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What If Its Not Working?

There will be times where your projects don’t go the way you want. The project you’ve worked so hard on doesn’t produce instant results and people don’t come rushing to your website to buy what you’re offering. Everyone has something go wrong at times, and the project isn’t as a profitable as you wanted or expected. What can you do in these situations and where do you look to first?

Below are a list of 8 strategies you can use to turn your failing project into a winner. All of this assumes you’re using the strategies such as market research, probes, sales letter websites, email follow-up, PPC ad testing, etc. This is not an extensive list of things to look for in creating a winner project, but it gives you the same starting point I use when I look at client’s projects.

Strategy #1: Improve the Copywriting

For many sites, the single best investment they could ever make is to hire a professional copywriter to either do the copy or at least review and edit the copy. A website which has a conversion rate of only 1% will be beaten by a website with a conversion rate of 3% every time in every type of marketing if they’re selling a similar priced product in the same niche.

People often look here last, but it’s one of the primary keys to creating a successful site. Create a pitch which focuses on people’s emotions and then justify their buying decisions with a logical presentation to support it.

Strategy #2: Do a more extensive probe campaign.

Concept is more important than copy. All your words can be correct, but if they’re not focusing on what your visitors really want to buy, it simply won’t work. If you have an extremely well written site which isn’t pulling, you may need to go back to the drawing board to make sure you’re focusing on the right buttons which cause visitors to buy now.

Put up another probe campaign and ask a different set of questions. Find out directly from your visitors about where you’re missing it. Success is created by finding out what people want and selling it to them. If what you have isn’t selling, you must not have found out what people want!

Strategy #3: Examine your email follow-up messages.

Do you have an email follow-up series in place to keep bringing visitors back to your website? If you don’t, you need to work on that today. If you do have a series, but people still aren’t buying, take another look at your email follow-up messages.

A mistake I see a lot of people make is to have the wrong sales/content mixture. You need to have enough content in your series to keep people interested in reading, but don’t give away so much content that people don’t need your product anymore. The purpose of the content is to give visitors a “teaser” and a taste of the product you sell. It’s simply the appetizer and not the main course.

Strategy #4: Specialize your sales process to tighter niches.

You might find you have good sales copy, a good email series, and you’ve hit the right hot buttons, but your product still isn’t selling. At this point you should take a look at specializing
your sales process. This means taking some of your highest traffic keywords and creating a sales site just for them. Focus your headline exclusively for those visitors.

Make sure the stories they see relate to them. Bring testimonials which would speak to them closer to the beginning of the presentation. The Internet is not a general market. It is composed of tens of thousands of tiny little sub-niches for you to focus and sell to.

Strategy #5: Research the competition to find out what they’re doing.

If your competition has been around a while and consistently outbids you on keywords, what are they doing differently? How can they afford to spend more than you and still make a profit? How is their sales site? What kinds of email follow-ups do they send? Where are their price points? What do they offer on the backend?

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Find out what successful competitors are doing and how you could emulate it in your own business.

Strategy #6: Refine your keywords & bidding process.

You may find some keywords are extremely profitable while others are losing money. Focus on the successful ones and find more similar keyword phrases you can use. For the ones losing money, try using quotes/brackets or changing your bids.

Test different ads constantly. Some of the keywords you expected to work may never work and will eventually need to be eliminated. If 50% of your advertising is working and 50% isn’t, then keep running with what works and eliminate the rest. My own past experience tells me that 50% or more of first ads don’t work. This business is all about testing until you keep only the things which are working.

Strategy #7: Modify Your Offer.

You may need to lower or raise your price. Some products sell just as many copies at $97 as they do at $47. Other items increase sales 10 times by dropping to $19.95. Pricing can sometimes be a difficult issue, but you can find the right price for your offer. You can also test offering payment options such as 3 payments over the next 3 months instead of the whole fee upfront.

You may even consider a “trial offer” where someone pays a token amount such as $1 or simply the shipping expenses and the rest of the product price won’t be charged for 30 days. They get to test out your product and then decide if it’s right for them or not (this approach has doubled or tripled sales in many markets, but it always includes higher return rates).

Strategy #8: Add in a backend offer.

You may try everything and still lose money on the first sale to a customer. It’s still not over! If you lose $10 off every new customer but your average customer buys $100 in backend items over the next year, you’re running a VERY profitable business.

It’s all about having a system in place to continually sell other items to your clients. This is where the real money is made. Create your backend email follow-up series and begin selling other items to your current clients to turn your unprofitable business into a profitable one.

Related Entries:

• The Money Is Not In Your List
• 5 Ways to Boost Profits Today
• Weekend Links
• 7 JVs You Might Not Have Thought About
• Price Point Strategy

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