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.
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.
Have you written all four already? What happens if you write 3, then for the last one you have absolute writers block, or you end up writing stuff you are totally dissatisfied with?
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 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.
I hate the title of Ramit's book, because I have to add an explanatory sentence every single time I recommend it to a friend. "You should really check out this book... it's called I Will Teach You To Be Rich. I know, it really really really sounds like a scam, but it's actually the exact opposite. Just trust me. No seriously, really. Please just trust me and get the book. Come on."
I'm guessing that, in your case, there is a rather specific group of people interested in visiting a URL like that. As a student, I'm not terribly inclined to visit it, for instance, due to its questionable nature (apologies, but it does sound a tad scammy).
Way less than that (the print proportion), partly due to the high international shipping fee ($10/issue). Most readers are just happy to get the digital edition and print it out.
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.
Fair enough -- my heuristic is perhaps too coarsely honed. :)
It just took a long time to get from the article title to the realization that I was being asked to sign up for a list. It's funny I just now realized the list is free....
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.
Well said Ramit. There was a great interview of Jeff Bezos by the now defunct Portfolio Magazine in which they asked him how important A/B testing is to Amazon's success. He said it was important but that still many decisions, such as launching the Kindle, need to "come from the heart".
In this age of analytics, I think a lot of small startups are overlooking the gut decisions they need to make and focusing too much on optimization (e.g. this HN question).
This might not be the interview referenced above (kinda brief). Wired acquired Portfolio's content? Or was it their progeny?
"Portfolio: Are you always extremely methodical about major decisions?
Bezos: With business decisions, yes. With personal decisions, I find that my methodical nature can confuse me, and so I think more about personal decisions, like what job you really want to take or whom you want to marry. Although I did have criteria for that...
Portfolio: What's a gut call you made?
Bezos: Amazon Prime. It's an all-you-can-eat buffet, $79, that gives you free two-day shipping on everything you buy for a year. When you do the math on that, it always tells you not to do it.
Portfolio: One of your big initiatives, a search engine called A9, fell flat. What happened?
Bezos: If you decide that you’re going to do only the things you know are going to work, you're going to leave a lot of opportunity on the table. Companies are rarely criticized for the things that they failed to try. But they are, many times, criticized for things they tried and failed at."
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.
The difference between the hard sciences and soft sciences is where the difficulty comes in. Grasping the concepts of say, quantum physics, is ridiculously difficult. Once you fully understand it, it is relatively easy to apply. The principles of negotiation are easy to understand, but very difficult to apply.
People in hard sciences are typically elitist because they've had to prove themselves right up front. Making it through school is a more concrete accomplishment. Who knows if that psyc major will ever amount to anything.
It seems like a double-major in STS and CS would pretty much make for the ultimate entrepreneur.
Need to raise money, get customers, convince great people to work for you, or sell the company? Draw on your STS skills. Need to write amazing software? Draw on your CS skills.
I'll have to look into STS and consider that, but unfortunately, I don't really want to double major because I want time to do other stuff (like hack and maybe have a social life).
Hey Ramit, great comment. I think your educational experience was unique in how applicable it is to what you now do--for a non pre-professional degree.
For someone outside of college, how'd you recommend people learn those topics?
As I was reading your comment, I thought to myself that this sounds a lot like the make-up of the book I'm currently reading. Then I got to the final sentence and understood why.
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:
Back in the day I used to do a ton of affiliate sales for information products. Personally I stay away from the long-winded sales copy pages, I see them as insanely scammy, but they still sell to normal people.
Ramit has a way of marketing like a scammer, but delivering solid content every time. Seriously "I will teach you to be rich"? I was really reluctant to buy a copy, but after a few solid recommendations picked it up. I trust Ramit's opinion on finances highly, enough to bring my people to see him at sxsw and keep reading his blog. My copy of his book has been passed through probably 10 people by now (haven't seen it in a year) and I link to his articles from my University niche sites, because they have tremendous value.
When is "I will teach your business to be rich" book coming out?
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.
Ramit, much of the skepticism comes from the secretive and untracked nature of these types of sales. Take the original article, for example, with the unsourced "I know a guy who makes $5 million+ per month" quote. The comments here on HN are full of people who insist it is possible and a few people who "know what ebook he's referring to" but no one will provide any concrete references. In fact, no one has even pointed out what the subject of such an ebook would be, or what demographic would purchase it.
Without any concrete examples, I'm inclined to assume that it's some variation on the "get rich quick" scheme. This makes the numbers even less believable, as the ebook author has even more incentive to claim extraordinary sales numbers. No one wants to buy a get-rich-quick book from someone who claims to sell 10 copies per month. If an author claims to rake in $5,000,000 per month, then people are going to want to hop on the bandwagon and buy his ebook.
