MixRank Blog

If you've been following this blog you know I am a huge fan of learning marketing from the classics. Indeed, the fundamentals of human psychology and persuasion collected in these books offer tremendous insight that will help you make more money. But, as I learned with a campaign I ran in the halcyon early days of my affiliate marketing career, you can't follow everything in the textbooks too closely. I was building a campaign for an education(scholarship grant) offer. I had done a little traffic in this vertical before, and I knew it had potential to be a huge campaign. So I was going to do this right, just like the old masters of direct response. Every old marketing book will tell you that 80% of marketing is research. And research I did. I spent weeks learning everything I could about my target market, trying to think like the people visiting my landing pages, finding and analyzing every single advertiser in that space, and so on. I searched all of the keywords I thought would be relevant and made huge spreadsheets of all of the headlines used in the ads and landing pages, what kind of images those landing pages used, meticulously documenting every little detail down to the color scheme they used. And that was before I had written a single word for my landing page. That consumed the next month. I think I wrote over 300 different headlines before finally settling on one I liked, in addition to the thousands of words of copy I kept writing, editing, rewriting, scrapping, and rewriting again, until it was as perfect as I could make it. I figured that it would be better to spend the time to create a high converting landing page than to waste money driving traffic to a worse landing page that might not convert. I was wrong. To say this was a lot of work was an understatement. It was a grind, a relentless slog. But the copywriting books promised that engaging in this process of relentless editing and refinement was worth it all. This, according to them, was what separated the good from the great. Meanwhile, while I was laboring on my landing pages, my competitors had thrown together quick landing pages in a few hours, launched their campaigns, and were testing and optimizing based on actual click and conversion data from their traffic. I was eventually able to launch my campaign, and it was profitable very quickly, to the tune of about $250 a day. Unfortunately, I was only profitable about about a week before conversions started dropping off. My competitors has saturated the market, and the campaign died quickly. If, instead of waiting two months to launch, I had launched this campaign right away, I could have been making $250/day for 9 weeks instead of 1 week. Although I had not spent much money, I had given up $15,000 in lost revenue. The opportunity cost of launching this campaign late was greater than any amount I was afraid of losing from launching with an imperfect landing page. All of the seminal copywriting literature, from Claude Hopkins to Gary Halbert was written in a very different time, when launching a marketing campaign was a slow, expensive endeavor. Back then, in the days of direct mail(that's snail mail in case it's not clear) you only had one shot to make a campaign work. If your copy didn't convert the first time around, after paying for printing, postage, and list rental, you just couldn't afford to try again. Internet marketing changed all of that. Now, it's possible to test a campaign for only a few hundred dollars. If it fails, no big deal; most campaigns fail. The goal isn't to craft the most brilliant campaign ever, it's to test lots of different things and iterate quickly in response to the data the market gives you. When you're building a business, any business, you need be cognizant of opportunity costs at all times. This is difficult and does not come naturally or intuitively, and it's something I still struggle with every day. But you only have to look at how wealthy people manage their time and money to see that mastering the calculus of opportunity cost is a big coefficient, if not a precursor, of creating wealth. I think one of the most important things any businessman does is figure out how to allocate his time and resources most efficiently. You may miss out on a few sales initially because of suboptimal landing pages, but the opportunity cost of delaying launching by even a few days will dwarf those missed sales. Every day spent tweaking your landing pages is another day of missed traffic and revenue, and it is costing you money right now. So don't waste time tweaking and refining your campaigns before the market has had a chance to validate their potential. Quit fucking around and just launch already.

You're losing lots of conversions right now for one simple reason: Your visitors don't trust you. There a lot of shady, questionable sites out there, all trying to sell something. Maybe yours is one of them, or maybe it's completely whitehat and friendly...it doesn't matter. Either way, instead of committing to a purchase a significant percentage of your visitors are leaving forever because they don't trust your marketing claims...or the quality of your product...or even your company as a whole. Now, there are two ways to build trust:

1. Slowly and patiently build a strong, well-known brand, all the while nurturing a relationship with your customers so they get to know you and trust you.
2. Exploit common cognitive biases, evolutionary psychology, and centuries of socialization to instantly evoke deep, genuine feelings of trust in your customers.

I don't know about you, but I don't have time for branding and relationship marketing. If I don't make sales today, I don't eat. I know that, for 90% of the traffic to my site, I have one chance and one chance only to get you to buy, and if I miss that chance, you're just going to turn to my competitors. So let's go ahead and see what's behind Door #2. Note: If you think using consumer psychology and common cognitive triggers to increase sales is unethical or manipulative, please stop reading now. This post isn't for you. Here are just a few of many time-tested, proven techniques you can use to instantly manifest authority and credibility out of thin air.

Always Be As Specific as Possible

This one should be intuitive and obvious to you...which one of these headlines appears more persuasive:

"This system lets you increase traffic to your website" or "By using this 1 simple technique, insight.io got 73% more visitors in just 14 days"

You see, over many, many years, humans have learned a simple mental shortcut for differentiating between opinions and facts. In general, opinions are vague, generic, and unquantified while facts are detailed and to the point. Nobody says "I like this dress 20% more than the other one". But people do say "This dress is $20 cheaper than the other one". See the difference? Specific, factual statements just have a certain air of infallibility about them. Every good liar knows the devil is in the details...the more specific you are, the more credible you appear. It's that simple.

Use a Readable Privacy Policy

This one should be obvious, but so many people don't do this that it bears repeating. If you have a privacy policy on your site anyway (because of credit card processing regulations, Google Quality Score, whatever), why not use it as a marketing tool? Don't clutter your privacy policy with legalese. Instead, tell people about how you'll never sell or share their data, how you use the highest levels of secure encryption, and so on. Think about it...wouldn't you be more likely to have a warm, fuzzy feeling about a site that spells out in plain English exactly what it's going to do with your personal information? Even if that site is peddling payday loans? The type of person who clicks on a site's privacy policy is exactly the type of customer you are losing right now because of lack of trust. Assuage their fears and earn their respect. And speaking of security...

Strategically Deploy Symbols of Authority

You've undoubtedly seen those ubiquitous security seals on every shopping cart checkout page. You know, these: These seals, which convey no useful information, are so widespread because they work. The mere appearance of such a seal on a landing page has been repeatedly proven to increase conversions, by about 11% according to a Verisign-funded study. You might think that these seals work because they are a way of transferring trust by proxy. That is, if Verisign, a well-known brand I trust, implicitly endorses this site, then it must be trustworthy (Of course, anyone with a few hundred bucks can obtain such a seal, but that's hardly the point of this exercise). That is not the case. Another company is also in the business of providing security seals to websites. When they first launched their service, this company was a complete unknown. They had no brand or inherent credibility to speak of. All they had was an official-looking seal. This company also commissioned a study to see how much inclusion of their seal on a sales page increased conversions. After lots of testing, this company determined that merchants putting this new security seal on their site increased conversions by an average of... 11%. In other words, the Verisign brand on the seal had nothing to do with the increase in conversions. They could have omitted it entirely, or used a completely different, made up brand, and it wouldn't have made a difference. Simply the presence of an official-looking seal, any seal, was all it took. As long as the seal looks legit, it works its magic. And the authority symbol doesn't even have to be a seal. I once tested adding a small lock icon( ) next to the text input on an email opt-in landing page for a financial product. The simple act of adding that lock icon, which only took a few seconds, increased opt-ins by 7.2% versus a nearly identical page with no lock. Not bad for a few minutes' work. The reason these specific symbols work isn't arbitrary...it's the product of years of social conditioning. Every bank website, every secure login page, every check ever written has imprinted in our collective unconscious that =TRUST. "Trust us..." that little icon implores. "Your data is secure with us." =TRUST =TRUST =TRUST The Milgram experiments (and thousands of subsequent infomercials) proved that people will obey the most ludicrous commands as long as they're coming from someone in a lab coat. All you need to do is show them a glimpse of the trappings of authority...and they're yours. The collective marketing done by thousands of companies has already done the hard work of creating an incredibly effective brand signifying safety and security. All you have to do is reap the benefits.

If there's one thing affiliate marketing teaches you, it's how to survive in the face of fierce compatition. As an affiliate marketer, I frequently found myself competing against hundreds if not thousands of affiliates, all of them promoting the same product to the same customers on the same traffic sources. All of the fundamental principles of traditional marketing, like differentiation, a USP, price testing, etc mean nothing, because everyone is running the same ads for the same exact product, linking to that same landing page. There is no fluff like branding or engagement. This is raw, pure performance marketing, where the only things that matter are clicks and conversions. Even the most successful affiliate campaigns are fleeting- blink, and someone with a slightly more optimized campaign will destroy you. Affiliate marketing in a competitive niche is something of a trial by fire. Words like "traction" or "angel funding" are unknown. You either convert enough of your traffic into sales to turn a profit immediately, or you die and a hundred marketers who are hungrier than you vie to take your place. If you can build a profitable business in that space, you can do it anywhere. This is the business environment I cut my teeth on marketing in, so you could say I know a thing or two about succeeding in the face of stiff competition. It may seem impossible to succeed in a space that already has established, better funded competitors. But, as a newcomer, you have several incredibly powerful advantages over your competition. Utilize them, and you will be able to outmaneuver the most determined competitors every single time. Here's exactly how I was able to enter the most saturated verticals out there- dating, insurance, fitness- and build $1000-a-day campaigns despite the presence of sophisticated, entrenched competitors.

Don't Educate The Market: Capture Traffic at a Later Stage of the Buying Process

You probably know that customers go through several distinct phases when researching a product and committing to buy. Remember Glengarry Glen Ross: The stages of the buying process are:

1. Attention
2. Interest
3. Desire
4. Action

If you're in a competitive market, you will have competitors advertising to customers at every stage of the buying process. Many of your competitors, particularly big brands, are spending a lot of money to educate the market - to show potential customers that they have a problem their product or service can solve. Before committing to a purchase they will research all the alternatives, especially if they are B2B customers. While these people are doing research, they're costing your competitors serious money in ad clicks and impressions, but are not converting into sales, because they're still in the research phase of the sales cycle. Don't bother trying to educate the market- let your competitors spend money convince customers they need a product or service in your industry. Then, when they're finally ready to buy, when they're finally at that ACTION stage, swoop in and get the sale. Here's exactly how you can do this:

• Consider buyer intent Bid on keywords that demonstrate strong intent to buy- "buy voip service" vs "voip service provider comparison". Generally, the later you get into the sales cycle, the more expensive keywords become, but the jump in conversion rate usually makes up for this.
• Don't bid for top position There are many reasons why you shouldn't bid for the #1 position in a group of ads, and this is one of them. Frequently, consumers will click on the top 2-3 ads for a search result as part of their research process, just to understand the marketplace. Then they will click on another, lower position, ad and actually make the purchase. For this reason, many more sophisticated advertisers test how bids and ad position affect conversion rates. Many find that position 3-4 is the "sweet spot" that actually converts better than being in position #1.

Next week, I discuss how to convert your rivals' greatest strengths into unbeatable competitive advantages you can use to dominate the market.

A lot of people have been emailing me asking some variation of "I'm kind of new to all of this marketing stuff. Is there a book I can read that will get me up speed on all this?" Well...yeah I guess. There are lots of books about specific marketing tactics, like SEO or optimizing AdWords campaigns. But I'm a firm believer in getting the fundamental strategy right before getting into specific traffic tactics(and maybe even before you write a single line of code). That means figuring out how big your target market is and what it wants, converting your main features into the biggest benefits, and eliciting attention, interest, desire, and action from your most valuable customers. The thing that surprises technical people most when we talk about this stuff is that building effective marketing messages is not an airy-fairy, vague, creative endeavor. Done well, it's actually a very precise, and methodical process designed to systematically and consistently elicit specific reactions in certain groups of customers. In the past century, direct response advertisers(the ones interested in generating conversions rather than branding) have developed and refined time-tested marketing messages that operate on the core drives and desires inherently present in all humans. The medium and technology may change, but human psychology does not, and the techniques detailed in the books below, ranging from broad advice on picking a fundamental human desire to target, down to specific words that increase conversions, are timeless. I'll be blogging about some of the time-tested advertising methods that are most relevant to driving traffic online, but I don't want to be like one of those "gurus" who simply rehash material from copywriting classics. If you have time, I would rather you read the books below yourself and get the full benefit of absorbing the knowledge of their authors directly from the source. All of these books are written by men who were incredibly successful in direct response advertising in their time. The advice they give is based on thousands of split tests and decades of experience building some of the most successful advertising campaigns of all time. If you read these books, study them, really absorb the insights they offer, you will become a master of tapping your customers' most pressing desires, and presenting your product as the solution to the problem they're most concerned about. Claude Hopkins - Scientific Advertising and My Life In Advertising The granddaddy of them all, a seminal work that brought tracking and split testing into the mainstream 80 years ago. You can take his advice about writing short newspaper classified ads and apply it directly to your AdWords ads. Eugene Schwartz - Breakthrough Advertising A dense and information-packed tome that reads more like a textbook. It's not easy to absorb and apply all of the information in this book, and you will undoubtedly need to reread it multiple times, but if you put in the effort to do so you will be greatly rewarded. The book spends a great deal of time on the science of writing headlines, and some of the advice on channeling mass desire into powerful headlines is brilliant. The same methods Schwartz used to entice millions into reading his ads can be used to get you more votes on social news sites(Hello Hacker News!), more clicks on AdWords and social ads, and more signups on your landing page. John Caples - Tested Advertising Methods Caples was a legend in mail order advertising, and pioneered many of the methods now used by e-commerce merchants. He understands the importance of writing strong headlines, and offers some excellent, specific examples on the topic, as well as a wealth of information on crafting strong appeals. The gems of knowledge Caples drops on every page can be applied to everything from tweets and blog posts to large-scale PPC campaigns. John E. Kennedy - Reason Why Advertising Even among scholars of marketing strategy, few know about this rare, incredible book. Over a hundred years ago, Kennedy's ideas on targeting and testing were revolutionary, and remain groundbreaking in many ways to this day. The few marketers who have mastered Kennedy's strategies are able to rapidly and easily out-market and out-compete the majority that blindly throw their money away on campaigns that could never work. Some of the concepts presented in this all-too-obscure work may seem obvious or trite to the contemporary consumer but simply thinking through Kennedy's approach to building advertising campaigns and how it applies to your product or service will bring tremendous benefits. David Ogilvy - Ogilvy on Advertising David Ogilvy is probably the best known marketer on this list. He diligently studied the techniques of the copywriting masters who came before him, and parlayed that knowledge into one of the most successful ad agencies in the world. The book is chock full of specific, actionable advice on everything from crafting good copy to the best layout and design for a display ad. Many, but not all, of the strategies he used for magazine advertising can work very well for your landing pages. Lock your designers in a room with this book, and don't let them out until they've memorized it. Again, I'm forced to cut an already too long post short. Marketing, like programming, is both and art and a science that can take many years to master. The authors listed above literally wrote the book on contemporary advertising. Learn the basics from them, and you will look at your existing marketing strategy and product with a completely different perspective. Master the intricacies of their knowledge and experience, and I guarantee that the way you approach developing anything that reaches other people, from a simple webapp side project to a sophisticated marketing campaign, will never be the same again.