William Charlwood

I’ve bought a load of stuff from Robert Plank. It’s good. Very good. It’s excellent value and highly educational. Most comment worthy are his Sales Page Tactics books which show you very sophisticated - and shockingly profitable - techniques that boost conversion rates.

If you want to run your own nickel sale where the price of your product jumps by 5c per sale or you want to turn all your websites into your affiliate program (this one’s very clever!) then check out his product range.

Things come and go online. One of the current topics is Eben Pagan who I’ve never met. He runs a site selling dating info for geeks and anoraks who don’t know how to wash or can’t dance etc. None of that is of any interest to me. What is interesting is that he has developed an approach to capturing the contact details of people who land on your site that is highly effective.

What he does is offer a tailored report for you the contents of which depend on how you answer a simple multiple choice questionnaire. The questionnaires are usually fairly straightforward but the reports are nonetheless relevant to the responses and they vary according to which answers you select.

Now here’s the clever bit: you get the report sent to you by email which means you’ve got to provide your email address.

Put yourself in the mind of someone who has landed on a page and completed a questionnaire. If the questions are sensible and hint at useful answers, you’re going to do the quiz AND submit your email address because you really want to know the answers.

Eben showed you how to do all this stuff on his own site and as an added incentive, offered a free version of the software he uses to create questionnaires. So thousands of people downloaded it.

And that is where it all went wrong - because the free software lacked critical functionality. Like it didn’t send the report out via email. In other words, you couldn’t use it to boost your own sign up rates.

I could see the value of the original approach and went hunting. I was sure that someone somewhere had created what I wanted and eventually I found it. I’ve since purchased the product (and sold a bunch of copies as an affiliate too.)

It’s called OptinQuizGenerator and you can get it here.

I released my new video course - Blog Email Alert - about 36 hours ago with a small promotion to one of my smaller lists. I never like to launch things to a big list until I have had a few successful sales go through so that I can be sure the sales order processing side of things does what it’s meant to do.

So far no problems though so I’m pleased. The other thing I’m pleased about is that it is the first time I’ve used MuVar with any degree of success. MuVar is an interesting multi-variate testing tool that lets you break down web pages into sections, create different versions for each of those sections and test how well they perform. So for example, you can try out 6 different headlines with 3 different headline fonts and 2 different guarantees etc. and then it will display various combinations of these items whilst recording the outcome in terms of a sale or a no sale. It then uses this conversion data to display the most profitable variable combinations more and more thus increasing your overall conversion rate over time.

MuVar is not as easy to use as it should be - for one thing, you can’t easily edit versions of a variable once you’ve entered it and so if you put a typo in the headline for instance, it will only disappear from the sales page if it turns out that it reduces conversion rates. Now a purist might say that testing typos is a sensible thing to do. After all, who knows if typos are good or bad for conversions. We might think we know but we could be wrong.

But there are other things you might want to put into your sales page that you can’t afford to get wrong - such as using scripts. When you create a sales page you might want to add a script to it but forget to do so until you’ve already entered a number of variables into MuVar. For example, I use statcounter quite a bit to track visitors and it requires a piece of JavaScript to be added to the page. However, if I decide that I want to use statcounter with MuVar after I’ve already set up a page it is a slog. It should be a case of just editing a variable.

The other problem with it is that until you have some data, some of the reports seem to go into endless loops. However, as soon as sales start to come in, this gets sorted out. I also read somewhere (can’t find it now) that you need run the batch processing function repeatedly if you want all the variable optimisation to take place. I think the comment I read was that it didn’t optimise all variables at once to stop overloading your server. Personally I think it should self-optimise after a pre-set number of actions rather than wait for you to do it yourself. Having said that, it may already do this - it’s just that the set up videos don’t make clear whether you need to run batch processing for it to optimise or whether you just need to do this to generate reports.

In terms of value for money I think MuVar is good but a little bit more attention to making it user-friendly would make it excellent.