How to Increase Your Sales Conversions By Split Testing, Upgrading Your Graphics and Improving Your Sales Copy
Notes from Marlon:  I begin with an in depth discussion of split testing software, including Kaizen Track and Split Test Accelerator.  After that, I move on to discuss raising the quality of your graphic design and how to learn to write sales letters that convert.
Here’s an update on split testing software:
We installed Kaizen Track (KaizenTrack.com) but couldn’t get it to work with all the various systems we have installed.  Split Test Accelerator is what we’re using.  Google Website Optimizer is GREAT for split testing.  However, you need to have your product delivery on the same server or domain  (I don’t remember which it is) as your sales letter. All of our sales letters are on a different server and this prevents us from being able to use Google Website Optimizer.
Another note:  Test BIG things.  I recently read an article by David Cross from Agora where he experienced the same thing I have.  You split test something and it appears to increase results. You roll it out.  Then you go back later and test it again only to find out the original outpulls it.
The MAIN things to test are your headlines, the opening or lead of your sales letters, the number of bonuses you offer, and the offer.
  
Hi guys, this is Marlon. How are you all doing? 
  
Tim has my desktop with the data and I was on my laptop playing around with some split testing software that I want to talk about today. So it sounds like we’re having a productive discussion here. 
  
Before we start, let me just find out who’s on the call. Who do we have on the call today and where are you calling from? 
  
Nancy: 
Nancy from Maryland. 
  
Marlon: 
All right, Nancy. 
  
Mike: 
Mike. 
  
Marlon: 
Mike, glad to have you again. 
  
Jim: 
Jim. 
  
Marlon: 
Oh, hi Jim. How are you? 

Jim: 
Fine, thanks. 
  
Marlon: 
And what city are you in, Jim? 
  
Jim: 
Colorado Springs. 
  
Marlon: 
All right, cool. Who else do we have? 
  
I want to talk a little bit about split testing and some really important things in terms of counting your visitors and so forth. Then we’ll get updates from everyone and we’ll take questions. 
  
Let’s talk about something that I’m getting ready to do and which we’ve done in the past. I haven’t really used the Taguchi Split Testing so for those of you who are new I want to introduce the concept. First of all, I’ll discuss split testing and then Taguchi and then we’ll draw down a little bit in some things I’ve discovered. 
  
Split testing was traditionally done in direct mail. You’d take 2 letters and you’d send out half the people Letter 1 and half the people Letter 2. It was also done in newspapers where you could run your ad in different zones with different headlines. That’s what John Table did 30 years ago - he split test headlines. 
  
But on the internet, this is accelerated times a hundred thousand times what they used to be able to do in direct mail. Because what’s so awesome about the internet is I’m sitting here and I can test a gazillion variables. But if you did traditional split testing, you try to do that with a whole bunch of variables that says you take a ton of traffic, it takes forever. 
  
There’s a guy that worked with Japan on statistical processes in the Deming Management Method and he’s called Taguchi. His last name is Taguchi and he wrote the method called The Taguchi Method, which is a method to test the whole bunch of things that we call variables. Variables could be anything. Variables could be 7 headlines or 10 headlines. Variables could be testing subheads. Variables could be your offer, the guarantee, bullet points, and the opening of the letter. All those things can quickly and easily be tested using Taguchi, which is a statistical process that greatly and enormously reduces the number of test required to get a valid result. 
  
So relatively quickly it can test 30,000 interactions of different combinations. Now, you don’t have to be a mathematical genius to figure all of this out because there’s software that will do all the calculations for you and present to the viewer of the webpage all these different combinations, keep track of everything, and at the end it’s magic. 
  
So here’s the way the deal works. Let’s say you create 10 headlines, 10 subheads for the headline, and 10 subheads throughout the sales letter, 10 guarantees, 10 different bonuses. Throw all of that into the software, it will run all the test for you, and at the end you know these were the winning subheads all tested against each other, with this headline, this subhead, this guarantee. This was the single best combination out of everything. So it’s just an awesome way to increase your conversions. 
  
Now, we’re working on increasing our conversions because it’s really interesting. We get, somewhere in the range, I honestly didn’t know that we were still doing this good on traffic. I had my guy in India who I hired through oDesk. I’ve been talking to you all about outsourcing, some of you are trying to hire Filipinos, some of you are probably ahead of me because I’ve been dragging my feet. But I did hire a guy on oDesk who’s doing quite a bit of stuff for me and last week he got a job. He got a real world job so he’s not doing outsource work anymore. But I had him go through Google Analytics. 
  
The thing I don’t like about Google Analytics is it doesn’t give you a total for all your traffic. I had to manually go through and add up our visitors every month for the last, like, 6 months. I found out we’ve been getting somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 uniques for all of our websites combined per month, which is good. That’s very good. It’s far better than I thoughtWe’re actually getting more traffic than we used to get when honestly I was making more sales and I was like, “What is up with that?” 
  
And the thing’s that happened is our conversions overall are down significantly, which just shocked me and I’m like, “What is going on here?” Part of that is the market. Some of those products have been around a long time so they’re not converting well and I haven’t kept the sales letters really, really current with current psychology of need. 
  
The way you get conversions up is by split testing the BIG THINGS.  Your headline and the opening of your sales letter.  The offer and so forth.  It’s better to spend your time testing the big things than the small things.
  
I feel that you need 1% conversions, at least. If you have low quality traffic from affiliates, you won’t reach that number.  But your good quality traffic should convert at that.  You should track this and if the conversions dropped below 1%, then you have to do some troubleshooting. 
  
For those of you who are newbies, some of this will be over your head but for Mike and maybe some of the other people here, this might be useful – there are a couple things you have to look at in terms of what your conversions really are. 
  
The first thing I found when I dug in to Split Test Accelerator, which is one of the software programs we’re going to discuss that does Taguchi test for you.
I found there’s a tab called Manage Traffic. When you click on Manage Traffic, you find out that it will highlight in yellow spiders that are coming to your site acting as hits that appear to be visitors but really aren’t. They’re spiders and this artificially lowers your conversion count. 
  
There is java script code you could do something with, and I’m not sure but I think you put it on your website or within Split Test Accelerator, we still have to figure it all out. 
The bottomline is, it will help get rid of the spiders. Because what it will do is not count as visitors traffic that’s coming from a source that doesn’t have java script enabled. What they found out is most of these bots do not have java script enabled and so what that means is if you do not count as visitors, hits from referral sources that have java script disabled, you’ll just get rid of all the bots. Or in Split Test Accelerator you can manually go through all, it’ll highlight different bots that it spots in yellow and you can go through and just click if you don’t want to include them in your test results which is very handy. 
  
Now, we also took a long look and Danny spent about 3 days this week going through DirectTrack and comparing DirectTrack to Google Analytics. The reason I said we had 50,000 to 100,000 visitors a month is DirectTrack shows 100,000 visitors a month and Google Analytics shows 50,000. That’s a big difference. We were really not sure why there’s a difference. As far as we can see, the tracking on both of them is accurate. We’re just guessing maybe I don’t have the Google Analytics code on all my pages or something. That’s a big difference. 
  
We’re going to take and put affiliate links on a page that no human being knows about. We’re going to then submit the page to Google and some spiders and see when the bots go there. Do they then, in essence, click on the reseller link and create what appears to be a valid visitor but is actually a bot. We think this might possibly be happening but honestly we don’t know. 
  
For those of you new who are listening to this call live or by recording, for some of you that will be over your head. That’s okay. You’ll learn this stuff as you go along. But you also have to understand there are advanced people on the call like Mike and some others so we have to cover it for everybody. 
  
The point of this is, you have to know your traffic; you have to know your conversion. I was talking about the 1% conversion. The point of the 1% conversion is you have to make sure that you’re not counting in your conversions and that you don’t have an artificially low number caused by spiders and bots hitting your websites. That’s the whole point of that. 
  
Now, Google Analytics does a really good job of omitting those but I’m still not sure Google Analytics traffic is everything you need because we really don’t have an explanation why it’s reporting half the traffic that DirectTrack is, unless half of our hits are coming from spiders. I mean, if you have 200 spiders hitting your site 3 times a day, it could boost up artificially your visitor totals. 
  
Hopefully that helps some of you – you just had information there. Now, let’s go down a little bit more into split testing. 
  
Let me tell you some of the programs you can look at for split testing. 
First of all, your choice is do you want a pay per month or do you not want a pay per month? There’s Vertster, which is the one that David Bullock, who kind of had the niche in split testing, speaks out on conferences and stuff. He got started with Vertster and then, I don’t know if he uses KaizenTrack, although he did 6 audios that were included as a bonus of KaizenTrack. I don’t really know if he uses KaizenTrack or if he uses Split Test Accelerator but Vertster is one, but that has a monthly fee. 
  
There are some other products that charge monthly but I don’t think you need to pay monthly. So that leaves you to a couple of basic programs that do Taguchi. Now, there are split testers that do not do Taguchi testing. Those aren’t what you want. For example, Armand Morin has one that’s a split test generator or something. But it doesn’t do Taguchi. I wouldn’t want that; you want something, in my opinion, that does Taguchi. We all love Armand but Armand doesn’t do Taguchi. 
  
So we like Taguchi because you can do the maximum number of test with a minimum amount of traffic. That’s what you want because it buys you speed. You get the absolute maximum amount of data in the least possible time. 
  
So that leaves you with a couple of programs, in my opinion that I’ve seen, that are the most robust. That leaves you with KaizenTrack (kaizentrack.com) and Split Test Accelerator (splittestaccelerator.com) 
  
Now let’s talk about KaizenTrack. I got on all of these because yesterday, Justin Brooke sent out an email. Justin did the SEO Lies report that hopefully you’ve read. If not, type in ‘SEO Lies Justin Brooke.’ It’s a $1 report on SEOs that I highly recommend. Great one to have your outsourcers do. If you’re hiring people the way John Jonas is teaching, have them do the SEO Lies. I plan on doing that. I just haven’t implemented it yet. 
  
Anyway, Justin sent out a thing saying that he uses and loves KaizenTrack.  
I want to educate you all about internet marketing because some of you poor newbies just don’t understand the game so I’m going to lay the game out to you, or part of it. What happens in internet marketing is people have vested interest. In other words, there are affiliates for products that have a vested interest in the product they’re promoting. Even if they’re not making money directly, still because they’re promoting it, they think it’s really the greatest thing since sliced bread. They’re going to be an advocate of that product so they have a vested interest because they’re making money from people buying the product. So you have to understand when you go in a forum, you do not have objective opinions. What you have are opinions from people who all have a vested interest based on the products they’re promoting and what they’re making money from. 
  
If they’re a PLR (Private Label Right) person and they pimp Private Label Rights stuff, and I use pimp to mean sell aggressively. I understand some people get annoyed when I use the word but I like the word. In marketing, in copywriting, you use things that are from the street. You use a lot of street language because it communicates with emotion and getting people to buy is about arousing emotions. So you’ll notice in my emails and so forth, I use a lot of street language. Some people object to that. Well, there’s a reason I use street language because it evokes emotions and you learn this when you learn to write copies. So anyway, I use the word pimp – it just means sell or promote but aggressively. 
  
Basically though, everybody’s pimping something. Everybody’s selling something in forum, in internet marketing forums anyway. Everybody has 3 or 4 products in their sig line even if the post is like, “Please help me get traffic. I can’t get any traffic.” and then you read their sig lines and it’s, like, “Mega hits generator: Get unlimited traffic.” Those are their sig lines in a post about how they don’t have any traffic. This happens all the time. 
  
My point is everybody has vested interest. So in the KaizenTrack forum, you have some people just trashing out the product in a manner that you know is not objective.  When I say you know it’s not objective, let me explain why. For example, one person is in there asking highly technical detailed questions because they figure the person won’t be able to answer them and it will make them look bad. Probably an affiliate or someone with a vested interest. 
Because of this post, I would have written it off other than Justin Brooke is a really, really good marketer, a really competent marketer and he’s not going to endorse something and say he loves it if it’s not good. And also, don’t really think David Bullock will allow him to use his audios if it wasn’t a good product either. That’s a little education about sometimes what goes on in forums. 
  
If you run a forum, make sure you have someone babysit and watch it.
  
If you’re a beginner, KaizenTrack on the one hand is easier to use than Split Test Accelerator, I’ll tell you straight up. On the other hand, once I watched the videos with KaizenTrack, then I understood how to use Split Test Accelerator. 
  
We have Split Test Accelerator but I never used it right, honestly, because of the interface. But I’m going to explain it to you so you’ll just get rid of your learning curve. I didn’t really understand how to use it and it’s intimidating at first when you go in there. Once I watched the KaizenTrack videos, I saw “Oh this is how you use Split Test Accelerator.” 
  
KaizenTrack’s a lot easier for a beginner. On the other hand, Split Test Accelerator has the most awesome forum and Jim’s in there everyday giving highly, highly, highly, highly detailed responses to posts. The guy, for what you spend on the product, I don’t see how he’s making any money because the amount of support he gives in the forum, he should be charging like $50 a month for or more. He really just goes overboard on it. 
UPDATE from Marlon:  Unless there is some reason you can’t use Google Website Optimizer, I recommend you use it.  Just about everyone I know uses it now.  The one thing I CAN say about Split Test Accelerator is the forum is absolutely awesome and you get personal help there with anything and everything relating to split testing.  The forum and support is outstanding.
Now, let’s talk about pricing. KaizenTrack for the basic version, I think, is about $200. Now the basic version is not with WYSIWYG, meaning what you see is what you get; we call it WYSIWYG in internet marketing business. The basic version is still easy to use. It’s still easier, in my opinion, than Split Test Accelerator. 
  
On the basic version, you open your sales letter and it’s in a little box over at the left inside, all the HTML code. So you’re also going to test your headline. You highlight the headline, with or without the HTML surrounding it, the formatting. I don’t think it matters either way. I would just highlight the text personally. Then you click a little link that says ‘Add Craig Split Test Based On This’ – you just click the link and it pastes the text for you in a box over at the right. And then you select which one of the Taguchi split test you want to run. These are arrays and I will what an array is in just a second. 
  
You click the link and it pastes it over in the right, in the first box that you control, and then it may have 3 or 6 more boxes depending on which split testing you’re running. Then you just type your variations of your headline. Then you go to the next variable and let’s say that one’s going to be subheads. So you label it subheads and you copy the first subhead you want to test over at the left, you click the link, it pastes it over at the right, and then you type in your variations. Then you go to, let’s say you want to test the first paragraph, copy the first paragraph, hit the link, then over on the right type in 3, 4, 5, 6 different versions of it and so forth. 
  
You don’t have to be using HTML and you just save the file, which will be a .php. The file has to be .php instead of .html although I’m actually a little confused on this. I’m having my guy look at it. They have, like, a java script method where you can use HTML but I don’t know if that works with Taguchi. Some of their documentation is really not world-class. So I’m having my guy look at that today. I think you have to save the pages as .php, which is no big deal. You save it, if it’s your homepage, you just save it as index.php instead of index.html, you upload it, and everything works the same. 
  
So that’s how KaizenTrack works. It’s all contained within their thing, you open your web page, you do your edits, you write your different variations, you save it, and you upload it, and that’s basically it. There’s one other thing - when you set the test up, you have to choose the goal page. In other words, if it’s opt-in, the goal page is the thank you for opting in page. That’s how it tracks conversions. When it hits that goal page and you put the code on there, it goes, “Oh, that’s a conversion.” You can also track sales and for that you have to put the code on the sale thank you page and then it knows to track a sale. 
  
Now, Split Test Accelerator is not so hard but it’s not quite as user friendly. The way it works is you have to open your HTML editor, like Dreamweaver front page. You copy your headline and then you paste it into a box in Split Test Accelerator. Then you type in your different versions, and then it gives you a little piece of code that you paste in your HTML editor. Let’s say it was the headline, you hit delete on the headline and then you paste it into this little piece of code there that it gives you instead of the headline. 
  
Then you go to your subhead. Copy the subhead, paste it into the box in Split Test Accelerator, type in your variations, and then it gives you a little piece of code that you paste in place of that subhead, or first paragraph, or whatever. 
  
So you have 2 programs open, your HTML editor and Split Test Accelerator. And you have to then paste the code back into your HTML editor like Dreamweaver front page. It’s not that hard but frankly, when you go in there and you’re looking at it at first, and you’re just seeing these boxes, you’re just like, “What?” 
  
I really didn’t know how to use it; I’m embarrassed to say that. At minimum if you’re going to use Split Test Accelerator, you need to go watch the videos at kaizentrack.com because it’s the same basic process, it’s just in Split Test Accelerator. 
  
In Split Test Accelerator, you have to open the Dreamweaver frontpage and paste code back and forth between the two. In KaizenTrack, there is no pasting back and forth. You open it, on the left you copy it, it will link, it pastes it over the right. So in some ways, KaizenTrack is easier to use. The problem is, Split Test Accelerator has the best forum in the world and KaizenTrack has a forum that’s very, very, very limited in my opinion. 
  
Now, the full-blown WYSIWYG version of KaizenTrack is $500. WYSIWYG meaning you don’t have to use the HTML even. It shows it as your regular web page and then you just highlight the sentences you want to test, the headline or whatever on your web page, click the button, and hopefully it pastes the right code and you then create your variations of it. I don’t really know how good that works. 
  
That’s really the platinum version. Platinum version supposedly has some other, better features. The platinum’s $500, Split Test Accelerator’s $500 so those two are the same price. The pared-down version of KaizenTrack where you’re doing it from the HTML code instead of the full WYSIWYG is $200. Frankly, I don’t know how good the WYSIWYG/the platinum version works. It’s not real clear what other features the platinum version has. It says it has some other features; it’s not 100% clear what those other features are. Other than you get 6 one-hour audios by David Bullock about split testing, which are very valuable because he doesn’t have these really great split tester with a lot of experience, and he has no info products that you can buy at that price point, like the cheapest thing he has is, I don’t remember, but it’s quite a bit of money, like $1G or two. 
  
So that’s split testing. How you increase your conversions is you do the split testing. And these are the 2 best products I know to do it in. Split Test Accelerator is not as easy to use, you have to paste and then copy back and forth, but it has a drop-dead killer support forum, just unbelievable support from Jim. KaizenTrack, frankly, is easier to use but very, very little in the support forum. Also, Split Test Accelerator may be a more robust program in terms of all its features. I haven’t really compared them apples to apples so I’m really not confident to speak on that. 
  
The other thing is whichever one you use, pretty much you have to install it. It’s a license to do it, as far as I can see, you could use them on unlimited domain. But you have to install it each time on each separate domain. You can’t install it once and use it across a bunch of domains. It’s not a hard installation as far as I know but you do have to install it separately on each domain. 
  
Another issue is a lot of people are doing web pages now using WordPress and the reason is because Google likes WordPress. I’m surprised at that frankly because Google has a vested interest in you using Blogger. If I were them, I would probably favor Blogger pages versus WordPress but I guess they’re being fair about it. 
  
Everybody’s now using WordPress for webpages and HTML maybe a thing of the past. Because you could do a static front page on WordPress where you choose that you want your front page to be static so it’s basically like a webpage. You don’t have to show any post on it or anything. You can put the post at /post or /blog, or something. 
  
Now, to use the split test, either KaizenTrack or Split Test Accelerator, with a WordPress blog, is a little bit tricky because then you have to have another program that allows PHP to be accessed, a plug-in that allows PHP to execute on a blog and that gets a little bit more complicated. I’m having my guy look at that today. It can be done but I don’t know of anyone really doing it yet. I haven’t seen that much mention of it in the forums. I just ran across like this program that would execute PHP in a blog and then once you can do that, as far as I can tell, you could split test in your blog. 
  
That’s how you can increase conversion. 
END OF SPLIT TESTING DISCUSSION….now I move to discussing increasing conversions by upgrading your graphic design.
Now let me say one other thing about increasing conversions. Some of you, need to hire a web designer. I’m all for it. Design Dashboard’s a very popular product of ours. I’m all for learning to do your own design. You still need to learn to do your own design because if a designer sends something back to you, you need to know how to open a PSD and change the words. You need to know how to do a basic drop shadow, you need to know how to add a little gradient to something or do your own button. You need to know just some basics of Photoshop. Design Dashboard does a pretty good job of teaching you that, not full blown Photoshop but Photoshop Elements. There’s not that big of a learning curve between Elements and Photoshop and actually Photoshop’s easier to use than Elements. 
  
But having said that, for example, on my blog the other day someone posted that they’d tried everything and it just wasn’t working for them. So I went and I looked at their website and, God bless them, but number one, hire a graphic designer. There are plenty of them out there. Again, how do you find them? Well, when you run across webpages you like, you scroll at the bottom and you’ll usually see a designer down there. Yesterday I saw one, minisite911.com and I also saw the other day ecovergrafix.com was really good. I run across these everyday. 
  
There’s no lack of really talented designers out there. I’ve used Design Guru Ryan. I’ve used Darren at Graphics Genie; he’s really a talented designer. But if you look at your site and then look at other sites and your site looks like crap, go hire a designer. Like minisite911, for $150, they will do all kinds of stuff for you. Some of you just need a designer, seriously. 
  
Now, on your copy, the same thing kind of applies. Some of you can really use a copywriter. But that’s more of a problem because design for $150-$200 you can get quite a bit design done. One of my friends had a sales letter that did $100Gs in a week off a JV traffic but he spent $13,000 on the sales letter because I forced him to. I’m like, “Dude, this thing will not convert. Go hire a sales letter writer.” He hired Mike Morgan. He paid him, I think, $13Gs or something like that but don’t quote me on that because Mike’s regular rate may be a lot more than that. He was friends with Mike so he may got a discount, probably did. But even at that $13Gs is not cheap. But he sold $100Gs so he’s thanking me, “Thank you so much Marlon. This thing would have never made it unless I hired a pro writer.” 
  
Now, if you don’t have that much money, Plan B is to go to Warrior Forum and hire somebody there. There are people that will do letters for $500, or $1,000, or $1,500. You don’t get a $13,000 sales letter probably for that money but quite possibly you get something better than when you’re writing yourself. 
  
Plan C, if you don’t have $500-$1,500 or you don’t want to spend it, go find a really good sales letters in your niche. Go to clickbank.com, shareasale.com, and pay.com. Look at the other sales letters, print them out, lay them out the floor, lay yours out side-by-side on the floor, compare the length of the letter, compare headlines, compare paragraphs, compare subheads, compare the testimonials, compare the guarantee, compare the call to action, and make yours as good as theirs. That’s how it’s done. 
  
So the person who said internet marketing just won’t work for them, that they’d tried really hard the last 3 years, you know, God bless them, I think they wrote their sales letters in Push Button Letters, which is a tool. It’s a tool to learn the basic structure of a sales letter. But it still requires thought and a brain and work. And the sales letter just wasn’t there. It wasn’t anywhere near close. 
How To Learn To Write GREAT Sales Letters
You have to go find sales letters in your niche that are relatively close. Like Total Health Breakthroughs sales letters, we’ve talked about those on prior calls. You have to find them, study them, print them out, lay yours beside them and compare them side-by-side, that’s how you learn to write copy. That’s how I learned. 
  
Courses are great but nothing replaces learning to write letters by studying letters that work. People are always like, “How do you find letters that work? I don’t know what sells, how would I know?” Well, go to ClickBank and look at the top gravity products, that’s a good start. Or go to great marketers like Agora, or Total Health Breakthroughs, earlytorise.com, dailyrecknoning.com, investmentu.com. Once you’ve subscribed to a couple of their email lists, believe me you’ll get letters from all of them. You’ll have no lack of sales letters from all of their divisions. Buy a few of their sales letters, buy a few of their products, and you’ll get like world-class copy everyday in your mailbox. Plus, everybody else rents their list so now you’ll be getting world-class sales letters from  whole lot of people. You better have a big mailbox. 
  
All right, so I’ve talked a lot. I’ve talked about knowing your conversions and having a 1% minimum conversion. This is important for AdWords, too because if you have a $50 product that has a 1% conversion, then you can pay ¢50. If you have a $37 product with a 1% conversion, you can pay ¢37 a click and breakeven. If you have a $100 product with a 1% conversion, you can pay $1 a click and breakeven. Then you add on forced continuity, then you have a profit. Average person stays on forced continuity, if it’s 3 months that’s $20 a month, that’s $60. So for every person that bought, out of 1% conversion that you broke even for in, you made $60. Do 10 of those a day, that’s $600 a day. Do that 7 days a week, that’s $3,200 a week. There’s your $100Gs right there. 
  
All right, I’ve talked a lot. Who has questions or comments on my discussion of traffic, inflated numbers, spiders, split testing software, split testing process, how you do it, why you do it, getting your graphic design up to speed and getting your sales letter up to speed. These are all critical elements of the game we play. Who has questions or who has comments? 
  
Mike, I’m going to start with you because you’re probably the most advanced on the call. What’s your questions or comments on it? Are you split testing? Yes or no, and if you are or are not, talk to us about it. 
  
Mike: 
Yes on some things, not on all. I just do usually more on squeeze pages to bring people in and it’s usually done on AB Test not Taguchi. 
  
Marlon: 
I would do Taguchi and here’s why. 
  
Mike: 
No, I understand why and I’ve looked it up. It’s the learning curve. 
  
Marlon: 
Okay, go to kaizentrack.com and watch the 3 videos on the page. You will not be scared of split testing after you watch those 3 videos. 
  
Mike: 
Now, the other thing is the difference you have in your traffic. Google Analytics uses java script. You’re definitely not picking up the bots since they have java script disabled because it won’t trigger the java script. 
  
Marlon: 
Right. And that may be the difference, Mike. It may be. 
  
Mike: 
Yeah, I mean, I don’t know that that’s a 50% difference but that definitely is probably a good piece of the difference. 
  
Marlon: 
Yeah, and some of that difference, a certain portion of it is caused by cookie stuffing. For those of you newbies, welcome to the deep end. I didn’t even know what cookies were until last year. Cookie stuffing means that people take an image like the one pixel GIF. In other words they create a GIF image in Photoshop, save it one pixel by one pixel, they put it on their website, and they link your affiliate URL to it. So when their page loads, the pixel loads, your affiliate URL loads, but it’s not a real person. It’s a one pixel image. 
  
There are valid uses for this and if we have time we’ll talk about AdWords Black Book and how John Barker/Mr. X uses them. I think he has a pretty legitimate use of it. There’s also non-legitimate use of it where there’s no promotion being done for your product. We found one person who’s sending us a lot of visitors each month, or we thought, instead they’re just loading a one pixel image and they’re never doing any real promotion for our product. I think that’s a non-legitimate use because they’re adding no value. They’re just trying to steal commissions off of other people’s efforts and they’re doing nothing at all to promote our product. Truthfully though, they’re not making any sales but it is inflating our stats and we’re aware of that. 
  
But some of these other things I’m not sure. Like, I don’t know if a bot spiders a page and there’s an affiliate link on the page, and the bot follows that affiliate link, will that register as a unique visitor on that affiliate stats. That’s the question. 
  
So, Mike, your assignment is to go to kaizentraffic.com and watch all 3 videos. 
  
Mike: 
Yup, definitely will do that. 

  
  
Marlon: 
Especially the middle one. The middle one’s the best but all 3 are good and frankly, they’re only 5 minutes long each, Mike. It’s not like these are 30-minute each videos. But honestly, once I saw those videos, it was all crystal. 
  
I may get KaizenTrack even though we already have Split Test Accelerator just because even though it may be not even as good as Split Test Accelerator, I’m not sure, but it’s so easy to use. It’s really easy - you highlight what you want to split test, you click a link, and then you type in your different versions in the box. How easy does it get? 
  
Mike: 
Yeah, that sounds relatively easy. 
  
Marlon: 
Yeah, there’s almost like no learning curve to it. It’s really the simplest thing in the world. When I saw that, my eyes lit up. I was like, “Oh my gosh, that is so easy.” 
  
Mike: 
Yeah, I tried with Google’s Website Optimizer, which is a Taguchi tester. It’s free but it’s brutal. 
  
Marlon: 
I don’t believe it’s Taguchi. It’s just a straight split tester; it’s not Taguchi. 
  
Mike: 
No, it separates. You can do multiple tests at the same time. 
  
Marlon: 
Yeah, but that’s a PHP test. That’s a multi-variant test but it’s not a Taguchi test. A Taguchi test uses an ortho-gonal array, which is different mathematical combinations of variables. In other words, I think there’s a 3x5 where you have 5 variables, meaning it could be your headline, subhead, guarantee, and a couple of other things, and 3 variations each. That’s called a 3x5. 
  
You just can’t test any number of variables against any number of variables. It has to be this valid mathematical combination. The cool thing is KaizenTrack does all of that for you. You don’t have to worry about it. You just click which number of variables you want to test basically and it will do everything else for you. 
  
If you watch his videos it will be crystal. You will be like, “Oh my God, that is freaking easy.” 
  
Mike: 
I use PHP on my pages, anyhow, so it’s not… 
  
Marlon: 
KaizenTrack is easy enough that, honest to God, I believe newbies could use it. The only issue really with a newbie using it is in the non-WYSIWYG version where you’re opening your letter and you’re editing the text in the HTML, you have to dig through the HTML to find, say, your headline, or your subhead. It’s really not that hard because you know what your headline says. You just find it. You don’t need to edit the HTML, all you do is you just highlight the text that your headline, click the little link and it will paste it over there in the side box, and it will say you have 4 variations or how many variations that test has, and then you just type in your variations and then you do the next variable, subheads or whatever. It’s really very simple. 
  
I’m right with you, Mike. The reason I never did Taguchi testing was I just thought it was too darn difficult and I didn’t have time to figure it out. 
  
Mike: 
Exactly, right now I’m trying to get my VA up and running. 
Marlon: 
We’re going to talk about that in just a second. But let me finish up Taguchi stuff and then I’m going to get updates from everybody including your VA. 
  
By the way, KaizenTrack, Mike, is something you can really even give a VA. Just give them what you want to test and have them put it in there because it’s easy enough that a VA could use it. Now, Split Test Accelerator I’m not so sure. It’s a little bit harder to explain to someone. 
  
Who else has a question or a comment now on this traffic thing, this split testing, or hiring designers, or getting good copy done? Who else has a question or a comment? 
  
Mike: 
What is the web site for Split Test Accelerator? 
  
Marlon: 
That’s the website, splittestaccelerator.com. 
  
Mike: 
Thank you. 
  
Marlon: 
If you get stuck on that, just type in ‘Jim Stone and split testing’ or ‘Jim Stone Taguchi.’ 
  
Whichever program you buy I highly recommend that you read the forums in Split Test Accelerator. Jim is just unbelievable at this stuff. I can’t believe the extent he goes through to answer people’s questions in the forum. It’s just amazing. 
  
Who else has a question or a comment? It can be about your graphics, it can be about getting your copy done, it can be about this whole split testing thing. 
  
Nancy: 
I’ll just give you an update. I got an image done for my Newbie Queen site. It seem to take a long time and I finally went with what they had because I just didn’t want to spend any more time on it so I’m going to use it. But I’m also going to go into Design Dashboard and see if maybe I can do a little stuff. But I’ll do that on my own. 
  
Marlon: 
Well, let’s talk about that real quick then, Nancy. When you say that it took a long time or something, what do you mean? Who took a long time to do what? 
  
Nancy: 
I had it done by…. 
  
Marlon: 
Don’t say names. You had it done by a designer that you hired, right? And how long was it taking them? 
  
Nancy: 
It only took about a week, maybe a little more. 
  
Marlon: 
Well, a week for a designer to do something is not unreasonable. 
  
Nancy: 
I know it’s not. I just tend to be impatient. 
  
Marlon: 
All right. A week for a designer not on your staff to do something is not unreasonable. However, let me say, for $150-$250 a month, you can hire a designer in the Philippines, full-time. Now they may not be able to do your highest A level graphics like Graphics Genie can or Design Guru Ryan, but they can sure do B and C level banners and run of the mill bread and butter design and so forth. 
  
Nancy: 
Well, this is not a bad image. It’s just not exactly right. And that’s where I always trip myself up so I thought, “Okay it’s good enough.” 
  
Marlon: 
Yeah, well if you want something fabulous you may have not paid enough money. 
  
Nancy: 
I paid $150. 
  
Marlon: 
Design Guru Ryan and Graphics Genie will do those A level graphics but you also have to pay probably, like, I’m guessing about $350-$500. 
  
Nancy: 
That’s okay with me down the road but right now I’m going with what I’ve got and get it going rather than slowing my work down. 
  
Marlon: 
Your graphics are not the crucial part in your conversions, your sales letter is. So spend that time and money on a sales letter. 
  
Nancy: 
So that’s my update. 

  
  
Marlon: 
Also, the other thing on a sales letter is let’s say you can’t afford a copywriter to write the whole letter, have them write the headline and the first page. Because your headline and your first page are, like, 80% of your results, anyway. 
  
Nancy: 
Wow, that’s great information. 
  
Marlon: 
Yeah, I can afford the whole letter but write the headline and Page 1. You can’t mock up the rest of it, but it’s not the critical part. Your headline and your Page 1 determine people’s attitude going into it whether or not they’re going to read the rest of the letter and so forth. That’s the critical part of the sales letter – the headline and the Page 1. 
  
Before we go on with updates from Mike and some of the other people, who else has a question or a comment on the split testing, getting graphics done, or sales copy? 
  
We have 8 people on this call so let’s hear from some of the rest of you silent folks. 
  
Dale: 
I’ve been listening and taking notes and re-installing some software in my computer at the same time so my focus is in split, but I’m enjoying and I’m really interested in the next section you’re going to talk about because that resonates more with me. Thank you. 
  
Marlon: 
Right, I was going to talk about what? 
  
Dave: 
The next section you said you said to the guy before me that you… 
  
Marlon: 
Oh, right, the Virtual Assistant. All right, well we’ll talk about that in a second. 
  
Who else has a question or a comment, any of you silent folks? 
  
Jim: 
I’m unclear as to why I got invited to this call. 
  
Marlon: 
You’re unclear as to why you got invited to this call, Jim? 
  
Jim: 
Yes, sir. 
  
Marlon: 
All right, you got invited to this call for one of two reasons. Either, one, you are paying monthly to be on the call and if not that, then two, when I gave away our free ebook which is How I Got 199,500 opt-ins and Sold My First $1,000,000, on Page 2 of that sales letter, the thank you confirmation page, was a $1 trial of these calls that you’re on right now. It’s a 2-week trial meaning you’re probably on one of those two calls; thereafter you’re charged per month. If you do not want to be on the calls, and you do not want to pay for the monthly, then go to getyoursupport.com and just tell Tim your name and that you don’t want to be charged for the calls, and he’ll take care of it. 
  
If you do want to be on them, we do this twice a month. I discuss whatever’s on my mind and then I try to get updates from people on the call, and I try to help them get over stuck points, that sort of thing. Is that useful to you, Jim? 
  
Jim: 
Yeah, that’s excellent. Thank you. 
Marlon: 
I believe you paid $1 to be on this call. There’s a chance you have been charged more than that and if you don’t want to be charged, let Tim know and whatever you paid will be given back to you, even if it’s just $1. 
  
But for the people on these calls, you also get a recording of the call assuming that the recording’s turned out. We have a little membership area where we have all the past recordings. There are a lot of them. If you don’t know where that is, again just go to getyoursupport.com, and ask Tim and he’ll tell you so you can hear the past recordings of what we’ve done. 
  
We have a lot of members but only a few show up on the calls and of the ones that show up on the calls, some of them don’t speak up so it is a way to get a little more personal help that you would typically get from somebody that’s sold as much as I have online for as long as I have. Normally, they have a whole lot of members and it’s a very impersonal environment. I haven’t really done a lot of marketing for this yet. 
  
Let me just tell you what the plan is. The plan is we’re ramping up pay-per-click. That’s going slowly because I have the learning curve just like everyone does. Our 50,000-100,000 visitors a month is all from affiliate traffic and organic traffic from the search engines. We plan to go into pay-per-click and I need a good way to monetize that. The idea is they go there on the pay-per-click, they download my free ebook and then the next page is “Oh, try this out for $1.” If you get an average of 3 months recurring billing at $40 a month, that’s $120 profit which then means I can pay $1 a click and breakeven and the people who stick with me then go on to buy other products and services and I make a profit. 
  
So that’s the reason we’re doing these and the overall rollout plan even though it’s materialized really slow. It’s a great deal for the people on right now, though, because we don’t have a lot of people and you get a little bit more personal help. 
  
I also maybe talked about things on these calls now where if we have 500-1,000 on here I might not have talked about some of these things, or I might be more judicious in how I talk about other products or that sort of thing. 
  
So is that useful to you, Jim? 
    
Who here would like to speak up? Anyone else? Do any of you have a stuck point you need some help with? 
All right. Mike, I guess you’re up then. Let’s hear about your Virtual Assistant. How many hours are you getting him? Did you get him from the Philippines or some other country? Give us the scoop on it. 
Update From Mike On How He Is
Hiring and Using Virtual Help
Mike: 
Okay, I’m following John Jonas’ stuff so it’s somebody from the Philippines. I used a combination of his stuff and stuff that I own on the blog thing to get it up and going. You have to post on that job board and I got about 3 people, 2 of which were part-time. I wanted somebody full-time for my first person. I did not want somebody just to do articles or something like that so I wanted somebody full time. I had a couple of people that wanted part-time and I had two people that wanted full-time and I replied back to both of them. One answered and one came back 4 days later so I hired the one that answered right away. 
  
I’ve given her the training that he has and I’m following his process. The first project is to get everything together for WordPress blog. I gave her a topic and said, “Give me some keywords. Follow the videos, do the keyword research, send me the keywords, and send me 3 suggestions. Go here,” and I gave her a place where she can go check domain names, and I said send me 3 choices for domain names. 
  
So she did and we went through that part. I bought the domains, threw it up on my server, sent her the information and said, “Okay, here’s my WordPress Made Easy product. This will show you how to put a blog up. I want you to install WordPress blog up there.” Now, we’re in the process that she’s starting to put content up there. 
  
Marlon: 
Let me ask you this, was that put up on Hostgator or Fantastico one-click installation of WordPress, or was it on another server? 

  
Mike: 
It’s on my dedicated server. She did ask about Fantastico but I told her not to use Fantastico. 
  
Marlon: 
Did she have to set up the MySQL database name and table? 
  
Mike: 
Yeah, she had to do the whole thing. 
  
Marlon: 
And she did it? 
  
Mike: 
She did it with the instructions I gave her. So she didn’t have to go search for anything. 
  
Marlon: 
I might use that. So you have a WordPress Made Easy product that covers the installation? 
  
Mike: 
Yeah, it goes through that. It has videos and it will walk you through creating a database and installing the blog and a book on how to FTP and stuff like that. They’re reference materials, and because I have that it’s easier for me to give her that. There are a lot of free information out there too. 
  
I don’t like Fantastico because it’s too easy to be hacked. I’ve been hacked; I’ve been through that. 

Marlon: 
I didn’t know that. 
  
Mike: 
Well, they use the same basic things and they call the database the same so it makes it easier for people to… 
  
Marlon: 
Oh, yeah. All right, now, how much are you paying her? 
  
Mike: 
I’m paying $250 a month. 
  
Marlon: 
And what city is she located in? 
  
Mike: 
I think it’s Davao. 
  
Marlon: 
A lot of the really good outsourcers, for some reason I do not know why, maybe it’s the ability to get internet, a lot of them are in Davao. 
  
All right, so you have someone in Davao, that’s good. It sounds like a really great person you found, Mike. 
  
Mike: 
Yeah, I’ve been happy so far. 
  
Actually there was a product that just came out today that I’m promoting. I’ve been through the product, it’s a video thing and it’s ideal to be at. It’s kind of like the product that John Jonas’ buddy, the $3 a day times 700, it’s the same type of product and it’s basically similar to what Justin does. 
  
Marlon: 
Who’s the person? 
  
Mike: 
It’s Susan.
  
Marlon: 
What’s it called? 
  
Mike: 
Video Cash Explosion. 
  
Marlon: 
I have to check that out. Let me write that down. 
  
Mike: 
What she basically does is she has software that will create a 1-page website and she has a script for a video, she goes through how to find a product on ClickBank, then edit the script, she gives you a PowerPoint that you have to make, like, 3 edits to and you basically do a PowerPoint video. 
  
Marlon: 
Really, that sounds awesome. 
  
Mike: 
Yeah. So you create that as a flash video in Camtasia, then her software does keyword research for Google. I’m actually going to use. I like Market Samurai so I’ll have Joan do it with Market Samurai to find our keywords for a product. 
Marlon: 
Well, that sounds awesome. I used Market Samurai last week. One of my friends uses it. I haven’t really used it before and I didn’t quite get the value of it. What do you like about Market Samurai? Why do you like it? 
  
Mike: 
I like that I can find some keywords and set the parameters relatively easily when you’re digging down. So when I’m digging down I can find the keywords that I can own easily, that they get enough traffic. So I can set minimum traffic and I can set maximum competition, sort those immediately and then I can also, once I find those keywords, go look at each keyword in there and see what my competition is in the top 10. Because it will show me how old the domain is, it will show me how many backlinks they have, whether they’ve submitted to different places. So you can see if that keyword is in their domain but it has 10 or 12 different categories and you can see if this is somebody that you’re not going to budge period, or if this is a place where you can hit the top 4 or 5 relatively easily. 
  
It’s a great research tool that way so that when you’re picking your keywords that you’re going to focus on, it just allows you to go a little deeper than just using Google or even like Wordtracker or other tools -- all of which I’ve used in different times. Because you’re not looking at just there, you can actually look at your competition. 
  
You can also pull and check your competition for articles and stuff if you’re in article marketing. Because you can take the keyword and you can pull blog posts and articles that are showing for that keyword and you can see how many backlinks they have and you can see there again how competitive it’s going to be to get your articles out there. 
  
Mike: 
Fair enough. I like that, Mike. 
  
Mike: 
If you’re looking to do bum style marketing, there’s an awful lot of information there that you can dig through in a half hour or 45 minutes and come up with words that you know you can compete on. 
  
Marlon: 
Well, if you can train your VA in that then you’re going to have a real machine going. 
  
Mike: 
Yeah, that’s what I’m looking at. This is the ideal thing - that basically she can just send me the script, I can do the video and give her the video and let her run the software. 
  
Her software does have keyword research in there and she gives you some ideas and then she goes through all the promotion stuff. And her stuff, a lot of it, it’s mainly bum marketing style – it’s articles… 
  
Marlon: 
Justin Brooke and John actually have people in the Philippines do the videos and everything, too. 
  
Mike: 
Yeah, well, I may get to that point but to start I’d like to… 
  
Marlon: 
Yeah, to start. But eventually, you can probably have the whole thing outsourced. 
  
Mike: 
Oh, yeah. I’d like that the whole thing outsourced so it’s just, “Okay as soon as you get one up and running and it makes X amount of dollars, just move to the next one.” 
  
Marlon: 
Sure. That’s what Joel Peterson did, the $3 a day 700 times guy. He flew in once with his partner because they wanted to market one of my Dashboards. When he flew in that’s when he showed me all of his pictures of his yacht and all their toys and so forth, and we talked about traffic. So I knew he was real. 
  
I had a long conversation with him the other day just kind of about how he does his stuff. Joel’s whole system really is he finds something that just makes a little money, literally, even like he said, $3 a day, and then he just scales it to unbelievable proportions. He had, I don’t know the exact numbers, between 25 to 100 people. When he was here he told me 100, the other day he told me 25, so the truth was probably somewhere in between. So he had people doing his AdSense business in India and that business did $25Gs a day. It was AdSense Arbitrage. He was, like, THE big AdSense Arbitrage success story. 
  
He’s honestly using the same program on his AdWords now, just tweaked a little bit differently. He still does it for his content network AdWords, it’s the same basic software just tweaked. But it’s the same idea. He just gets something that’s profitable and he hires people, outsource overseas, and then just scales it. 
  
Mike: 
That’s basically what I’m looking at, that will be ideal. The second person I want is someone who can do PHP programming. 
  
Marlon: 
You’re going to have to pay probably $450 for them. 
  
Mike: 
Yeah, I figured that’s going to cost me more. 

Marlon: 
Yeah, to get somebody good, probably $450 is what I’m guessing. 
  
Mike: 
Yeah. But I have enough need for somebody that’s scaleable for another project. 
  
Marlon: 
All right, now, I have a question for the other people on the call. Did this conversation with Mike give any of you any ideas or any insights and do you have any questions? Anyone? 
  
Jim: 
It was interesting what he was doing and for me it was also interesting that you mentioned Joel Peterson at his $3 a Day times 700. That was an interesting concept. 
  
Marlon: 
The $3 a Day is pocket change for Joel. He replicated that 700 times and I think he has a few Filipinas that work on that. He really just did that so that he’d have a product to sell. That’s my opinion on it. 
  
Let me just explain it this way. The reason Joel flew in here originally and the reason I met him and his partner, he has a partner in some of his businesses, is they wanted 5,000 units of one of my Dashboards a week. Joel plays the game at a very high level. So in my opinion, he really just did the $3 a Day to show people that here’s something practical that you can do and that you can scale up. The service I think that he’s doing for everyone, though, is really showing them that you don’t have to do 700 things. You need to do one thing 700 times, or more. 
  
Jim: 
It’s a repeat kind of philosophy. 
  
Marlon: 
Yeah, he has AdWords account now. I didn’t ask what he got in January and February, I’m sure the numbers are very similar but I did see the video from October of his Google AdWords account. Just last October, 23 million clicks on Google AdWords and I’m sure he’s still doing numbers fairly much in that ballpark. And the reason he’s doing that is he has 3 people full-time in India who just work on his AdWords. He has 6 total but 3 of them just do keyword research full-time. All they do, all day long, everyday, is find more keywords that he then plugs in to his AdWords content network system. He has one thing that works then he just scales it up with outsourcing. 
  
Now for that business he also, by the way, has custom software written. If you’re going to scale up AdWords at any kind of scale, you’re probably going to have to have custom stuff written. Probably on the organic SEO side to some degree because everytime anyone starts using a particular software on a large scale, Google will kill it. 
  
The ideal thing is like what Mike just talked about, which is a software program or something that will do something but, it’s a launch but not a gazillion people bought it. It’s not like Frank Kern and the whole syndicate was out there promoting it. You know, it’s kind of a niche thing. That’s probably going to last a long time because it will never really even make it on Google’s radar. 
  
Jim: 
Mike’s comment about Fantastico was also interesting and it was something that I noticed on every installer that I’ve ever done on Fantastico, it always creates the same format of SQL database and I wonder if that was packable somehow on a system, which I guess it is. 
  
Marlon: 
Yeah, I thought that was a valuable insight, Mike. I did not know that; I did not even think of that. We don’t use Fantastico because I have a dedicated servers and we’re on **** (1:16:15) so they don’t have Fantasticos. And I have a PHP programmer on staff so he just did it himself but I’m glad you said that because I didn’t know that. That’s good information. 
  
Nancy, did you have any questions or comments about anything Mike talked about? I don’t now if Nancy’s still on or not. 
  
It’s getting a little bit late; we have to wrap this up. Before we close up today, did anybody else have questions or comments? This is your last chance to speak up. 
  
Dan: 
I appreciated hearing that the Taguchi split testing stuff is way beyond where I am so this latter part was very helpful. I appreciate it getting a little more stuff that I can think about how I can use it. So, thanks. 
  
Marlon: 
Well, if you go to kaizentrack.com you might be surprised how easy it is to use the Taguchi. I don’t know if you’ve been through our back audios in the members area. We have some that are a lot more basic than today’s call. 
  
I have to cover things for both beginners and advanced but I do have some calls, especially like 2 calls ago where we worked on Nancy’s business and really drilled down in detail just on building a business really from scratch. So if you’re new to this, go back through some of those back audios and I think you’ll find there’s a lot of gold in them. 
  
But yes, get one thing that will make you some money and then scale it up. Do it 700 times, outsource it to the Philippines or wherever. Some of my friends are using oDesk – it’s an easy way to start in outsourcing because you don’t have to hire them full-time. The problem on oDesk is, like, my guy got a job and quit. They’re looking for jobs and so you go for this learning curve and all of a sudden they disappear. That’s why it’s to your benefit just to hire someone full-time so you are their job. That way you go through the learning curve once and then they’re with you. 
  
All right, everyone I want to say thanks for being on this call. I hope all of you got something useful out of it that you can put to use in the next couple of weeks. This call when it comes in a couple of days will be posted in our private members area. I will see everyone on this call in 2 weeks. Thank you everyone. 

  

  
  
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