80/20 Marketing and Conversion Optimisation

I am reading this awesome book right now called 80/20 marketing by Perry Marshall. It basically explains how much money we leave on the table in our businesses by not setting up mechanisms to increase our sales through sales funnels and conversion optimisation.

Quick primer: Sales funnels are a way of leading prospects and new customers through a process from a small or free purchase down your funnel through to your most expensive purchases. Conversion optimisation is tweaking all the different touch points along your sales funnels to increase the amount of sales and opt-ins along the journey.

Marshall’s 80/20 insight is that, according to him, the 80/20 rule is fractal. By this he means it continues to occur within each element of the pattern in an identical manner. This means that by selling 10,000 people something for one dollar, you now have 2000 people who are likely to buy something for $10. Out of those 2000 you now have 400 people who will buy something for $100. Then you have 80 people who will buy something for $1000. So from the initial $10,000 sale you’ve scaled it to $140,000 total – in theory!

Well that’s interesting, isn’t it!

OK so I don’t like just reading things and then forgetting them so I am going to run some experiments. The first thing to consider is – it’s all very well, this theory, but if you don’t have anything to sell, you still have to create it. And the premise only works assuming you have something people want to buy!

Now, I don’t have the downline products developed yet, but I do have some very unoptimised sales pages selling ebooks I have written. And they do sell – but I do nothing to squeeze more sales out of them. So I am going to start there. Here are the 2 pages I am going to work on. (Warning: this will reveal that I am not your garden variety marketing square!)

Psychedelic Meditation
Anxiety Meditation

Between them these two books have paid for the modest holiday my family and I will take this Christmas, but that’s about it. Let’s see what we can do to increase the amount of money they generate me. To do this I am going to have to learn some stuff:

• where is the traffic coming from?
• which traffic converting?
• where else can I get relevant traffic?
• what are the best tools to split-test the sales pages?
• which modifications will increase sales?

Once I have my head around this, I may move to a new phase and create a sales funnel, but this is a lot of work to start with, so I’ll leave it at that for now.

Update: I skipped to the fun bit for now, 4th bullet point down and decided to go with Google’s free analytics experiment tool. I set up 2 new variations of the Psychedelic Meditation page which will run for 2 weeks minimum. I changed the title and meta-description on one, and then on a second one I also changed the headline, which I am betting will have a bigger effect because now it matches a main search term that the site attracts. Note: I was careful to avoid duplicate content penalties by adding the canonical link element, very nerdy, very important!

Now to go work out where the traffic is coming from and how I can get more. Hint: I haven’t even done basic SEO on this site so I reckon I’ll soon increase the traffic it’s getting pretty substantially by going through the keyword data I have collected for the site over the last few years and ramping up the Google referrals.