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I couldn’t keep this one to myself for a minute longer…

It’s some free sales letter software from Eben Pagan that helps you to create sales letters that literally seem psychic to your website visitors. I just had to take a closer look…

What this software does is it creates a squeeze page where you ask your website visitors a series of questions. They then enter their name and email address and on the next page is a sales letter that’s customized to the answers they gave on the previous page. Then at the bottom of the sale letter is your order button.

I installed the software and tried out each step needed to get your psychic sales letter up and running and it’s very straight forward and easy to do. You don’t even need an HTML editor as it’s all build into the software for you.

The only downside I could find is you can only use this as a tool for list building if you have a GetResponse.com account. Otherwise the names and email addresses vanish into a black hole somewhere and so defeating the purpose. I’m sure the code can be adjusted to use any autoresponder service but you need to know what you’re doing.

As someone who loves Macs and prefers to use them I had to fire up my PC for this one because it only runs on Windows, which is a great shame but I do hear of a Mac version coming soon.

Other than that if you’re just starting out online or have some experience already (and have a PC) this software is well worth taking a close look at because of it’s potential for increasing your sales conversions 100 fold.

Before doing anything else you really need to watch Eben’s video first because it does a much better job at explaining how everything works than I’ve done here…

How to create a psychic sales letter

Here’s the link to the software…

Psychic Sales Letter - Download

I don’t know about you but I love to customize my websites and not stick to pre-defined templates so I’m going to see how far the pages this software creates can be pushed. The biggest thing for me is can I make adjustments to the code and sales letters so I can hook it up with my own e-commerce system.

Let me know what you think…

Popularity: 47% [?]

Back in January I ran a 7 day test using this interesting new online website visitor tracking service called Crazy Egg. (Here’s the article I originally wrote Don’t boil this crazy egg).

Essentially what this online tracking service does is it tells you which links are the most popular ones on your website. You can then use this information to optimize your websites ability to convert visitors into subscribers or customers.

Here’s the page I tested: BigSellingConversions.com

As soon as you login to your CrazyEgg account you’re shown a really well laid out and easy to navigate dashboard that shows all the tracking campaigns you’re running.

Here’s a screen shot of the page I tested out…

So you can see that during this time I had 25 visits and 17 clicks in total for that page.

To be totally honest with you that figure of 25 visits is something I’ve not been able to verify with my Google Analytics stats that I was getting so I have to question the accuracy of the tracking. I’m going to run another test on another site to see how accurate the tracking really is, right now I’m just not convinced by it.

For the purpose of just showing you what you get when you use this still very interesting online tracking tool here are my other results…

CrazyEgg provides you with a couple of ways to look at the data you get back on the clicks the links on your site has gotten. The first way is a heat map…

Then you can switch to overlay mode and you get something like this…

What’s interesting is how many people clicked on the check box, even though the form would still work without the checkbox being checked. The reason for doing this is to use the idea of commitment and consistency, when you commit to doing something by taking a positive action you’re more likely to follow-it through to the end by being consistent in your actions.

Is CrazyEgg worth using?

Definitely, but with one caveat… make sure you also track your visitors using a service like Google Analytics to compare the visitor numbers.

Based on the what I learned the numbers of clicks were not high enough to get any kind of significant information from them. Ideally you need around 200-300 visits to the page you’re testing to get meaningful results.

Go check out CrazyEgg.com now and see what you can learn about how people are using your website. It costs nothing and takes about 5-10 minutes to set up.

Popularity: 36% [?]

I’ve just started to reading this superb book called “Be Unreasonable: The Unconventional Way To Extraordinary Business Results” by Paul Lemberg. What I like most of all about it is how it encourages you to challenge the “norm” or what you might consider being “reasonable”.

It’s all about stepping beyond what’s expected and transforming yourself into something extraordinary. In fact this is a step-by-step guide to the rule breaking and destiny making mindset that helps you take control of your business future.

So what the heck has this got to do with website design you might ask!

Everything!

I want you to think carefully about the last website you designed…

As you were designing it were you saying to yourself “I’ve got to get this perfect” before I can upload it and finally launch it? Was there a huge list of things you just had to get done before you considered your creation perfect enough?

I want you to consider this… people have a tendency to get stuck in trying to think of the “perfect idea” and create the “perfect website”. Instead they’re always polishing, always making small changes here and there, knowing someday they’ll be ready to launch (just don’t hold your breath!).

According to Paul Lemberg “Perfection kills market place opportunity” and nobody knows this better than Bill Gates.

Why is it Microsoft has so many different versions of their software? you know version 1.003a or version 4.3.456b or some other long coded number. These numbers simply mean that Bill Gates isn’t a perfectionist, he’s a realist who understands the importance of being unreasonable to get things done and into the hands of his customers as quickly as possible, even if it’s not yet perfect.

His programmers don’t sit around endlessly polishing their software until it’s an absolute masterpiece. They gets his products created so Microsoft can make money.

So if you’re still working on your website design, polishing it, perfecting it I need to ask you a couple of question….

If you launched it today will it work? will it still be able to make you money, even though it’s not perfect yet? If your answer is “yes” and “yes” again, my suggestion is to “just do it”, get it launched and shoot for excellence by testing in the real world instead of looking for perfection in isolation.

Being reasonable tells you that things should be completed in every way with no defects before you can launch. Unreasonable people do the opposite and seek excellence rather than perfection. Perfection stops you making progress, excellence can be reached quickly.

So where do you see yourself in all I’ve said?

Being unreasonable doesn’t just apply to website design. When I wrote this post I didn’t spent hours perfecting it, I just wrote it, read it through, corrected a couple or errors then posted it.

You might even have noticed a few errors I’ve missed out on… did it stop you from reading? or for even getting this far? Of course not, I’ll just correct those errors later on.

This is exactly what Paul Lemberg means about aiming for excellence rather than perfection. If I aimed for perfection, I might never have even posted this article and you would never have known that you’re actually ready to launch your new website today!

Get Paul Lemberg’s book, read it from cover to cover, be unreasonable and get extraordinary results.

Popularity: 35% [?]

I’d like to tell you about how I escaped a deadly trap most people are unaware of.

But first another question…

Have you figured out what it takes to “really” make it online?

Personally I wouldn’t say that I’ve figured it all out yet …but I am so close I can almost taste it!

Why is this?

Simply because I realized very early on that I needed to get away from selling my time for money …this was the trap!

Escaping is easy…

Create a digitally downloadable product once that I could sell over and over again using nothing more than a website and an automatic follow-up email system.

Then repeat the system over and over again until I had a whole line up of valuable products to offer.

Here’s what happened to me (and is probably happening to you right now)…

I was so busy selling my time (designing websites for other people) I had little time to figure out how to turn this into a product I could sell many times over without me actually being there.

As you know time is limited which puts a ceiling on what’s possible when you follow this model of earning an income.

So there was my problem.

…how on earth could I free myself from it?

(more…)

Popularity: 26% [?]

In my last post I showed you the theory behind how people really use and view your website (and it’s not what you think!). If you missed it you can read it here.

When you’re designing your website you need to keep everything I said in mind for the best possible results.

Today I signed up for a unique and “potentially” very powerful online service that’s going to help you a LOT because it follows on from my last post in a very interesting and very useful way.

What this service does is it shows you how people are using your website. Before you only had the theory but now you can get the “actual” stats for your website design, have I got your attention?

Great! because if you’re as serious about creating high converting websites that not only look great but also sell like crazy I highly recommend checking out this service (just as I’m doing).

It’s called “Crazy Egg” and they give you the tools to visualize your visitors (even for free!)

Here’s a screen shot I’ve grabbed from their website so you can see the different types of statistics they’ll give you to help you create websites that convert visitors into buyers or subscribers.

• You get an overlay of the web page you’re testing so you can see the actual percentage clicks on each link and form element you have on you page.

• You get a full summary of raw clicks.

• You also get a visual heatmap of the page so you can see at a glance where your page “hot spots” are (where people are clicking the most).

Here’s the full list of the features Crazy Egg gives you.
Here are the different things you can test for…

• Test a new design
• Test content and discover which version works better
• Test various layouts or placement of key elements such as ads or action buttons.

As I mentioned earlier I signed up for an account. But before taking the plunge with a paid account I’m testing the free version. As soon as I have some results to show you I’ll post them up here.

If you’d like to join me in this testing of Crazy Egg just go to their site here and sign up for a free account. It’ll take about 5 minutes to get started and there’s a single line of code to add to the pages you’re testing.

It’s a really well laid out and easy to use service which looks like it has a great deal of potential to help you build better more profitable websites.

Let me know how you get on won’t you?

Popularity: 30% [?]

It all started when I got to talking with this interesting guy called Ben Cope…

You see Ben calls himself “The Internet Genius” which put my guard up right away because anyone calling themselves a “genius” had better put their money where their mouth was, if you know what I mean.

I was pleasantly surprised because unlike many people out there claiming to be experts he was actually pretty good and new his stuff quite well. So when he contacted me a couple of weeks ago with a new product he had just released I listened to what he had to say.

Now to cut a long story short Ben wanted to me to take a look at what he calls the “WordPress Dream Theme”.

He sent over the links to the various pages he had created which explained what it’s all about and gave me the link to download this interesting looking WordPress theme design he had created.

A couple of days went past as I waited for some spare time to take a closer look. Finally I cracked open the web pages Ben had sent over to me and I took a close look under the hood of his latest creation and was pleasantly surprised by what I found…

(more…)

Popularity: 36% [?]