very similar process to get their language and messaging—and their shopping carts and everything else—flowing like a well-oiled machine. They started by buying clicks and expanded from there. Then one day Oprah got excited about their product, and BAM! The Secret went viral, selling untold millions of copies. Also I’d like you to notice where social media ranks on this list. Pay attention to the little asterisk (*) next to it. I don’t put it at the top because it doesn’t generate much sales for most companies. But where this fits on this list depends hugely on what kind of business you’re in. Since social media generally starts with Facebook, you can take a free test at http://www.IsFBforMe.com. It will tell you how Facebook-friendly your business is, with a score from 1 to 10. If your score is 5, leave social media where it is in the Expanding Universe—right in the middle, item Number 5. If your score is 10,
move it to priority number one. If your score is 1, move it to number 10. (And yes, if your Facebook score is 10, you should do Facebook before you do AdWords.) The reason I created the IsFBforMe tool is sales is a disqualification process. I was applying the 5 Power Disqualifiers. When my Facebook advertising book came out, I knew I could convince a lot of people to try Facebook ads—but it would not work for them. I knew the only way to get happy customers and 5-star ratings on Amazon was to disqualify people who didn’t fit. I tell people: If you scored an 8 or above, Facebook ads will be very important for you. If you got less than a 6—you probably shouldn’t even buy my book at all. High scores on Facebook are businesses that sell entertainment, tribal identity, experiences, and escapism. Fiction books, music groups, movies, spirituality, local hangouts, aspirations, political causes, and travel generally perform well on Facebook.
Google Is the Yellow Pages. Facebook Is a Coffee Shop Facebook is not where people go to buy, say, automotive brake pads. If you sell B2B, Facebook is probably almost useless, but LinkedIn may prove very useful. Ted Prodromou’s book Ultimate Guide to LinkedIn for Business is an excellent reference. In any case, how you expand from small to large in various media is hugely important. You do NOT just “sling mud against the wall.” You start with the place of highest leverage and testing with consistent traffic, which is highly targeted paid advertising. You’re actually starting at the top end of the Power Curve, testing the highest-quality traffic sources on a small number of people. Then you expand from there.
————————————————— PARETO SUMMARY —————————————————— p You can optimize most of your sales funnel by optimizing a handful of vitally important web pages. The rest can just be “good enough,” at least for now. p The expanding universe theory of market domination says you build out your advertising strategy in this order: paid search engine
traffic first, then email and affiliates, then social media, then offline media. p How you prioritize social media varies hugely depending on the type of business you’re in. Get your “Social Media Compatibility Score” at http://www.IsFBforMe.com.
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