Losing Self Respect, One Conversion at a Time

If you mimick leading marketing in your filed, then deflect the blowback from the effective marketing onto others who gave you the tips that helped you increase your conversion they may not appreciate that:

We also have inline ads, ala Aaron Wall's suggestion (so blame him if you're angry )

If you have a professional copywriter suggest revising your content, then state that using similar marketing to their past work is below you they may not appreciate that:

Aaron Wall told me his conversion rate after switching to a page format like this has sent his sales skyrocketing to unbelievable proportions. Yes, this saddens me, but it's also inspiring - if they can do it, so can we, right?

Well, maybe. But we've got to be willing to sacrifice a bit of self-respect and dignity to get it done.

Then if you hold a marketing contest, saying anything goes you are bound to raise a few eyebrows

Anything goes, dude. We're looking for the best-converting page, and if you think the best way to get conversions is with flying monkeys and marquee tags, then have at it!

In every market controlling conversations is associated with trust and authority. That is why framing issues, business models, and sales techniques is so important if you want to prove your model is better than competing models. Few people claim their own businesses are bad.

Few people think of the Google Toolbar as spyware if it is marginally useful. Stop Badware, the non profit reporting on spyware, is not likely to make a report criticising Google's Toolbar or search helper redirection so long as Google is their lead corporate sponsor. The attempt to portray honesty and openness is sometimes more important than being either of them.

Rand recently created a landing page contest, but the problem with this sort of contest is that the very act of making noise increases sales, but it also makes your traffic stream dirtier and less consistent. After Brian Clark rewrote my salesletter he quickly became one of my top affiliates. His reach and brand increased my reach and brand, but it also led to many others writing about me, and more people searching for my brand...some of those traffic sources were really clean while others were less so...perhaps less interested and more driven out of curiosity or following what was popular at that point in time. Plus those that were pre-sold on Brian's site probably didn't need any salesletter at all to convert. The fact that he wrote it made his readers convert exceptionally well though because his copy is in tune with his readers, and they already trust him.

I had to wait on testing the results because I had too much temporal noise around my brand to provide accurate short term testing results. Inadequate data sampling provides inconclusive data. Even A/B split test results that are allegedly 95% certain are wrong 1 out of 20 times.

As John Andrews stated landing pages are only one part of the marketing mix. It is hard to track conversion for high touch and high trust products or services using multivariate testing while allowing others to write your conversion copy. Unless they write your ad copy, a sales letter, conversion funnel, and bonus offers that are consistent with your brand they are throwing darts at a wall. It may create conversation, builds your reach, boosts your brand exposure, give the perception that you are open, and can give you a few good ideas on how to improve conversions, but likely the test will bear false results, especially since brand positions and sales techniques are so temporal and few people willing to write free copy understand all the nuances of effective sales techniques.

If your are going to "sacrifice a bit of self-respect and dignity" you might as well get meaningful results out of it Rand. ;)