When writing your ads or sales letters, remember this one very important thing…

Focus on your reader…not on you!

When someone reads your ad, letter, brochure, etc., the first thing they will be asking themselves is ‘what’s in it for me?’

And if you don’t tell them, then you can be sure that they will just click off your site or stop reading your promotion.

One of the biggest mistakes we see made by online business owners is that they spend too much time focusing on themselves and their business. They quite often start our with the same type of statements… how long they’ve been in business, who their biggest customers are, how they’ve spent years of research and millions of dollars on developing their product, etc.

And while those points are important, they should be expressed in a way that matters to your potential customer. When writing your copy, put yourself in the shoes of the reader. Let’s take this statement as an example…

‘We have been in business for 10 years.’

Well, this is clearly focused on the business who is promoting, and not on the reader. Remember the ‘what’s in it for me’ rule. When making a statement like this, put yourself in the shoes of the reader and remember these two very important words…

‘So What!!’

You’ve been in business for 10 years but so what! To re-address the focus of this statement we need to address the ‘so what’ aspect of it. To do this, you must add a ‘which means that’ statement. So for example,

‘We have been in business for 10 years which means that you can be assured that you are dealing with a solid and stable business and we will always be here to make sure your xxx product is working perfectly’.

Notice the ‘which means that…’ Well, now we are completely re-addressing the focus of our statement from us as the business to our prospect, the reader. We are literally forcing the focus on them.

Remember the golden rule of ‘what’s in it for me’ with regards to your reader and you will be assured of greater success with your online business.

All too often, we see online businesses who fail to test any aspect of their marketing. They bet their future on subjective decisions and what they ‘feel’ to bet right. This is not good for a number of reasons.

As online business owners, we do not have the power to predetermine what our market wants and what they will and will not respond to. The only people who can do this are our customers.

By testing, you can hone your online business for maximum profits.

So what do you test?

Well the answer is quite simple… pretty much everything… but in a methodical way. You can test one price point versus another, one headline versus another, one color versus another, one ad versus another… the list is endless. The important point to know is that you must test one area at a time and analyse the results.

What you are doing is removing the guesswork. When you test one approach versus another and analyse the results, you can see which approach creates the most sales.

Let us say that you were testing your headline. You analysed your data and realized that headline 2 was outperforming headline 1 by 50%. It would make sense therefore to drop headline 1 as you now know which headline works better. If you wanted to be really clever, you could then create headline 3 and test that versus headline 2. See which one performs best and implement that headline. You can go on and on until you find the perfect headline. Then move onto the price and repeat the exercise.

Obviously, testing is an ongoing exercise. Maintain this philosophy in your online business and you will begin to realize how this can dramatically increase your sales and profits.

First of all we must stress that free bonuses must add REAL value to your offer. They are NOT free bonuses offered just for the sake of it. They have to be useful and genuinely enhance your offer.

In fact, studies have shown that quite often, an offer is highly profitable not because of the main product, but because what people really wanted was the free bonuses.

One of the best examples of how free bonuses can add real value comes from the world of TV ‘Infomercials’. We are sure you have seen the one we are thinking of… it comes from the master of TV ‘infomercials’, Ron Popeil.

He had this art perfected with the use of free bonuses with his set of kitchen knives and the catchphrase…

“But wait there’s more…”

If you recall, he used to begin selling a single kitchen knife for $39.95. This kitchen knife was the best kitchen knife ever seen… cut through anything etc etc.

Once he had gone through all the benefits of why you must own this amazing knife for $39.95 and how it will make your life easier he then switched to his famous saying…

“But wait there’s more…”

He would then start to introduce this amazing array of more and more knives as free bonuses…

• A $50 Carving Knife
• A $60 Chef’s Knife
• A $70 Cleaver
• 8 $70 Steak Knives
• A $40 Knife Sharpener
• A $40 Bread & Bagel Knife
• And on and on….

And all for only $39.95

Notice how he would value all his bonuses! Well if the viewer wasn’t already sold with the original knife on its own, once Ron had added another 24 knives as free bonuses, making the entire package a 25 $1,000 knife set for only $39.95, viewers couldn’t get their credit card out quick enough.

And it’s this little technique which can transform your online business and ensure that you will make money online.

We are going to tell you what a squeeze page is and why you need one in your online business…

There is one fundamental law in creating a profitable online business, and that is:

“YOU NEED TO BUILD A DATABASE”

Having your own database will allow you to make more money online quicker with follow up offers and back-end products.

And the way you build your database of names and e-mail addresses is through a ‘Squeeze Page’

A ‘Squeeze Page’ is basically a simple, one page website that offers some free information in exchange for the visitors name and email address. Take a look at http://dollars-on-demand.com as an example of a squeeze page. Notice how it’s just a short, one page web site that is offering a free report on how to make money online in exchange for a name and an email address. As soon as a visitor enters their details and clicks submit, their information is automatically transferred to the database where follow up offers can be made. And of course, the visitor then gets his or hers free report in exchange.

Without a squeeze page, life becomes a whole lot more difficult. Just imagine a potential customer who is visiting your site has no way of leaving their details. They quickly scan your offer and decide it’s not for them or whatever and they leave. That’s it… you have lost them forever. This means that you need to keep attracting new visitors to your site all the time.

Contrast that to a ‘Squeeze Page’… if you provide a compelling free offer, generally speaking a large proportion of visitors will leave their name and email address in exchange for the free offer you are making. This means that you can now keep going back to that prospect with various offers, products, etc without having to attract new visitors to your websites. And overtime, as you build a relationship with that prospect, we can virtually guarantee that they will at some point buy from you.

So remember, implement a ‘Squeeze Page’ into your online marketing efforts and start building your all important database now!

It’s especially valuable when creating your own copy, whether you’ve never written your own copy before or you are an experienced veteran at the art. Indeed a swipe file is at the heart of all great copywriters.

So what exactly is a ‘Swipe File’?

A swipe file is a collection of successfully written marketing and promotional material, whether it be direct mail, order forms, flyers, classified ads, web copy, email copy, etc.

Owning a swipe file makes producing winning copy a very easy thing to do and enables you to put together an ad or sales letter very quickly.

You see everybody gets stuck for words and ideas at some point. It happens to the best of us. So when this happens it’s always handy to have a source of past successes to go to. It then becomes a task of simply adapting an already successful piece of copy for your own offer.

Not only that, another great benefit of owning your own swipe file is that by just studying it and reading successful copy over and over, you start to train your mind to think in the same way as the original author… and you end up being able to write your own copy in a similar way.

So this is what we recommend you do starting from now…

Get yourself a BIG empty cardboard box and put in it every single piece of promotional material you ever get, be it direct mail, a web site, an email or whatever.

Whenever you are about to launch a new product and are stuck for words when you are writing up your copy, go to your swipe file. Trust us when we say it will be worth its weight in gold!

We see a lot of people who have wonderful aspirations for their online business but never actually succeed in achieving them. Well, we DON’T want this to happen to you!

What we want you to do for a moment is to think about what ‘freedom’ will mean to you. If you find that difficult, try to think back to how you feel when you’re on holiday…

The warmth of the sun on your face, the sound of the crystal blue ocean against your feet… the feeling of being a million miles away from the pressures of your usual life.

You have no work to do… no one to answer to… you are just alone in that moment.

If you can picture this… if you can ‘feel’ that moment then you have had a glimpse of not just what freedom really means but what you are working towards.

And you may ask… “So Mark and Ken, why have you asked me this?”

We have asked you this because it’s VERY IMPORTANT that you are always aware exactly what you are truly striving for.

We know from our own experience that it is so easy to lose sight of this… so easy to slip back into our everyday mundane pattern of behaviour which keeps us away from the kind of life we really seek.

And one of the reasons it is so easy to slip back is because to actually achieve this kind of freedom…

You have to do the BORING things to get there…

In fact, some people actually prefer to read about the DREAM rather than actually going through the steps of attaining the life they seek.

Being handed the exact steps to the dream life you want… and then do absolutely NOTHING is such a waste.

You see, you have to actually deal with the ‘boring’ bits in order to get to where you want to be. Doing things like building a list, writing a sales page, creating a product, etc. may not sound very exciting, but it’s ONLY through following through these steps that a life of true freedom is attained.

You see, in order for us to realize our dream of delivering live coaching around the globe we had to go through the exact same steps… nothing very exciting… nothing very difficult. Just little steps like building a list, writing a sales page, creating training material, etc.

But of course if we couldn’t be bothered to execute those steps, then we wouldn’t be where we are now!

It will also be the same for you. If you honestly want to retire a millionaire in 2 to 4 years time then you have to do the same.

It’s all simply a result of basically taking one ‘boring’ little step at a time… sporting success only comes from ‘boring’ training, exam success only comes from ‘boring’ revision, etc. We want everyone to remember this point so you remain focussed at all times.

Remember, you simply can not get to where you truly want to go if you do not do this!