ramit

I've run a bunch of tests on this with 100,000+ email users. In nearly every test, we found that varying the copy of the text link from "Click Here" to "Join Now" or "Get the Video" or "Buy Now" or a bunch of other copy...made almost no difference.

I haven't written all four yet, but I do have outlines of the ideas. I collect ideas/research/examples for a long time -- often years -- so when I go to write a post, I can sort through tons of stuff. That helps with writer's block.

This is the 1st of 4 posts I'll be doing for the New York Times (their Bucks blog) on the psychology of willpower, automation, and earning more. This one is about how people believe if they just "try harder," they can save more money...yet willpower fails repeatedly. I included research from social psychology and personal finance, and 3 tactics to overcome our failure of willpower. Hope you guys enjoy it.

This is actually pretty interesting as I've been testing this for the last 2 years. I've been on The Today Show, ABC News (once/week), G4TV, PBS, CBS Early Show, etc. Most of the time, the anchors/screen will say my domain, http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com.

In general, you will not get nearly as much direct traffic as you would think. For example, if I showed you the traffic from the week where I was on a national morning show, you likely wouldn't be able to pick out which day I was on.

However, media works in very interesting ways. It does affect book sales, particularly in retail stores. And media begets more media, since producers watch other TV shows.

But it's very mysterious and much more of a black art than direct traffic/measurable media.

Let's guess. I guess...92% digital, 8% print.

I know it's easy to think that everyone trying to show others how to monetize their skills is trying to make a quick buck, but that's really not the case. I've been writing for 6 years and have 300k+ readers/month.

Give it another look. If you still think my stuff is scammy, well, you're entitled to your own opinion.

But don't let your heuristic of "talking about money = scam!" get in the way.

There is some extremely valuable stuff in my blog and courses, and 99% of it is free.

Hey Atomical, I've seen a similar study before, but can't find it. Could you point me to it?

For other interesting studies on health: http://delicious.com/ramitsethi/health

This is a complicated question.

I know of a direct-response guy who had horribly ugly sales pages that literally included misspellings. He tells this story about how all kinds of marketing consultants and designers would come in and say, "Your sales page is so ugly! You need a redesign." He would laugh and say, "Everyone says that. But I have data from the last 5 years, and this is the single best-performing page of all." He made $25m last year.

Sophisticated direct marketers are not to be trifled with.

However, if you're building a company that depends on other non-direct factors like brand, you can't really A/B test that. You just have to make a decision.

A few years back, I met a guy whose girlfriend worked on the optimization team at Amazon. Now THEY are sophisticated. They knew how A/B tweaks would affect users several months later. But even still, Amazon often makes strategic decisions that can't always be justified with data.

Bottom line: It's important to know the advantages and disadvantages of various types of marketing, including direct/brand/etc. But you will have to make some tough choices.

Personally, on my sites, I've seen lots of interesting results with testing designs...but I finally told my staff to stop micro-testing since we'd optimized the hell out of some of our stuff and were only getting incremental gains (e.g., going from 35% opt-in rate to 39% is prohibitively difficult). The biggest results I've gotten have been from strategic changes like changing the offer, adding a new product, pricing changes, back-end offers, deeper customer research, etc.

There is actually a specific STS specialization in CS if you're more technically inclined.

2 suggestions:

1. Here are some good books on psychology (specifically behavioral change): http://astore.amazon.com/iwillteachyou-20?_encoding=UTF8&...

2. Hang out with persuasive friends. Try to understand the meta-lessons of what they do. You can ask them, but often people don't have cognitive access to explain what they do, so sometimes you'll just have to observe.

When you combine theory with practice, you can get powerful results.

Very interesting. This describes my coursework at Stanford almost exactly.

My major was STS (Science, Technology, and Society) with a minor in psychology. Then I studied sociology in grad school.

What I focused on was social influence, persuasion, and behavioral change. I took courses on negotiation, deception, cults, magic, minority influence, organizational development, group dynamics, arbitration, personality/social psychology, persuasive technology, and a ton more. I was a researcher in the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab for years.

And I mixed it with practical applications of negotiations in the field.

The coursework has helped me dramatically in understanding the motivations, attitudes, and behaviors of others.

I still remember one of my Comm professors talking about how other technical disciplines tend to look down on areas like psych/comm. She said something I'll never forget: "The value isn't in the difficulty of the material, but the usefulness."

I use my social psychology background in my work with people on iwillteachyoutoberich every day.

Not for a while : )

I'm focusing on helping people earn more via my Earn1k freelancing course right now, so it's basically an IWTYTBR business course. We teach a lot of techniques that can apply to freelancing or even product-based companies.

Btw, thanks for the kind words!

Let's be careful here. Patrick, you and I both know how the conversion models in this area work, and while the info-marketing world is filled with scammy sleazebags, there are also some very credible ones.

For example, I sell information products as well as a New York Times best-selling book. My students do very well, whether it's learning how to automate their finances or earn more via freelancing. If they don't, they request a refund and I eat any costs of my online products.

Virtually every info-marketer offers generous guarantees and has to live up to their product's hype...or they go out of business. This is an extremely competitive area.

Vaksel, let me also offer some feedback on your numbers. You're analyzing them without knowing how the field works, and frankly every Web2.0 company could learn a LOT from studying the direct-response field. Want to know how to increase your AOV by 200% or 300%? How about finding undiscovered 6-figure revenue sources in your business (like I did 2 months ago)? Why not look to the people who have been doing this for decades?

You assume that most of the money is made from the sale of the ebook itself. That's not correct. Most of the revenue is actually made from the "back end," or other products that are either cross-sold, upsold, or repeatedly sold. Every direct marketer knows that you profit more from having a dedicated group of customers who buys from you time after time...which is why the very best ones take INSANE care of their customers. I'll speak for myself, but I continue to send lots of free material to both my free users and my customers. I email them free stuff. I call them. I write them hand-written cards (seriously).

As a result, on the rare occasion when I sell something, I can sell it for premium prices (often 100x more than my competitors charge for their products) and people happily pay it because they trust me and they know it's the best.

Here's another example. I know an info marketer who pays a 200% commission for any affiliate who sells his book. So if you sell his $27 ebook, you get $54. How does he afford that? Because he's systematically built a funnel that offers his customers more products that they want and are willing to pay for, making it a simple no-brainer customer-acquisition cost -- even at 200%.

A skilled direct-response marketer could take a $27 ebook and turn it into $500 of LTV...and the customer would be DELIGHTED to pay it if the material is of outstanding quality.

IMHO, a lot of Web2.0 companies should stop poo-poohing marketing and learn how it really works. Virtually every Web2.0 company should be doing upsells, cross-sells, and partnerships...and as a guy who co-founded a venture-backed startup and know a lot of other startup CEOs/marketers, I know that very, very few do.

I've put together several bookmarks that might be interesting:

* http://delicious.com/ramitsethi/emarketing (direct-response stuff)

* http://delicious.com/ramitsethi/marketing (general marketing)

* http://delicious.com/ramitsethi/monetization

Hope this helps.

I'm one of those people whose Google Apps account takes 15-30 seconds to return a result when I search for something. It drives me nuts.

I just installed CloudMagic and it's amazing.

Doubtful. In order to find out why people don't buy, we do heavy, ongoing customer research/surveys/phone calls with people who are on our prospect list but haven't purchased after the expected purchase time frame.

Hardly anyone, ever, has said "I haven't bought your course because you don't support Paypal."

Great question.

No, we haven't split-tested the addition of Paypal. We're constantly running tests, but this is a low-priority one for us based on extensive customer research.

Since we can't test it all, we pick the biggest potential wins (e.g., headlines and offers) and run them as rigorously as possible.

I do know that IMVU offers an insane number of payment options, but I think this may have more to do with their particular userbase.

I use Authorize.net with 1Shoppingcart. It works pretty well. I'm starting to come up against some technical limitations (like a lack of trigger emails for shopping-cart recovery), but overall, I'm very happy with the solution.

EJunkie and Payloadz are actually very good for simple shopping carts. In fact, they can do some pretty complex stuff like cross-sells and affiliate tracking. When you start finding yourself hitting technical limitations (like upsells not working the way you want them to, or you want to do more complex trials), you'll know it's time to upgrade providers.

I accept a fairly high volume of payments and intentionally don't accept Paypal. Here's why:

1. 99.9% of my paying customers have a credit card <---this is #1 for a reason

2. I've only had ~3 customers ever complain about my lack of Paypal. I made a special arrangement for 1. She ended up canceling.

3. Paypal doesn't allow the custom flows (upsells, cross-sells) that I can do with my shopping cart

4. Paypal doesn't integrate as nicely with my backend analytics, and I prefer to have all my sales centralized

5. Hearing bad bad horror stories about Paypal is just another, distant reason why I feel no urge to use them

Hope this helps.

Unfortunately, nobody wants to learn about statistics -- they just want it to work so they can make more money. I just wrote a post about behavioral change and understanding your users here: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/why-personal-finan...

That's why sites like Visual Website Optimizer are getting increasingly good. They use plain language to explain when to keep running the tests.

Again: It's unrealistic to expect lay users to learn statistics. They don't want to become statistical experts, they usually just want to increase sales. This is where software can help.

The January effect takes place in a lot of disparate areas.

Gym memberships spike in January. No surprise there.

But what's more interesting is that most self-development books are published in January. Publishers know this is a key time to reach people in the general areas of health & fitness, money, relationships, and work.

I've also had massive traffic spikes on my blog in January when I run a bootcamp/New Year guide.

I wouldn't be surprised if the HN growth happens with people saying, "I really want to learn about tech/entrepreneurship and build something this year."

A full-time traveler wrote a massive guest post on my site describing how she travels for $14,000/year: http://www.iwillteachyoutoberich.com/blog/cheap-travel/

I got my own merchant account because I needed to do some more sophisticated monetization work than Clickbank, Paypal, or Amazon allowed.

Now I use Authorize.net + Powerpay.biz + 1shoppingcart. Works pretty well together.

Doesn't Gilt do this?

Can you say more about this? I'm a big fan (and customer) of Gilt, and I'd love to know where I can read more about this. Thanks for the heads-up.

Do you pay for Mixergy?

If you learned just one thing at this conference that helped you optimize development by even a small percentage, this would be worth it.

Or if you met one person who you could ping for specific questions when you hit a roadblock, this would easily pay for itself.

I really encourage you to think about value, not cost.

Are you sure? On the same page, they say:

"Banner-free browsing on Ars Technica means no distractions, just content. Better yet, the ad-free pages are optimized so there are no "holes" where ads used to be. It's a tighter experience."

I went through New York publishers for my first (Portfolio/Penguin) and second book (Workman Publishing).

A while back, Tim Ferriss and I did a video covering lots of stuff on writing/marketing/entrepreneurship.

Specific clip about self-publishing vs. a NY publisher: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffYVm5g6oSk

Full 88-minute video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JesBi91m39E

(Uh oh...I just realized the threading on these back-and-forth conversations may become a little crazy.)

Anyway, here's the deal.

You have clearly thought a LOT about this and have all the elements in place. I'll just suggest a few different ways of thinking about what you wrote above.

1. Publishers don't care about your posting rhythm or how many Twitter clickthrough rates. In fact, many don't even care about your book topic.

They care about your platform and how well other books in this vein have done.

I noticed that you yourself indicated that there are few books on failure, while many books on success. Why do you think that is? What would make your book different?

2. A series of musings is usually a very bad book. Who is the market? Do you already have a presence there? For example, publishers started approaching me once they noticed that iwillteachyoutoberich.com was popping up in the personal-finance space.

3. On a tactical note, typically authors find an agent, who then finds the publishers. If you really want to publish a book, go find agents who have written books similar to yours and send them a pitch letter.

4. Also on a tactical note, driving 20k uniques in 2 months is very good. However, from looking at your site, you haven't captured those people. In other words, they came once and left, never to return. Think carefully about how to capture these people so you can continue sending them material that they want, love, and expect.

I can get into outbound marketing if people care, but suffice it to say that many, many startups overvalue social media and ignore channels that actually convert. Hint: Twitter. (Test it and see for yourself.)

4. MOST IMPORTANT. What is your goal? You indicated you don't care about the ego boost of being an author. So carefully consider whether a book is really what you want to do. There are many, many other channels (ebook, blog, etc) that don't require the back-breaking work of writing a book. Mine took 2 years to complete. A book is specifically useful for building your brand and spreading your ideas. But in most cases, there are other channels that work better.

(Incidentally, we should come up with a name for areas where people who work tell others NOT to do it. Examples: Authors, musicians, lawyers...)

Hope that helps. Let me know if you have other questions.

Thanks!

Let's do it here so others can benefit from the back-and-forth conversation. You can email me your super-private questions separately.