“Everything you want (but don’t have) lies outside your comfort zone – – else you would already have it”

In early 2015, at an event that over 100 high-level entrepreneurs paid up to $5,000 for a ticket to attend – – I gave my first ever talk from the stage.

Scared and nervous do not even begin to illustrate how I felt in the moments before walking on stage…

….especially because the night before, I had ripped up the talk I’d been preparing for weeks and sketched out something completely different on a piece of scrap paper.

The talk I was going to give was teaching the core principles of my new book “Profit Hacking”. The book focuses around three main concepts:

1. How to get more traffic to your website
2. How to convert more of your traffic into leads and/or sales
3. How to maximize the lifetime customer value of your conversions

Since coming out in December of 2014, Profit Hacking has spent 13 months straight in the top 20 for Amazon’s best selling books in the Web Marketing, Marketing, and Ecommerce categories. Thousands of entrepreneurs have read it and used what is taught in the book to grow their business and “hack” their profits.

Delivering the Profit Hacking content to that room of high-level entrepreneurs likely would have brought me a handful of clients & referrals but I wanted to talk about something different. The talk I gave was 10 minutes long but I’ve cut out the first 4 to get straight to the heart of the speech:

 

Training for a marathon has a couple of great side benefits. One is that long distance running is an excellent form of meditation.

So far, I’ve been blessed to receive some clarity through dozens of miles run. Hopefully, this article will serve you by giving a glimpse into those insights.

Guiltless Desire

After an expansive weekend last month, I was lucky enough to bear witness to my friend David discuss an idea around guiltless desire.

The concept resonated deeply.

How often had I “made myself wrong” for desiring what I desired? Times I told myself that I wasn’t worthy of having it nor capable of creating it in my life. When I judged myself as strange or weak or broken for desiring some things while I judged myself as conformist or egotistical or unreasonable for desiring other things.

Add on top of that what I had learned through Buddhism and the “spiritual community”. The teachings that desire is at the root of all suffering.

But what if all if it is part of the human experience? What if the “desire” Buddha spoke of was the desire for anything to be different than it is exactly right now?

If you didn’t resist anything, you wouldn’t be feeling the want for anything to be different right now. Then you can access the perfection of the moment.

But by all means – – have goals. And dreams. And desires. Let them motivate you and inspire you and push you. Align your thoughts, words, intentions, state, and actions to match the level of passion you feel for the things you want to be, do, and have.

Own your desires. Never judge them as “good” or “bad”. Never apologize for them. In fact, the more you speak about them – – the more you will get them. That’s because others want to help you get your needs met and your desires filled.

But they can’t do it if they don’t know that is what you need or desire….unless your friends are mind readers or are immensely intuitive.

While you can drop your judgment of your desires (or any of your thoughts for that matter) as “good” or “bad”, there is another way to “judge” them that I recommend trying.

Label desires (or thoughts) as “useful” or “not useful”. Things pop into your mind all the time and they don’t necessarily have to mean anything bigger than the fact that they were a fleeting, passing thought.

If you think of something that doesn’t ring completely true to you and/or isn’t something you would like to expend any more energy (of any kind) on, then mentally label it as “not useful”.

The mind is an incredible tool with an insatiable capability to learn. Give it the inputs now that will create the future that you want. Telling your mental computer that something is “useful” will tell it you want more attention & focus on that thing moving forward. And vice versa.

Own your desires, align yourself with them fully, and watch your world change.

Need-Free Connection

This is something that is pretty new to me. Without even realizing it, I’ve been putting psychological and emotional hooks into people for as long as I can remember.

Even if I’ve just met that person, I want them to like me and think I’m funny and interesting and more. On some level, I latched onto them seeking signs of their approval.

This creates the dynamic where I “need” something from them. This creates an energetic demand on them and usually gives them a slightly uneasy feeling within themselves.

You probably know what I’m talking about on both sides of the equation.

While I wanted (and needed) compliments, to feel accepted, and to feel like there was a real connection…I wasn’t getting that very often.

Desire with need can often actually repel the thing you want.

Desire combined with an expectation of that desire becoming a reality while at the same time not needing it to happen can often be a huge attraction for the thing you want.

While I still have a lot of room for growth in this area, I’ve been feeling a lot more need-free connection in my life lately.

Strangers have complemented far more often and I’ve felt much faster and much deeper connections with others. I’ve even found that more people than usual approach me to start conversations than they used to.

I believe there are two things helping drive this shift:

One is that you can “cut the cords” that are trying to attach you (and/or your self-esteem, your worth, your approval, etc) to someone or something other than yourself.

Physically make cutting motions with your hands all around your body and visualize all the cords that have come from you trying to hook in to others being cut. Then visualize all the cords that have come from others trying to hook into you being cut.

Through “cutting the cords”, giving yourself the things you previously “needed” from others, giving everyone else the freedom to be themselves without wanting them to be any different, and by lovingly (but also assertively) setting boundaries + agreements for all your relationships are huge steps towards need-free connection.

The other is something you’ve probably heard hundreds of times but it’s worth hearing thousands of times because of how important it is.

That is that you have to love yourself more, accept yourself more, and be more connected with yourself if you want to increase the amount of those things you receive any of those things from others.

You can lead the charge by loving and accepting yourself first, thereby giving others a shining example of how to interact with you & treat you.

You must give to yourself in order to receive from others.

Speaking of….

You Must Receive In Order to Receive

Early in my entrepreneurial career, I heard a few people I trusted tell me that I had to give in order to receive in business and in life.

Successful entrepreneurs often cited that their giving spurred a significant amount of their success (and ergo their receiving).

Whether it was giving of their time, their money, their expertise / skills / abilities, or something else – – they were passionate about giving.

So that’s what I did. I started giving.

I gave a percentage of revenue to charities. I volunteered my time to tutor grade school students of the Chicago Public School system. I gave ideas and hours of consulting and other bits of my expertise away for free. I gave paperback copies of my book out for free (which means that not only was I giving something away for free, I was actually losing a couple bucks per book).

And I was pretty much always struggling. I was giving and giving but my bank account wasn’t seeing the supposed positive side effect of the giving.

This whole time, I had massive issues with receiving. In all forms.

If you wanted to give me a compliment, I wouldn’t accept it by saying “thank you” and deeply appreciating that someone else not only saw me but was compelled to speak to it.

Instead, I’d play it off or play it down or deflect it in various ways.

And despite me thinking and saying that I wanted more money, I turned money down at so many different opportunities. People wanting to pay me for my time or my expertise or my book and I said that I was happy to help for free.

Which people think they like but it really ends up creating a pretty messy dichotomy. People (myself 100% included) often do not respect what they get for free.

Even if what they got for free was amazing, implementing it more often than not falls to the bottom of the priority list because there was no investment behind it. There was no energy or thrust behind it.

But if people pay for something, then they are far more likely to take it seriously and see it through.

And people usually don’t like to feel like they took advantage of someone or were unable to reciprocate by providing you a roughly equal amount of value in return.

Money is a great way to give a roughly equal amount of value in exchange for what you’re getting. When you give something away for free, the other person may feel some form of guilt over not being a part of a “fair” transaction.

You can let money simply be a “test” to see how committed people are to getting the results that you can bring them. If they don’t want to pay you what you charge, then they weren’t ready to commit at the level that you’re going to commit to them.

There is likely an endless (and constantly replenishing) number of people who are ready to commit at a level equal to (or even greater than) what you bring. Those are when you’ll have the most enjoyable customer/client relationships and where the best results for all parties involved come from.

In order to receive, you must practice receiving.

Once you have no blocks to receiving, then giving is a great way to increase the amount getting back in return.

Imagine if you kept ordering stuff from Amazon every few days but you had a mile of barbed wire, 15 foot concrete walls, alligator infested moats, and a small army that stopped anyone and everyone from getting to your home.

No matter how many packages you order, you’re never going to receive any of them. Maybe the occasional rogue UPS driver who has a passion for living dangerously can get you a couple of the things you ordered but you’re definitely getting a lot less of the things that you could be getting.

Take down the walls, send home the militia, chase away the gators and all of the sudden all these wonderful things that were supposed to get to you start showing up “magically”.

If you didn’t know better, you’d think that the whole world had a meeting and decided to start being a lot nicer to you.

As you remove your barriers to receiving, you are taking “friction” out of the process that must be gone through in order to give you something.

In conversion optimization, we consider friction anything on a website that makes it harder for the person to take action.

Maybe the price is too high or maybe the site doesn’t function very well or maybe you force visitors to register on your site before they can make a purchase – – but whatever it is, there are unnecessary barriers between a visitor doing what you want them to do on your site (buy, subscribe, sign up, contact you, etc).

By removing the barriers, you make it easier for others to do what you want them to do on your site and grow the revenue your business earns via your website(s).

Check in with yourself to see how well you receive and if you have constructed any obstacles that makes it harder for others to give to you. See if you have any judgments around receiving being in some ways “worse” than giving.

“Receiving” is as natural and pleasurable and honorable and as whatever other good attributes you pin on “giving”. You must receive in order to receive.

Think Bigger, Then “Teleport” to Get to That ‘Bigger’

Your life is constrained first by the size of your imagination and second by your level of courage in going after the dreams & goals created by your imagination.

You will never grow unless you try to do something beyond the current barriers of your comfort zone.

Something interesting happened to me when I started diving into personal development stuff:

I thought I had to dive inside and “fix” everything. Everything bad or dark or wrong had to be ripped out. Everything that kept me small or afraid or weak had to eradicated and eliminated forever.

And I certainly was successful in releasing and processing a lot of emotions and issues that been stuck inside of me.

But I am now convinced that the “success” wasn’t necessarily a result of going “back in time” and trying to uproot old beliefs and ways of being that no longer served me.

Instead, the success came the moment I decided what I would like to replace those things with and then commit to being and doing those things.

I just learned that the original definition of the word “habit” actually referred to a garment – – an article of clothing. That made all the sense in the world to me.

Just like you can choose your clothes, you can choose your habits. Your habits are quite literally clothing that is “worn” by your personality. You have them because they fit you. They fit your current self-image and personality pattern.

Your habits and your self-image go hand-in-hand. When we consciously develop new & better habits, our self-image will outgrow the old ways of being that came with those old habits.

Successful change, growth, and development happens when we make a conscious decision about how we want to be – – and then reinforce that decision through consistently acting in a way that is aligned with what we decided we wanted.

If, starting now, you paid all of your attention, awareness, focus, thoughts, words, and actions in the direction of what you want, there is no need to “remove” or “kill” the old things you no longer want in your life.

Old habits and old ways of being don’t have to die hard. They can simply “starve” themselves away naturally as you focus more and more of your energy & resources in the direction of what you do want.

You can take a jagged, squiggly line from ‘Point A’ to ‘Point B’ or you can take a straight line. The straight line is the fastest path, right?

What if you could get rid of the “line” completely but simply teleporting from A to B?

A recent TED talk I watched called “The Anatomy of Results” made the argument for “Intention” and “State” being more important than “Action” for getting results.

At first I was skeptical but then it began making sense. Two different people can take the same action (they can say and do the exact same things) but get completely different results.

One person may come in with the intention of trying to get something from the other person and a defeated state where they lack confidence in their ability to get what they want.

The other person may come in with the intention of trying to give something to the other person & help them and with a powerful state of confidence that they can create & serve.

You can begin teleporting to the life that you want by transforming your habits to “fit” the type of person you need to be in order to have what you want.

You can begin teleporting to the life that you want by deciding who you want to be and then acting in a manner consistent with that new self-image.

You gotta be before you can do and you gotta do before you can have.

The doing reinforces the being. The doing gives your more experience, more feedback, more results, and more confidence in your ability to be the person you decided to be.

Then you likely are able to expand your imagination even further for what is possible for you to achieve, to accomplish, and who you can be. Then you likely are able to exercise courage more consistently in going after the things you want to be, do, and have.

There very well may be nothing except for some false, limiting beliefs in the way of where you are and where you want to be.

You could teleport in an instant (even this instant) to completely being the person that you want to be. And you could completely transform your habits so that you would consistently be doing things in alignment with who you want to be. And from there, it’s only a matter of time before you have what you desire.

Of course, most people opt for linear growth (whether that line is squiggly or straight) over radical, transformative growth. I know that up until this point of my life – – that is the path I’ve taken.

And if that path is working for you right now, perfect. Improving 1% per day is a wonderful way to grow (especially because compound interest will eventually take hold and make things really exciting).

But I hope reading this expanded your imagination for what kind & speed of growth is possible if you cultivate the courage to go after it.

I invite you to, like an article of clothing, try on this method of growth.

I invite you commit to responding positively & aggressively towards every challenge as well as every opportunity to reinforce to yourself (and to the universe) that you’re serious about the new you that you’ve decided to be.

That you’re serious about getting everything in life that you desire.

Guiltlessly, of course.

For most of my teenage years and 20-something years, I’ve “sports hated” Kobe Bryant.

You know how it is. You choose to see the negatives of a person and become blind to the positives. And then something happens and you are able to see the full picture of that person.

When this happens, you usually find that there is a lot you can learn from them. Initial resistance is often a sign that there is something important for you if you lean into it a bit.

I just watched the most recent documentary on Kobe Bryant called “Muse” and it completely changed my opinion on the man. There’s a lot in the 90 minute film. My goal is to pass the key things I learned on to you here.

It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be.

 

That’s the name of a (great) book I bought in college. I read it back when I bought it. I liked it. It felt like the truth. But I wasn’t ready for the full impact of its lessons back then.

The other weekend in Las Vegas, my hotel room had a small collection of books on the coffee table. One of them was that book. And this past week the lessons from that book have been popping up all over my life.

Kobe had some of the most poignant things to say about the topics of Life, Ambition, and Becoming Great.

Here’s what I learned from Mr. Bryant….

AMBITION

If you don’t have a goal, it’s difficult to score. You must have a goal and you must develop a complete disregard for where your abilities end.

In fact, choose a goal far beyond what you thought you were capable of accomplishing yesterday and make it your business to achieve it.

Kobe’s goal was “to be able to sit at the same lunch table as my muses. Michael [Jordan]. Magic [Johnson]. I wanted to be able to sit at the same table as them and belong there.”

No matter how talented or well-regarded a young athlete is, it certainly is ambitious to make your goal to be considered right there with a small handful of the best to ever play the game.

But Kobe’s view is that “when we say ‘this cannot be accomplished, this cannot be done’ – – we are shortchanging ourselves”.

If you want to be great, there’s a choice you have to make. We can all be masters at our craft but you have to make a choice. There are some sacrifices that come with making that decision and many people wind up opting to not make those sacrifices.

If you have truly made the commitment to being the best at the expense of other things, you have an instant advantage on your competition who have not made that same commitment (or at least not at the same level).

I don’t expect to have my jersey hanging from the rafters of the United Center in this lifetime, but I can make my goal to be able to sit at the table with some of the best marketers and conversion optimizers of all time. To be able to sit (and belong) with my muses.

And you can do the same.

If you want to be the best at your particular field, get serious about your commitment. Expand your imagination for what you are capable of and expand your courage in going after it.

Seek out those who already are or at some time were at the mountaintop. For Kobe, he wanted to learn how to be the best basketball player in the world. “And if I want to learn that, I have to learn from the best. My place to study is from the best.”

When your goal is bigger and more important to you than your fear of rejection or your need for approval from others, you won’t think about those things. They’ll receive less and less attention, energy, and awareness to the point where they’ve almost disappeared completely. Your fears can’t get in the way when your goal is that much more important.

LEADERSHIP & PERCEPTION

Make no mistake about it, perception is often reality. How others perceive you has a massive impact on your ability to influence them.

Whether you are trying to create a partnership, make a sale, get a date, change their behavior, or something else – – you will be ineffective unless the other person perceives you as able to make their life better through being influenced by you.

For a long time, there was no distinction between my “personal self” and my “professional self”. I operated and carried myself the same way amongst friends & family as I did potential clients, clients, & employees.

And I got feedback (direct and indirect) that told me I wasn’t taking enough control, I wasn’t leading effectively, and more.

The solution was to separate my “personal self” from my “professional self”. What would the most effective leader, the most effective CEO of Conversion For Good look like? How could I become that in professional situations (while still “being me”)?

Kobe faced something similar. Here’s his quote:

“I had to separate myself. I created “The Black Mamba”. Kobe has to deal with personal challenges and The Black Mamba steps on the court and does what he does. And the Mamba just says ‘Fuck everyone. I’m destroying everybody that steps on the court.’”

Early in Kobe’s career, the Lakers were Shaq’s team. They won 3 championships but a rift between Kobe and Shaq led to the Lakers trading Shaquille.

The Lakers then had 3 difficult seasons where they either missed the playoffs or barely make the playoffs & got eliminated in the first round. Kobe was the center of trade rumors for chunks of those seasons. Kobe was called a “bad teammate”, an “ineffective leader”, and a player who wasn’t able to make the people around him better.

But once Kobe fully “embraced the Mamba”, he was able to properly influence those around him. Kobe (or The Mamba) decided:

“This team is going to have my personality, have my grit, have my fight, they’re going to have my will, my competitive spirit. When we step on that basketball court, you’re not facing me and just my spirit – – you’re facing 12 of those.”

The next three seasons for the Lakers saw 3 trips to the finals and 2 more championship trophies.

(My note: The addition of Pau Gasol, the return of Phil Jackson as coach, and key injuries to the Boston Celtics helped the Lakers’ return to glory)

It started with Kobe becoming the leader he needed to be in order to “be the guy” on teams capable of winning the championship. It started with Kobe deciding within himself to be that & committing to it. When you do that, subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) things shifted that alter others’ perception of you.

As Kobe said:

“The most important thing is that you’ve gotta put everyone on notice that you’re here and you’re for real. You’re not a player who’s just going to come and go. I’m not a player who’s just going to make an All Star team one or two times. I’m going to become an all-time great.

Once I made that commitment and said, ‘I’m going to be one of the greatest ever’, then the game became everything for me….when you make a choice and say ‘come hell or high water, I’m going to be this’, then you should not be surprised when you are that.

It should not be something that feels intoxicating or out of character because you’ve seen this moment for so long. It’s been playing in your mind for so long that when the moment comes, it’s like ‘of course it’s here because it’s been in here [points to heart] the whole time, it’s been in here [points to head] the whole time.”

THE FUEL FOR GREATNESS

Make no mistake about it – – extraordinary outcomes usually require extraordinary drive, focus, commitment, effort, and grit.

If it was easy to be great, there would be no such thing as greatness. Greatness would be average if that was the case.

Along your journey, you may feel discouraged at times. You may even feel broken, defeated, or hopeless. I know I’ve battled several bouts of depression where I felt that I was “destined to fail”….days where I could barely pry myself out of bed because I didn’t believe in myself or when I was so drained from previous days efforts I felt like I had no energy.

You must be able to fuel the consistency that greatness requires. Your fuel can come from many different sources & the most effective fuel for you often will have unique, personal components to it.

But knowing what fueled others to their greatness can be informative.

The “Muse” documentary started with this quote:

“There is power in understanding the journey of others to help create your own.”

There were a couple things about what fueled Kobe that really struck me.

One was his willingness to tap into “the dark side”. We all have one. Even the sweetest, kindest person you’ve ever met. Even your grandmother has one.

But many of us (myself included) are afraid to let it show.

Maybe it was something they did as a child where rage overtook them and they did something they felt terrible about after – – and decided from then on they wouldn’t let “dark” emotions ever take control over them again.

Maybe they witnessed the dark side of another inflict great harm (physical or psychological) onto another – – and decided they would never put themselves in a position to do that to another person.

But you have the ability to harness and channel the “dark energy” in a conscious way that fuels creation rather than destruction.

In “Muse”, Kobe said:

“For me it is that ferocity or that anger or that rage and I carry that with me.

Using the darker emotions – the anger, the resentment, the frustration….sadness….using that as a weapon. Using that as a form of offense.

It’s a scar, it’s a pain, it’s a bad memory. Most people are afraid to tap into that side of them but it’s such a powerful thing.

Once they own it themselves, then the sky is the limit because they are going to drive themselves and pull from who they are – – all of their life experiences and the things that have motivated them. Embrace the villain nature that’s in all of us and unleash.”

Kobe described how he used the external chaos of his rape trial to fuel him internally to train harder and play with greater intensity:

“Playing with rage was new to me, but I fucking loved it…..I had all this pent up frustration I needed to let out. It was an avalanche man. There was nothing that was going to get in the way, nothing that was going to stop me.

It’s the battle that’s going on within me that I’m carrying with me to the competition. So it’s not about you, it’s not about anybody else because you’re not me making me go. I’m driving this thing and man you just happen to be a person in the way who may get demolished in the process.”

One thing that I’ve seen help fuel many mission driven entrepreneurs is that they’re working to build something that benefits people outside of the organization.

Maybe they’re building schools, donating clothes & food to those in need, providing medical aid, planting trees, or using their business as the engine to help solve an issue that is important to them.

When you’re working towards something that is bigger than yourself, you can be propelled forward by knowing there are others out there whose lives could be improved (or even saved) by your efforts. As Kobe put it:

“You fall. You hit a bump in the road. You get back up. You get back after it. That’s what you do….You have to be brave. If not for yourself, then for those who need you.”

We touched on the “dark side” earlier and how it can motivate you. There is also the “light side” which has immense power behind it as well.

It’s cliché to say “love what you do and you’ll never work a day in your life” but there’s often truth behind things that get said so often. Love for what you do, what you’re building towards, and what you’re striving for can mean (for yourself, for your family, for your community, and for the world) can be an endless fuel source so long as you stay connected to it.

Kobe: “I love what I do it. It’s as simple as that. I get so much enjoyment from it.”

Even if right now you don’t love what you do. Maybe your business is struggling or your job isn’t fulfilling or you don’t care for your boss. What can you love about it? What skills or experiences or rewards does it provide you that you can feel appreciation and enjoyment from?

Realize that the job or the business or the client that is in front of you right is the one. Meaning that it is a waste to yearn for something you had in the past or to half-ass the one in front of you now.

It’s easy to say that your current job or project or client isn’t “perfect” for whatever reason and that you’re going to “just deal with, get it over with, and make the next one good”.

But “perfect” opportunities come more often to those who have earned them through doing great work. The thing in front of you now is the one. If you make it the best you possibly can, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you gave it your all.

And you’ll earn a reputation for doing good work (which will attract “bigger and better” things).

Another thing that can fuel you is your past. Things that happened in the past are solid but the meaning you assign to those things are fluid. While you can’t change the past, you can turn past experiences from limiting to empowering.

You can turn failures and rejections into learning experiences and opportunities to improve. You can use painful moments as motivators to do whatever it takes to not feel that pain again. You can use successes as “appetizers” for the bigger wins you have lined up through your goals.

For athletes, injuries happen. Injuries can end a season or even a career. They can ruin a team’s championship aspirations. They can prevent players from reaching their peak potential.

For that last one, sometimes the injury is too much for the player to overcome physically (a leg injury that permanently makes unable to run as fast, jump as high, etc) and sometimes the injury is too much for the player to overcome mentally (in the back of their mind they are afraid of re-injuring themselves, the recovery & rehabilitation process to get back to their previous condition is too daunting, etc).

Some players look at the scars from their surgery and see the thing that stole their prime. Other players look at their scars and see something closer to what Kobe sees:

“As I sit here now and I take off my shoes and look down at my scar, I see beauty in that. Because I see all the hard work, the sacrifices. I see that journey that it took to get back to this point of being healthy. I see the beauty in that struggle. That’s what makes it beautiful.”

The injury happened to the athlete. That can’t change. But the meaning they attach to it after the fact can. Which one is more empowering?

If you can regularly tap into the pleasure of reaching your goals and attaining greatness (however that looks for you), you will be pulled towards them. Similarly, if you can tap into the pain of not reaching your goals, you will be motivated to do whatever you can to not have to actually live that pain.

I’ll leave you with one last quote from Kobe:

“My brain cannot…it cannot process failure. It will not process failure. Because if I have to sit there and tell myself ‘You’re a failure’…I think that’s worse…that’s almost worse than death.”

There are no absolute truths in conversion optimization.

Reading case studies or list posts filled with tests other people ran that improved their conversions won’t necessarily work for you.

That would be using someone else’s solution for your problem.

However, there are some rules of thumb that usually produce positive results & I want to share some of those with you here.

The True Goal of Conversion Optimization….

The true goal when running tests is not just hoping to increase your conversion rate with the test but also to learn something about your visitors based on the outcome of the test.

That may be main thing that separates experts from novices in optimization – – as experts run more and more tests, their picture of what visitors to a site want becomes clearer. As more tests run, the expert’s advantage grows larger and larger because they have learned so much from the previous tests.

But that is something more advanced that we’ll cover sometime later. For now, we’re still focused on getting you started, getting your first several tests running, & getting those all important initial victories.

Rules of Thumb For Higher Conversions

Copy

There have been multiple studies on readability & the effect is has on conversions.

If your site is hard to read, people aren’t going to squint or use the enlarge shortcut to make it readable.

This seems obvious but a lot of people get it wrong. I remember when I worked at Rise, one of our clients is a HUGE company that mostly caters to retirees. The text on the page was small, they had one big block of text, and there wasn’t a lot of spacing between lines.

They could have been offering the location of the Fountain of Youth and their conversion rates would have remained terrible because no one over the age of 55 could read the words on the page.

Feel free to deviate from this a bit & let the style of your copy fit your/your site’s personality but here’s the best practices from a conversion standpoint:

• 16 pt font size
• Very large headlines and calls to action
• Frequent use of images & lists (ordered or un-ordered)
• Keep paragraphs short with a healthy amount of white space between them
• Sub-headlines every few paragraphs
• Keep lines of text under 75 characters

The majority of people online are scanners rather than readers so structure your copy to be scanner-friendly.

Web Forms

Web forms are a good place to optimize as they are closely linked to high value conversions (leads, inquiries, sign up forms, checkout forms, etc).

Think of web forms as being a sales clerk in a brick and mortar store. To help facilitate a transaction or giving you the information you want, the clerk asks you questions.

If the clerk right off the bat fires off a lo-o-o-ng list of questions like:

• What’s Your Name?
• What’s Your Address?
• What’s Your Email Address?
• What’s Your Birth Date?

But all you want to know is which Shake Weight is the right one for you! You probably don’t want to answer all of those questions unless it’s clear why the clerk needs that info.

Web forms are the same – – they often ask for too much and it creates a lot of friction, causing people to leave your site without filling out the form.

How do we reduce friction on web forms?

1. Set clear expectations

This can be done in multiple ways. Just be transparent up front about what information you’re going to be asking for and why you’re asking for it.

Sometimes it helps to break your form up into multiple pages (get their email first!) and ask related questions together. This usually beats one long form as people don’t see everything all at once & once they get through that first section they usually think along the lines of ‘might as well finish it now’.

Be clear about what they’re going to get in exchange for filling out the form.

2. Reduce the number of form fields 

This is an easy test to perform in Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer (you may need to use a bit of Javascript to auto-fill in the deleted fields if your CRM requires those fields be filled) & a test that usually produces positive results.

Ask yourself what information do you really, truly need to get from the visitor to fill out this form. I’m talking about the bare minimum. Start there and then you can test adding some ‘nice to have’ info fields to see if and how they effect conversion rates.

3. Start Easy

Begin with the easiest fields to fill out. If you lead with asking for their credit card number, you’re likely going to have lower conversions than if you start asking for name, email, address ,etc

4. Trust is key

If you’re asking for payment information, it will help to have some trust seals on your form or page letting them know your site is secure, that you are rated by the BBB, etc

Testimonials also work here as does microcopy that ensures there are no hidden fees or that shipping is free or that their email address will never be shared, sold, spammed, etc

Calls to Action

For every page on your site, you should have one action that you want the visitor to take above all others.

You definitely can have secondary (or even tertiary) calls to action but take the time to choose one main goal. Engineer the page around helping the user act on that call. Here are some ways to do that:

Use a button/image

Buttons and images are generally more colorful, larger, & more attention grabbing than text links. This isn’t the answer in every single case but we’re looking at rules of thumb here.

Use a different color from the rest of the site

If the call to action is the same color as  the rest of your site, it will blend in & your visitors won’t notice it as often.

Use the right copy

The main things to keep in mind for call to action copy are:

• Clarity trumps everything – – make it very obvious what clicking the call to action will do
• Convey a benefit
• Contains a trigger word

And so we conclude Part 1….

I see that I’m just over 1,000 words here so I don’t want to overwhelm you early on. Part 2 (and likely a Part 3) will be on the way in the future for more rules of thumb where we’ll cover things like….

• Home pages
• eCommerce category + product pages
• Sign Up Pages
• Pricing & pricing pages
• Checkout & cart pages
• And more

What To Do Now:

1. If you’ve been following this blog series and have gotten your first A|B test win (or broke your old record for largest lift in conversions) – – let me know in the comments so I can give you some proper recognition!
2. If you know someone who has some busted copy, web forms, or calls to action – – throw them a bone by sending them the link to this article.
3. Continue on to the last part of this blog series with a list of conversion optimization resources

Let’s be honest….

Let’s wipe away all the distractions & buzz words that surround making a business work online.

What do you get when you boil it down to the basics?

1. Traffic
2. Conversion
3. Economics

That is all there is1. It’s true for offline businesses too (just that traffic is people in the store rather than on the website).

And you need all three to be strong.

A stool with one leg shorter & weaker than the others will not stand

Similarly, a business where one of those three key elements is broken will struggle to survive in the long run.

If you get 100,000 visitors a month but none of them convert into subscribers, buyers, clients, etc – – then you may as well have gotten 0 visitors.

If you convert 100% of your traffic but can’t get anyone to come to your site, then you’re not getting anywhere.

And even if you got 100,000 visitors and converted each and every single one of them into a customer, if each conversion only produces a profit of $0.01 – – then you’re making $1,000 a month….likely not enough to support yourself.

You need to be strong in all three areas to have a thriving business.

In terms of time & money invested into improving these three areas, I’d say most online businesses break down like this:

Traffic – 80%

Conversion – 10%

Economics – 10%

Splits like that will lead to a lot of wobbly & broken stools.

I don’t think it should be an even split between the three but I think the investment into increasing conversions should be at least 30%.

Let’s look at a hypothetical pay per click campaign where you have $10,000 to spend. See the total number of new customers & the cost per acquisition (CPA) with different levels of investment into traffic vs. conversion:

 

Campaign Budget	Spend On Boosting Conversions	Spend On PPC Traffic	CPC	Visitors	Conversion Rate	New Customers	Cost Per Acquisition
$10,000	$0	$10,000	$0.40	25,000	1.00%	250	$40.00
$10,000	$1,000	$9,000	$0.40	22,500	1.25%	281	$35.56
$10,000	$2,000	$8,000	$0.40	20,000	1.50%	300	$33.33
$10,000	$3,000	$7,000	$0.40	17,500	1.75%	306	$32.65
$10,000	$4,000	$6,000	$0.40	15,000	2.00%	300	$33.33

Splitting the budget 70/30 between traffic and conversion got the best results in this example. Of course, the numbers are made up but I hope it illustrates the point.

On top of that, when you’re paying per click – – the traffic comes and then it goes. You pay for it and your investment lasts as long as that visitor is on your site (and if you’re converting 1% of traffic then you’re paying for 99 out of 100 visitors to just up and leave).

When you’re paying for conversion optimization and get a lift in your conversion rate, that lift will have positive impacts for the life your website or for that webpage.

Take the long term view. Take some money from Paid Search, Display, SEO, or whatever other traffic budget you have & put it towards increasing your conversion rates.

You’ll get the best results that way. You’ll get lasting results that way. You’ll truly grow your business that way.

Want A Free Conversion Consultation?

Fill out the form on this page and I’ll be in touch shortly to schedule a free 30 minute conversion consultation. Start maximizing the value of the traffic you work your butt off to get by boosting your conversion rates.