I am not talking about the travel industry
I am not talking about putting on your safari boots

If you are doing any type of online business
pay close attention to this article.

If you are doing Adwords, eBay, Affiliate marketing
or anything else, then understanding today’s
concept can be the key to your success.

There are 2 ways to find a hidden city in the jungle.

1. By chance. Meaning that you wonder around the
jungle long enough that you found the hidden city.
Lucky you. Chances of finding the city are slim
to none

2. Get a tour guide. Meaning that someone will show
you the EXACT PATH to the hidden city. Your chances
of NOT  finding it are slim to none.

The same goes for your website as well.

Your Goal is to take your customer by the hand,
through your selling adventure, and make sure
he arrives at the destination on YOUR TERMS.

In other words, become the tour-guide for your customer
and show them the way.

Lets take a look at the following picture
(Told you I was a top notch designer )

(Click for full image)

As soon as your visitor lands on your website
his journey begins. You can either let them
wonder around or take them by the hand and get
them to do EXACTLY what you want.

Your sales letter is part of your virtual tour guide.
Your sales letter is what is going to help your
customer make a positive desicion at every decision point.

Your journey map must be well designed before
you even create your website. Your website
must be build with the map in mind.

Some keypointers:

1. Eliminate any links on your page that are not
part of the map. You dont want people clicking away
and leaving your process

2. Your sales letter should be constructed to
help the customer make specific action(s) which
will take them to the next step in the path. If you
fail to do this, you are a bad tour-guide and your
visitors will leave

3. Make the transition between pages uniform.
you want the customer to feel they are in the same
path (website)

4. Carefully test every decision point to know
the exact conversions numbers (how many people
went to the next step out of all people). This is
Extremely important. Keep in mind, without a map,
you wouldnt know what to test, and what effect
it has on your bottom line

5. Make it as easy as possible to go through
the journey.  The easiest it is to go to the next step,
the more people will do it

6. Take the customer to the next step in the path
as fast as possible. For example, when paying for
product A, redirect to product B upsell immediately.
People are “hot” when they buy. Dont wait for them to
cool off

7. Make sure you bring “lost” customers back into
the path (get an autoresponder series to keep
bringing people back)

Having a map like this one, and knowing your
numbers at every decision point is the key to
a successful online business.

Lets give a figurative example:

lets say 1000 people go to your page and 50%
optin (that is decision 1, conv = 50%)
That is a total of 500 people that went to
the next step

from the people that opted in lets say 2%
purchase product A for $97. so we made 10 sales from
those 500 people. or a total of $970

Say from those 10 people, 20% buy product B
for $197. so 2 people bought for a total of $394

Total Profit: 394+970 = $1364.

Since you tracked all your numbers, lets try
and see what happens if we increased the conversion
of the Decision 2 point to 3%.

We make 15 sales of Prod A
We make 3 sales of Prod B

for a total of 1455+591 = $2046

That is almost $700 more just by working on a
specific part of our process to make it better.
(A small change)

Note: This was done with the same number of visitors.
and not counting the people returning from the autoresponder

If we better other sections of our system, the numbers
go up signifigantly.

You wouldnt be able to do this if you didnt know
your numbers and if you didnt have a map to work
with.
So todays lesson:

Make a Map, take your customer through the journey
and test and track all conversions at desicion points.
Dont forget to look out for my email on thursday 9AM PST

 Please post your comments below.

Best Regards.
-Socrates Socratous

P.S. The lucky commentator from this past week’s comments
was BusyBee. Congratulations Busy Bee, you won a seat at my
upcoming Telecoaching Class.

Please post your comments below.

Is traffic really the holy grail of a successful internet business?

If you answered yes, THINK AGAIN…

Traffic is a very important part of a successful website
BUT if you dont have the other parts in places, it will be
a waste of time and money!

In order for your traffic to actually worth anything, you
must do SOMETHING with it.

I call this “The Journey“. The marketing term for it is
“marketing funnel”.

In short, it is the FLOW of traffic to and through your business.
It involves capturing some of the traffic (lead generation)
and moving the leads through different stages in order to
increase their value (value of your lead = how much
money you make from  a lead during the life of their relationship
with you.)

For example:

• 1000 visitors go to your website (traffic)
• 500 of them optin for a newsletter (leads)
• 50 of them purchased a $100 product (customers)
• 25 of those 50 purchased an additional $500 item (leverage)
• 10 of the 25 purchased a coaching program for $5000 
  (more leverage)
• 5 of them pay you $1000/month for continued education
  (Residual income)

The process above will NOT happen on its own. It is a journey
YOU must take your visitors through and do it correctly in
order for it to work.

Note that the numbers of people are decreasing with every step
creating a “funnel” effect.

This is a simplified example to show you how it works.
It can be extended further to increase the value even more.

I created a diagram to show you a metaphorical representation
of this concept which I think will “stick” in your mind and help
you always keep it in mind when you create and optimize
your business.

I call this “The Swimming Pool” concept.

Click on the image below to open in a new window.

Let me explain what this means and what it means for the success
of your business.

There is a “RIVER“.

You take a “HOSE” and you plug it into the river.

The hose takes water from the river and adds it into your
POOL.

The SUN heats up the pool and evaporates a percentage of
the water inside the pool. (lost water)

there is a PUMP that filters the water from the pool and
adds it back into it.

There is also another HOSE that takes water from the pool
and adds it into the SPA.

The Red arrows show the direction of the flow in the diagram.

This is how a real live swimming pool works. So keep this in
mind…

How Does this relate to your Business?

Lets break it down:

The river represents the traffic source. For example Google Adwords
represents a river of people.

Having a hose bringing water to your pool, is like having an adwords
campaign driving traffic to your website(s).
Some people will opt-in or buy, some will leave. 
People leaving (loss) is represented by the evaporation.

As soon as people are on your customer or mailing list, they are
INSIDE your pool.

When you have an autoresponder series sent to your people from
your pool, is like the circulation pump where you take people from
the pool, fliter them and then put them back in the pool.

The evaporation process happens continuously. meaning that
you always lose people from your list

Your Goal is to bring more traffic in than what is lost through
“evaporation”

AND…

Move people to your higher ticket items (Backend – SPA)

IF you stop bringing traffic in, your pool and spa will eventually
dry.

This is a simplified model.

More things to consider:

• You can have the people in your pool and spa plug their hoses
  in other rivers and bring traffic to your pool (Affiliate -referral methods)
• You can plug additional hoses to other rivers and get traffic in.
• You can create more swimming pools and exchange traffic
  between them. (Cross Selling)
• You can find other people with swimming pools and get them
  to exchange traffic with you (JV partners)
• You can physically plug your hose on someone elses  pool
  and get some traffic from there (Integration Marketing)

and so forth…

As you can see from this example, Traffic itself IS NOT important.
Controlling the flow of traffic and converting it, is the
most important thing of all.

Also, knowing the cost of driving the traffic from each traffic
source and how much money that traffic is worth to you,
is FUNDAMENTAL.

Knowing the value of each person in your swimming pool will
tell you exactly how much to pay for advertising without
getting burned.

Sorry for the long post.

This is VERY important to understand in order to move your
business to the next level.

If you like this information and you want to keep it coming, please
post your comment below.

As I said before, If you post a comment, you will get a chance to
win my mystery gift on Sunday. A post on each blog post from
this week, will cound as an additional chance of winning the gift.
So if you posted before, post again to increase your chances.

Till Sunday,

Partner to Your Success,
-Socrates Socratous

P.S. Your comments is what drives me to continue to provide you
with this information. Your Comment COUNTS. So please post your
comment below.