• Found a way to out sell other copywriting books (answer 5)
• Listened to her audience and broke her product down into 4 parts
• And then used a smart bundling strategy to increase revenue (answers 1 & 2)

In 5 questions, Joanna reveals some amazing details about how she launched her ebooks, sold about 5,000 bundles of all 4 ebooks (20,000 copies in total), and what mistakes she made that you can avoid.

1. Most people hesitate launching 1 ebook. You launched 4 ebooks together! How did that come about?

Joanna: Honestly, it didn’t really occur to me to hesitate. I’m a bit impetuous that way, I guess. When it comes to writing, well, I have a decent amount of confidence in my skills as a writer. I can’t do anything else — I can’t swim, I nearly flunked stats in university, and I’m scared of heights, public speaking, spiders, the works! — but I can write.

But more than that, the reason I wrote my ebooks in the first place was because the Hacker News community encouraged me to. See, way back in 2010, I saw a post on Hacker News from a great guy named Shereef Bishay, who was looking for some copywriting assistance. I did some free work for him — to help him, not because I believe you should give your services away — and he told the whole HN community. My inbox was suddenly flooded with requests for help, a few of which I was able to take on. Those who didn’t ask for help encouraged me to write an ebook. My hubby agreed that I should.

So, 8 months later, I produced a 200+ page volume… and then broke that into 4 ebooks.

When it came time to launch the books, I just sort of decided to one day. They were ready. So I wrote a blog post, posted it to Hacker News, it got upvoted quickly and stayed on the first page for ~1 day… and people started buying my books. I thought only a few people would buy. But then 100s bought in the first 24 hours alone. To use a cliche, the rest is history.

2. You sell each individual ebook for $17.99. And you also bundle all the 4 ebooks and sell it for $48.96. Can you talk a bit about your bundling strategy?

Joanna: When I first split the 200+ page version into 4 ebooks, I did so because my beta readers said the 200-pager was overwhelming. Nobody wanted to become a copywriter; they just wanted to be able to successfully hack their website copy. Made sense. So I broke the book into 4 areas people should focus on most: 1) developing messages, 2) formatting for the web, 3) headlines and 4) calls to action.

I currently list the 4 books individually for $17.99 each.

The bundle is valued at $72 – but I always give people who choose the bundle a deal. Right now, they can save $23 off the total price by buying the bundle on my site.

Now, to be clear, I’m also conversion-focused copywriter. So I don’t make any web moves without being strategic about those moves.

The bundle was a strategic move. I know people make decisions in context. I know that it’s somewhat hard to make a decision when you have to choose among 4 individual books… and the mind likes to group things… so the mind will group the 4 individual books together against the 1 bundle, giving the mind just two options to choose between: the pain of selecting the right individual book, or the ease of selecting the discounted bundle. Ease wins every time.

The result of this bundling strategy? I sell about 1 individual book for every 300 bundles I sell.

No matter what promo I run on my site — or industry friends like Ben Hunt run through my site — the bundle sells way better than the individual books.

3. Could you share your experiences about selling your ebooks on other marketplace websites like AppSumo and MightyDeals?

Joanna: Both AppSumo and MightyDeals are amazing to work with.

I’m lucky to offer a product that solves a real problem for a lot of small businesses / startups. They all need copywriting help, but most of them are bootstrapping their business, so they can’t afford to hire a copywriter. (A copywriter is generally seen as a luxury, not a necessity.) That’s a problem for businesses. My solution is for them to read any of my 4 books… and focus on what they need to when they need to (i.e., need to write a headline right now? refer to that book right now).

The deals you see on my books on AppSumo and MightyDeals are always very good. I want to get my books into the hands of lots of people —- volume is more important to me, frankly, than selling less and making more money on each. So I like to offer around 50% off the retail price, for the ongoing deals. When the deal is featured, I give dramatic discounts —- you’ll sometimes see the bundle on sale for as little as $17 (but, I admit, that’s rare!).

If a small business has a need for my ebooks, and they can get them for an amazing deal, it’s hard for them not to buy. So I make quite a lot of sales. Not everyone does, though. I’ve read about people listing their courses on a deal site only to sell ~100 copies. Hardly seems worth it. I’ve sold 1000s of bundles on these sites — so it’s worth it for me.

AppSumo approached me after my success on Hacker News. I’d already approached MightyDeals by that point. Unfortunately, I made a newbie mistake and listed on MightyDeals around the same time that AppSumo was launching my deal, without even thinking about the conflict. So both sites were going to have my deal on at once —- which neither of them liked very much. We worked it out, though, and all was well.

For my product, selling on AppSumo and MightyDeals is a great strategy.

4. You offer a cheatsheet on headlines for free – in exchange for a tweet. How has this Twitter marketing strategy worked out for you?

Joanna: Ugh, it hasn’t worked at all for me! I actually can’t stand it now and feel like it was a total rookie move for me to ask my visitors to pay with a tweet. I mean, if a client were to tell me they were going to force people to spread the word about them before they’d even earned their trust, I’d try to talk ‘em out of it! And yet I made that mistake myself.

I keep meaning to take that pay-with-a-tweet thing down. Once my fifth book is out (planned for May 1), I’ll take the time to locate the URL, go in and remove that silly button.

5. Can you share one big lesson – that would be beneficial to other folks who want to launch their own ebook?

Joanna: Two things:

1. Never think of your non-fiction ebook as a book, or you’ll never finish it. Think of it as an information product. That is all it is. When you strip away the aura and intimidation of “writing a book”, you can start to loosen up a bit. Write the way you want to. Include stuff you love and delete stuff you don’t care about. Make it your own. Pack it full of amazing info — without worrying if the paragraph and sentence structures would please the great writers in history. When I realized this, it was a major mental breakthrough for me.
2. Always think of how you’ll market your product before you create your product. There’s a recent story about someone writing an ebook on chihuahuas because “chihuahua” is, like, the most-searched phrase of all time. The book sold like hotcakes. The lesson: make sure there’s 1) a market for your product, 2) a demand for your product, and 3) an easy way to get traffic to learn about your product. All three of those count. There’s a market for web design, and there’s a demand for web design products… but getting traffic to such a product would be insanely tough ‘cos there’s so much competition! Focusing on a niche can help a lot in this department. I wrote a copywriting ebook — for which there’s market, demand, but insane competition — and decided to target it at a niche: tech startups. If you can think about how you’ll market the product before you start creating it, selling it shouldn’t be that difficult.

###

Action Summary:

• Breakup and then bundle your products. This is an excellent strategy to increase the perceived value of your product. And increase your sales volume.
• Special deals websites can be very lucrative to increase your sales in a short time frame.
• Don’t force folks to promote you without knowing you.
• Niche your product to beat the competition.

Three things you’ve got to do if you love Joanna’s smarts:

1. Subscribe to Joanna’s CopyHackers newsletter
2. Buy her copywriting books at a 45% discount on Appsumo.
3. Get an exclusive coupon code for Joanna’s 5th book, coming out on 1st May.

But Leo’s guest blogging strategy is more penetrative and impactful than anyone elses. Unlike other guest bloggers, he doesn’t aim to get a link back from the bottom of the guest post – from the Author Bio section. He aims to get link backs from the content itself. When I noticed this, I had to ask Leo how he went about with it. His answers are fascinating. Make sure you read his answer to question 4.

1. Can you share details as to how successful guest blogging has been for you and Buffer?

Leo: That’s a fantastic question. Up until about September of last year, over 70% of our daily traffic was solely created through guestblogging. We had around 60,000 users back then. Since then we brought in some other sources of traffic. Blogposts still are around 20-30% of our daily signups though.

So, purely traffic wise, guest blogging has already been extremely powerful for us. At the same time, I can’t stress enough that what the most successful thing we achieved was to build the terrific relationships with all these great bloggers out there. Through guestblogging I was able to get in touch with the biggest and most successful blogs out there.

As an example, when we then launched the Buffer button for blogs, it was no problem at all, to get it on lots of blogs and show how it can improve sharing of articles. This longterm effect is by far the most valuable thing!

2. Do you follow a strategy or a step-by-step system for guest posting? How much time do you allocate to it?

Leo: Haha, I’m afraid I don’t. Still, there is one very important trick I have used. It’s one of the best motivators that helped me scale my blogging.

How I go about guest blogging is this: I find a few bloggers whose content I think I could match, and then I do a brief brainstorm. I jot down an introduction and then send them an email:

“Hi, I have written this Twitter Tip/Social Media guest post and was wondering if you might be interested in taking a look.”

After I receive a “sure, send it over,” knowing that I haven’t actually written the post yet, I buckle down and am able to finish it in no time. The fact that I know it will be published as soon as I send it over makes it a lot easier. I would send out 10 of those emails in a short space of time before I go to sleep, then get on average 2-4 “yes” responses back and write the posts.

Originally I would spend literally all day writing these posts, but I have scaled back to around half a day of writing every other day now.

3. How do you find decent blogs to write guest posts on?

Leo: That’s an easy one. I would just start by googling “Top 50 Social Media Blogs” and then go through list posts that I found.

Of course, it’s important not to just cold email. Browse through the posts first, get familiar with the blog owners writing style, retweet them and leave comments. And then shoot them a quick email.

4. Most people write good content rich guest posts. And then expect a link back from the very bottom – from the bio line.  Your guest posts are unique, as in many of them are helpful reviews of BufferApp – and get links from the content itself. How did you manage that?  How do you pitch the idea for your posts to the blog owners?

Leo: Ha, great spot! Yes, you make a great point. So actually, I have 3 different types of guestposts that I am writing:

1. content rich guest posts, Buffer is in the author bio, like here.
2. reviews of Buffer, like here on Inc.
3. list posts of “10 Top Twitter/Social Media tools”, where Buffer is one, like here.

The reason I was able to write reviews about Buffer itself is quite simple. Very early on, when close to no one would either know Buffer nor myself, but the post was very well written, the blogger wouldn’t care. I have after a while stopped to do that and switched to Twitter list posts.

List posts actually worked much better. They would spread much further and not look like an advertisement. I heartily recommend this technique to anyone. Since I provided a blogger with great content that would get shared hundreds, sometimes thousands of times, they didn’t care too much that Buffer was part of it. 1 out of 10 is something that a lot of bloggers would accept.

5. Can you share one big lesson – that would be beneficial to other folks who want to promote their blogs and apps by guest blogging?

Leo: Hmm, that’s a good one. I think it is this one:

Don’t get discouraged if you get rejected. At the start, you will do so plenty of times. In fact, I settled for a ratio. Only 40-50% of all my attempts to write a guestpost would get through.

If you are prepared to receive many many rejections, than you are able to make it through.

One more: guestblogging needs to be a longterm project. One guestpost won’t do much. But one a week for 10 weeks will. Try to focus on volume as much as you do on quality. You need to put out a ton of posts for it to give you a return.

###

Action Summary:

• Guest blogging is an awesome way to increase your website traffic. But the key is to be consistent with it. As Leo says: focus on volume as well as quality.
• Guest blogging is a numbers game. You’ve got to be persistent even if people reject your guest blogging requests.
• Write list posts. And let one of the bullet points be about your website. Thats the best strategy to get link backs from the content of your guest posts.

Signup for Buffer. It really is an awesome tool for social media sharing and scheduling.

1.

Most people are worried about giving away too much of information for free. It is a valid worry. Because if you share all your know-how for free, people won’t buy from you. So how much knowledge should you give away?

The purpose of your blog posts and articles is two-fold:

1. To position yourself as the authority. Build credibility for you.
2. And to convert casual readers to buy from you.

If you reveal too little, people won’t perceive you as a knowledgeable authority. And if you reveal too much, they won’t need to buy from you. And that’s why, you have to find a balance.

How To Find The Balance Between Telling Too Much, And Too Little?

An easy way to find a balance is to not write blog posts from scratch. But to give answers to questions that people have. And convert these answers into blog posts.

This works because if you sit down to write an article, you are in an information sharing frame of mine. But if you’re just answering questions, you’re in a problem solving frame of mind. That is why, we are better at editing ourselves while answering questions – and keeping to the point.

2.

In 1972, two psychologists – Bransford and Johnson conduct an experiment. They gather a bunch of students and divide them into two groups. They read the following passage, and ask the students to narrate back how much they remember after a few minutes:

The procedure is actually quite simple.  First you arrange things into different groups depending on their makeup.  Of course, one pile may be sufficient depending on how much there is to do.  If you have to go somewhere else due to lack of facilities that is the next step, otherwise you are pretty well set.  It is important not to overdo any particular endeavor.  That is, it is better to do too few things at once than too many.  In the short run this may not seem important, but complications from doing too many can easily arise.  A mistake can be expensive as well.  The manipulation of the appropriate mechanisms should be self-explanatory, and we need not dwell on it here.  At first the whole procedure will seem complicated.  Soon, however, it will become just another facet of life.  It is difficult to foresee any end to the necessity for this task in the immediate future, but then one never can tell.

The first group of participants just hears the passage as it is – and they can’t remember much of it after a few minutes.

The second group however are told 7 little words before the passage is read – which makes all the difference. What are the 7 little words?

“This passage is all about washing clothes.”

These 7 words make people remember almost everything about the passage. Because it gives them a framework.

Giving a Framework to Your Content Makes it More Potent.

People pay more for systems than for simple information. So repackage your knowledge into frameworks and schemas and systems.

Give away the content on your blogs. And reveal the frameworks and the systems when people buy from you.

You don’t have to worry about giving away too much information from your articles – as long as you don’t give away your frameworks.

Action Summary:

• Don’t start with an idea. Start with a question. Because answering questions help you find the balance between being perceived as an authority and giving away too much of information.
• Create frameworks and schemas for your content. Only share these frameworks when people buy from you.

Leo’s answers are pretty simple and to the point. No fancy new skills he advocates you learn. No huge focus on SEO, or link building. But often times, simple stuff works the best. So without further ado – here are 5 questions with Leo Babauta.

1. What did you do to get those first 1000 readers? Did you have any strategy or plan that you followed to increase the number of your readers besides writing awesome content?

Leo: Honestly, I didn’t know what I was doing. I would leave comments on other blogs linking to a relevant post on my blog, and get a couple readers that way, but later learned that’s a spammy thing to do. I would submit my post to Digg and then vote for it myself, and it would get no other votes.

What I learned that worked was

1. connecting with other small bloggers and exchanging guest posts with them;
2. writing posts that were worthy of people linking to and forwarding to friends; and
3. interviewing larger bloggers in hopes that they’d link back to me.

I also got lucky in that a few larger bloggers linked to a couple of my posts (which I now know were my best posts at the time).

2. When did you first realize that this blogging thing will work out for you? Was there a specific tipping point, a specific event that made you realize that you could do this on a full time basis?

Leo: It was a few months into it, when my readership started to snowball and grow quickly, and I started to figure out how to write posts that people really wanted to read. At first, I didn’t know what information people were looking for, what voice worked best for that medium, or what format works best on the web. I learned by listening to what readers, and other bloggers, responded to, and just as we all do when we’re talking to different people, I adjusted the way I communicated. And as that worked, it just hit me one day: “Maybe this could be my calling.” I remember feeling shocked at that epiphany, and soon after I was so excited I could think of nothing else.

It was a different ballgame when I only had a few readers. At that time, it was mostly a matter of connecting with other people who were interested in the same things I was interested in (changing my life, simplifying), and sharing what I’d learned with them in hopes that it would help. That small audience responded very kindly, and that encouragement helped me to keep going even if I didn’t have a huge audience yet.

3. I remember seeing a lot of zenhabits posts on the frontpage of digg in 2007 and 2008. How big a role did traffic from social bookmarking sites like digg and delicious play in your success? Did you have any specific social media strategy to attract new readers?

Leo: It was huge. I don’t think anyone else with my kind of blog (single-author blog) had as many social media successes as I had at the time — millions of pageviews from Digg, Delicious, StumbleUpon and the like. My social media strategy was something I figured out very quickly (in the first six months) — writing powerful posts packed with useful information was the only thing that mattered when it came to 1) attracting readers, 2) getting people to subscribe, 3) getting readers to forward and share your posts with others, 4) getting other bloggers to link to you, and 5) getting success in social media. What mattered most to me was being useful to readers and knowing that they liked my stuff so much they wanted to share it with others. The social media stuff was a side benefit, though a very nice one.

4. One of the controversial things you’ve done is uncopyrighted all of your work and put your entire blog under public domain. How has that worked out for you? Would you recommend other bloggers to uncopyright their work too?

Leo: Copyright is a relic of days of print media, but in the digital age sharing is the default mode. You want people to share your work. This is a good thing for creators. Unfortunately too many people are stuck in the old mindset, and try to make it difficult for people to share their work, mostly because of fear. When I learned to overcome that fear, and liberate my work, it was incredibly freeing. That has been the main benefit. But another amazing benefit has been that, by removing obstacles to sharing my work, I’ve made it easy for others to use my writing in books, magazines, websites, newsletters, newspapers, classroom materials and more. How can you possibly thank people enough for sharing your ideas in so many ways, with so many people? Consider my mind blown. Copyright owners are looking at everything backwards — you should want people to love your stuff so much that they’ll share it with everyone they know.

I highly recommend other bloggers, and writers and creators of all kinds, uncopyright their work. It’s scary, but a powerful shift in mindset. You might not want to do it if you’re only going to think about how “fair” it is that other people might make some money off your work, or are worried that you will never make any money. Fairness in this context is a quaint concept when everything that we create is based on the work of others, often uncredited. And I’m living proof that you can uncopyright your work and still make a living.

5. If you had to start from scratch today, without the popularity you already have, what would your approach be?

Leo: Create a blog that is based on some really interesting things I did in real life, that has a story behind it, and fill it only with powerful, useful, interesting posts. Connect with other bloggers, do lots of guest posts and interviews. Connect with readers and help them as much as possible. Have fun the whole time.

###

Action Summary:

• Write good helpful content. Connect with readers.
• Connect with other bloggers. Guest blog. Do interviews.
• You can create a popular blog simply by doing a few basic things well.

If you’re not already following Leo Babauta’s ZenHabits blog, you should. He writes awesome posts about how to live a life free of stress and worry, how to be more productive, and live a happier life.

###

5 Questions with an Expert will be a regular feature on this blog. If you know an expert on increasing website traffic that I should talk to, please let me know.

How Paul MacCready Succeeds in Creating a Glider Plane When Others Had Failed For 17 Years

Henry Kremer wants to push the boundaries of human ingenuity. He has a vision: can an airplane travel – powered only by the pilots body? So in 1959, he starts a contest: he would award the grand sum of £50,000 (which is about $1.3 million in todays money) to the first person who builds a glider plane that runs for half a mile only on human effort.

17 years go by. Many resourceful teams attempt to win the reward. But no one succeeds.

In 1976, Paul MacCready faces a crisis. His business venture has failed. And he still owes $100,000 to a friend who had loaned him the money to start his business.  In 1976, 1 pound is exactly equal to 2 US dollars. So when Paul hears about Henry Kremer’s reward, he decides to try his hand at creating the human powered glider.

Paul starts by studying the efforts of other teams that have attempted to win the reward. And he comes to a startling realization. All those people were solving the wrong problem. They would spend over a year creating a glider plane. And then go on a test run. Which would result in a crash within seconds. And then they would go back to creating a new airplane. The process was very slow. And expensive.

Paul realizes that the problem is not inventing a human powered aircraft. The problem is the process of inventing a human powered aircraft. It’s just too slow. So he changes the problem: how can you build and rebuild a plane in hours instead of months?

With this problem in mind, he creates his first prototype. He uses mylar, aluminium tubing and wire to build. This first prototype fails because it is too flimsy. But Paul quickly fixes that in hours and tests again.

This quick iteration process means that Paul has more data points to learn from his failures. While other more resourceful teams have spent years and years behind the problem, Paul comes and wins the Kremer reward within 6 months!

The biggest mistake people make is they spend weeks and months building their product. Before they even know if it will sell. You have to fix that. You have to speed up your product testing and development process.

2.

Young Thomas Edison toils for 6 whole months to build his first invention: a vote recording machine. People can vote for an issue without getting up from their seats, and all the votes are tallied instantly – saving a lot of manual effort. But when Edison tries to sell his invention to the Massachusetts Legislature, he finds that they are not interested in buying it.

One seasoned politician explains to Edison that his invention will disrupt the status quo and is exactly what the Legislature does not want. You see, the political groups regularly relied on brief delays caused by manual counting of votes to try and influence others to change their votes. They wanted more time to persuade others. Not more efficiency in vote counting.

That’s when Thomas Edison vowed that he would never waste time inventing things that people did not want to buy.

But how do you find out what people want to buy? You can’t ask them. Because as Edison’s friend Henry Ford says, people themselves don’t know what they want.

So what do you do?

###

Apologies for leaving you at a cliff hanger. But the above post is an excerpt from the first chapter of the new ebook I’m writing: Frontend Marketing Strategy: How to create ever increasing flows of traffic by building a frontend product.

The book will sell for $35. But you can pre-order it for $5.

The book will reveal a strategy you can use yo create a perpetual traffic cycle:

1. How to create a frontend product and sell it effectively.
2. How to use the profits from the sale to promote your website.
3. How to optimize the product pricing and the conversion rates so that each sale gives you enough money to advertise and generate at least one new sale.

It will cover topics like:

• How to validate your idea. And not waste time developing a product that won’t sell.
• The quickest way to write salesletters and create effective landing pages.
• A few frontend product ideas that do well.
• How to price your frontend products.
• How to use joint ventures to drive the traffic.
• Advertising tricks.
• How to optimize your conversion process.

If you are interested in the book, pre-order it by paying $5.

Note: The ebook hasn’t been written yet. You will receive the chapters as a I write them. 1 chapter at a time. 1 to 2 chapters per week.

Why am I doing this?

• I do my best work when I have deadlines to meet. Having you pay me the token $5 will make sure I am accountable.
• The end product will be a lot better because of your constant feedback.
• It would be awesome to gather a few testimonials before the ebook is launched.

What skill sets do you require?

• Moderate writing skills (although you can outsource this.)
• Domain expertise. So that you can actually create a front end product.

What you’ll have at the end?

• A comprehensive step-by-step process of how exactly you can build and utilize a front end product to create a perpetual traffic cycle for your website.

If you are interested, please use this link to send the 5 bucks.

But when I started searching for a good solution, I was pretty disappointed.  Most plugins showed a Pin It button underneath the posts. Not on top of the images. I wanted to show the Pin It button on top of the images – only when you moved your mouse over it. (Because this movement would win people’s attention. Most people turn a blind eye to all the social media sharing buttons from underneath the posts.)

I even found a few people selling Pinterest plugins for as much as $17! Yikes.

So instead, we ended up creating a free Pinterest Plugin for WordPress ourselves.

And yes, it optionally integrates with SuccessNexus.com affiliate program too

Links:

• WordPress Pinterest Plugin
• Direct WordPress Link

How removing one ingredient from instant cake mix, led to more sales

In the 1950s, quite a few big packaged food companies like General Mills and Pillsbury come up with a new product: complete and instant cake mixes. All you have to do is add water to the cake mixes and you are done. But the instant cake mixes don’t really sell that well.

Ernest Dichter – a consultant hired by General Mills – makes a suggestion after talking with a lot of house wives. His suggestion is simple: remove the dried eggs from the instant cake mixes. And require folks to add their own eggs to the mix.

Ernest realizes that just adding water to the cake mixes made the task seem too simple to the house wives. It made them feel un-involved. The task of adding their own eggs would make them take ownership of the cakes that are made.

While General Mills and others did a lot of different things to promote their cake mixes, this one recommendation played a crucial role in making cake mixes a big hit.

2.

How a psychological experiment made people pay more for Ikea’s black storage boxes

Michael Norton is a professor of marketing at Harvard Business School. He and his colleagues gather a bunch of people to conduct an experiment. The participants are randomly divided into two groups.

The first group is given an unassembled plain black IKEA “Kassett” storage box. They are given an instruction sheet that shows how easy it is to assemble the box, and are asked to assemble it themselves.

The second group is shown an already assembled, exactly similar plain black IKEA “Kassett” storage box.

Both the groups are then asked to bid a price for the storage box. They are told that at the end of the experiment, a random number would be drawn. If their bid price is higher than that number, they would pay the amount and take the storage box home. If their bid price is lower than the number, they would not purchase the box.

On average, participants who assembled the storage box bid 62% more than the participants who just inspected the box!

3.

How New Line Cinema Increased their Ecommerce Sales by 133%

New Line Cinema doesn’t make movies. They make brands. Matrix. Harry Potter. Lord of the Rings. They make a lot of money from licensing and selling their movie related merchandise.

Some years back, they create a whole new department in their company: the ecommerce department. The goal of the department is not only to promote the movie on the internet before it is released, but to also make extra money by selling movie merchandise.

New Line Cinema earns decent revenue from their online activities. But their sales double when their ecommerce department implements a simple strategy.

New Line Cinema sends an email to their in-house mailing list asking folks to help them decide which movie posters to print by voting on the ones they love the most. Then a few weeks later, they send another email saying “You got what you wanted. Your choice of poster is selected.”

This 2 email strategy that asks for customer feedback increases New Line Cinema’s sales by an awesome 133%!

Action Summary:

• Involve your clients. Involving folks won’t only lead to higher sales, it will also make folks like your product more – and pay more for it.
• Ask your clients to vote for which product feature to add. Take their opinion on aesthetics like color and design.
• Ask your clients what their most pressing problem is. Then write educational blog posts to solve those problems.
• Don’t dumb your product down. Use easy participation devices to make people feel like they own the output.

1.

Sheena Iyengar is a professor at University of Columbia and teaches a course on Organizational behavior. She once conducted a scientific research experiment to gauge the effect choices have on people.

Iyengar set up a tasting booth with a variety of gourmet jams in the grocery store named Draeger’s in Menlo Park, California.

• One day, she displayed 6 varieties of jam in the booth.
• The next day she displayed 24 varieties of jam.

And then she counted the number of sales generated each day.

The Paradoxical Results

Most people would think that the more choices there are, the more people would buy. But Iyengar’s research proved otherwise.

• 30% of people, who stopped by the 6-jam booth, ended up buying one of the jams.
• While only 3% of people, who stopped by the 24-jam booth, ended up buying the jam.

2.

The simplest way to improve your website conversion rates is to reduce the clutter.

• Don’t give a 101 navigational options
• Don’t use 3 or 4 column layouts
• Don’t provide 23 different social media sharing buttons
• Don’t link to 50 websites from the sidebar

Reduce the options to increase the impact.
Focus. Make sure each page has only one primary call to action.
And ruthlessly remove all the other links and buttons.

Be like Google. Google was a breath of fresh air when it was launched. Because while other search engines had a 1001 links and options on their home pages, Google offered only the search field.

Yahoo’s clutter vs Google’s simplicity. Google won.

Action Summary:

Be like the switch. Reduce the options and people will do what you want them to do.

1.

Fred Barnard is convinced that advertisements are more persuasive if you use pictures in them. So while writing an article on the topic, he coins the quote “A picture is worth a 1000 words.” To make sure that people take his premise a bit more seriously, he sneakily attributes the quote to being a wise Chinese proverb. And over the years, the attribution shifts to Confucius. But is Barnard’s premise really true? Will adding pictures to your content make it more persuasive?

2.

Will you change your candy preference based on its packaging?

Mili Milosavljevic and her team of vision scientists and neuroscientists recently conducted an experiment.

In part 1 of the experiment, hungry consumers are given a list of 15 food items (snickers, sour skittles, etc) and they have to rank them according to what they like more.

In part 2 of the experiment, the participants are shown two of the food items on a computer screen – and they are asked to choose the one they prefer more. They are asked to make this choice between different food items over and over again.

Here is the interesting part: some of the food items are made to look brighter. And when they are made to look brighter, people select them over the food items they had ranked higher up in part 1. The conclusion?

• Brightness wins our attention.
• Brightness makes us love something more than we usually do.

Adding pictures to your post will spruce it up. It will give your webpage a bit of color. It will make it easier for you to win attention. It will make folks like your posts a bit more.

3.

In 1976, Nelson and his colleagues began researching what is better in memory creation: pictures? Or words? And they found that pictures win hands down.

Even when subjects were shown as many as 2,500 pictures, they remembered 90% of them a week after viewing them!

In other experiments conducted, the researchers found that people would retain only 10% of the information after 72 hours of going through it – if it was presented on paper or orally. But when pictures are added to the presentation, this rate of remembering the concepts would jump to 65%!

This effect of adding pictures to aid in memory is so strong, that they named it the picture superiority effect (PSE).

The word “cat” when spoken will trigger the image of a cat in your brains.

People can retain and recall more details about a concept when shown a picture than when explained in words because we think in pictures. Text on a page must be converted into pictures in our own minds. That is why, concrete sentences like “the red apple fell down from a tree” is easier to remember than something abstract like “the force that attracts a body to the center of the earth.”

Adding of relevant pictures to your posts will anchor your posts in people’s minds. They will remember your lessons with a lot more clarity and over longer time periods.

4.

Derek Halpern shares some insights about what kind of pictures to use – from the user interface research done on the T-mobile website.

“One older shopper, interested in buying a phone with easy-to-press large buttons, became frustrated when she couldn’t discern the button size in any of the pictures. When she spotted Catherine Zeta Jones holding a phone she liked, she became exasperated. “She’s a very pretty woman,” the shopper told us, “I just wish I could see the buttons.”

Using pictures is important. But if you don’t use relevant pictures, you’ll just end up frustrating your readers.

Don’t send mixed signs to your readers. Make sure your pictures are relevant to the topic being discussed.

The trick to finding the perfect picture for your post is this: distill the essence of your post to just one word or phrase. And search for images using that word.

T-mobile wouldn’t have placed Catherine Zeta Jones’s picture so prominently if they would have distilled their one key word to “easy to use phone.”

Apple has always been the boss when it comes to using relevant pictures to make their point. Here are two images that were used to promote their thin Macbook Air laptops. Who couldn’t realize that the keyword was “thin laptops” after looking at these images?

Macbook Air being removed from an envelope to show how thin it is

A 10 cent coin placed next to a Macbook Air to compare its height

5.

In 1985, after finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple Computer Human Interface Group adopted the motto, “A word is worth a thousand pictures,” and a descriptive word or phrase was added beneath all Macintosh icons.

Action Summary

• Use pictures because pictures attract people. Pictures make your posts more like-able. Pictures anchor your posts to become more memorable.
• Distill your post into one keyword or phrase. And find relevant pictures to use by searching for that phrase.
• Add captions under your images to reinforce your teachings and un-confuse the folks.

It’s 13 December 2001. Five terrorists infiltrated the Indian parliament and opened fire. The attack led to the death of a dozen people.

But do you know how the terrorists managed to pass through the stringent security and infiltrate the Indian parliament?  They fooled the security by decorating their car to look like a government car. It had all the appropriate security passes and stickers. And the emergency siren and lightening on top of the car.

So when the security saw what looked like a government car, they didn’t check it as severely as they should have.

The Story of the Discount Coupon Fiasco

Robert Cialdini the psychologist talks about a marketing case study with a similar lesson. A tire company mailed out discount coupons for their tires. But due to a printing misprint, the coupons offered no discount at all! The tire company found this out a bit too late and were in a panic as to what to do.

Here is the surprising ending: the percentage of people who redeemed these zero discount coupons was the same as the percentage of people who had redeemed coupons with hefty discounts in the past. The response rates didn’t change!

People saw what looked like a discount coupon, saved it, and used it – even when it didn’t give a discount!

The Lesson: Fake it till you make it

The lesson to learn from these case studies is that: decisions are formed irrationally. And it is highly affected by relevant signs and symbols.

If you make sure that your website “looks” successful, then people who visit it will act as if the website is truly successful. And their actions will be affected accordingly.

Yes “fake it till you make it” is a good mantra to follow.

Reddit.com – which today is a huge website and receives more than a billion page views a month – started off faking it too. Their founders created various different usernames. And submitted cool links using different usernames (instead of submitting all the links from 1 admin account only).

This made the website look a lot more busier and popular than it really was. Which made a lot of visitors stay back. Building a community became easier.

“People will trust you if you appear to be worthy of their trust, not because you feel that you are trustworthy.” – Dr. Paddi Lund

So appear trustworthy. Appear stable and popular. And people will react positively to your website.

Action Summary:

• In the initial days, ask your friends to comment on your blog posts.
• Add security and social proof signs and symbols to your website.
• Add a 1-800 number to your contact details.
• Focus and add just one social media button to your website at a time. So that your audience does not get divided. And your numbers look higher.
• Act like an already popular website, and your readers will react accordingly.