William Charlwood

Internet Marketing Consultant
calendar August 5th, 2008 by William

If you are doing any sort of testing then you need to make sure you have enough data to make rational decisions. I recently ran a split test using my autoresponder. What I did was send out two different emails to a relatively small list (around 400) and measured the response rates.

It was a classic A/B Split Test in other words although the sample size was quite small.

Here’s Version A of my email

Hello Firstname

Recently I mentioned a free ebook that makes me good money.

I didn’t write it. It is free to read. You don’t need to supply
an email address to get access to it.

But if you read it you’ll discover something pretty neat.
The book is quite short and very punchy.

To make it work for you here’s a very simple idea: put your
link to the book as a signature in your emails.

You can copy the example below if you want.

With best wishes

William Charlwood

PS Discover the ultimate online super tip.
http://www.supertips.com/ultimate/x/?id=104

And here is Version B

Hello Firstname

Recently I mentioned a free ebook that makes me good money.

I didn’t write it. It is free to read. You don’t need to supply
an email address to get access to it.

But if you read it you’ll discover something pretty neat.
The book is quite short and very punchy.

To make it work for you here’s a very simple idea: put your
link to the book as a signature in your emails.

You can copy the example below if you want.

With best wishes

William Charlwood

Discover the ultimate online super tip.
http://www.supertips.com/ultimate/x/?id=104

.

Spot the difference!

Actually the only difference was the use of “PS” in version A.

Initially I was intrigued to see that Version A was significantly more successful in terms of click through rates. At one point there was a 91% likelihood that its relative out-performance would be repeatable. In other words, statistically it looked as though a similar exercise done again would show that Version A generated a higher click through rate 91% of the time.But as data dribbled in, the relative response rates got closer and closer. At the moment Version A has generated a click through rate of 23.5% and Version B a click through rate of 22.7%. These click through rates are quite high for emails and often one problem you face is getting people to read them in the first place.

The figures themselves are too close to separate and suggest that the results of this particular split test are neutral which is a shame! I rather enjoyed having made what looked like an interesting discovery, namely that using PS as opposed to not using PS made a difference.

But I was wrong to leap to this conclusion too early.

Just for completeness, the subject line of both emails was the same:

A Quick Suggestion

calendar July 16th, 2008 by William

Private Label Rights are rights that apply to content that you have a right to use, publish and sell as if you were the author. You also have the right to modify the content to make it unique.

Webmasters used PLR content to increase the size of their online presence in order to attract more search engine traffic. They also use PLR to make their websites and blogs content rich in order to keep visitors on their site for longer.

The use of Private Label Rights is very similar to the way that newspapers use syndicated content from Press Agencies. In fact many PLR sites now exist to sell PLR content. However, there can be less editorial freedom with syndicated news content.

If you use PLR you need to be careful. First you need to check the quality of the content supplied. Some PLR content is very poor quality. Some is of a very high standard.

You also need to find out how many other webmasters are using the same content. The issue here is of duplicate content. If too many people publish the same content without making it unique there will be increased competition in the search engines. Additionally, there are theories that search engines penalise duplicate content. In other words, they treat duplicate content sites as being of lower quality than sites with original content.

For this reason many web publishers use software to turn articles into unique content by replacing words with synonyms. Other software is more sophisticated and re-writes complete phrases whilst maintaining the meaning of the content.

Good Private Label Rights content can enhance the quality of a site and is often available for very little money.

calendar July 13th, 2008 by William

An OTO or one time offer is a method of increasing sales by offering customers a special deal that is only made available to them once. For example, you could make a one time offer of a massive discount on an ebook to new subscribers to a newsletter.

An important feature of a one time offer is that its limited availability is made absolutely clear to the customer. If it isn’t made clear it won’t work.

The psychology behind OTOs is that you know that you will never get such a good deal presented to you again and if the value of the deal exceeds the price the conversion rate can be very high.

Many internet marketers use one time offers, especially as up sells, but in a lot of cases that statement that the offer is “one time and one time only” is actually false. Simply reloading the page having deleted cookies can often bring an expired one time offer back again.

Having said that One Time Offers often provide customers with excellent value deals and it usually pays to examine such offers in detail.

From the marketer’s perspective a One Time Offer made to a list very early on can help recover the cost of list building more quickly and so makes sense from a cash flow perspective.