Today is about measuring conversion. The assumptions are: you did your market research and picked a good phrase and you’ve been tracking your traffic to your site (and maybe even from it).
The next big question is how many of those clicks are turning into sales? That’s what conversion is all about.
Tracking:
your site –> affiliate page –> purchases made from your affiliate link
To get better conversion, you need to tell a good story. Better stories sell more. Example, the Pokemon card story about the kids sneaking card packs onto the checkout lane belt while parent wasn’t looking. When they got home, there were a bunch of card packs in the bags. Parent puts the story on eBay about why he’s selling all these cards. Gets great sales.
Great copy on eBay is essential to sales, too. If you don’t have something to say, chances are you won’t make much unless there isn’t much competition or your product is very inexpensive.
Another great way to get good content is to search YouTube for free videos to imbed in your pages. If they’re copyright free, you can use them, but out of courtesy, acknowledge the video producer and give them a back link. You didn’t make that video so don’t take credit for making it.
Good book to read about conversion:
Made to Stick by Chip Heath & Dan Heath (available at the library)
How to spell SUCCESS:
- Simplicity
- Unexpectedness
- Concreteness –> believability
- Credibility
- Emotional –> connect with your readers!
- Stories
- Stories (so important, we say it twice)
Stories are how we learn best. It how humans have passed down history from one generation to the next for thousands of years. Great stories are imperative.
Action Items
- Install tracking on all content pages
- Expand internet real estate for each niche to 3-4 sites (blog, Squidoo, article site, second blog, wiki)
- Create a new article using today’s lesson on those 3rd and 4th platforms
Progress
I’m posting this on September 10. I’m still working on day 23 forward. It’s taking me awhile to get everything done because I’ve run into a couple of platform problems, like with Hubpages. I started a hub and planned to finish it over the weekend, but published and saved it as well as saving it. I got a rather nasty email the next morning from the hubpages administrator that I had created a spam site for back linking only and that my content didn’t contribute anything to their community. I deleted my hub and decided to stick with Squidoo.
Squidoo automatically scans for content when you save and it won’t publish your lens unless there is sufficient content to warrant it. You don’t decide if something is published on their site, they do, but you get to keep whatever content you produce until it is ready to publish. If it gets stale, they’ll put that lens back to under construction status until you update your content.
My other problem lately is also time. School has been back in a month now and lots of students are deciding they need a tutor, so my tutoring schedule is cranking up. It’s also home school crunch time for my son. I’ve had him work most of the summer, but now that school is back in, he’s got to work just like if he was in a classroom.
I’m writing new articles for each of my sites to keep my content fresh. That’s easy on some and not so easy an some others. I’m also writing related articles to publish through Associated Content, for which I may get paid if they’re accepted. I can still publish them without being paid and they will contribute to my AC page performance bonus.
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