Heya,

A friend recently asked, “What is an indispensable tool
in your business?”

My answer?

[Inspectlet] .

It’s a session recorder, which we’ve discussed briefly
before in this series. I use it to troubleshoot sales
funnels, landing pages, sales pages, upsell pages, and
order forms. A very unique and useful tool, indeed.

In this email and probably the next few, i’m going to
discuss the much awaited “tech stack”–the technology
choices i’m making these days to maximise profitability
from traffic for myself and for clients.

Here’s how i came to discover this tool and what it did
for me (and what it can do for you)…

Once upon a time, i began work on a campaign for an
important client. After we planned, thought out, and
designed the landing page, and after i built an initial
Google Ads campaign and ran it…

i was shocked at how HORRENDOUSLY it performed.

It was an opt-in offer. Nothing for sale yet. All we needed
was for visitors to enter their email address. It was
converting a meager 2% of visitors into email leads!

TWO PERCENT!

I tried a few of my usual tricks. But nothing fixed the
pathetic response.

I needed to save face and i needed to do it fast.

What in God’s good name was happening? What about the
page made 98 out of 100 visitors not respond and give us
their email address?

If only there was a way to SEE what people were doing. I
actually sat down and built a simple tool that would record
the interactions of visitors with the page and reproduce
them for me in a simulated animation on my screen. But
before i spent too much more time on it, i decided to see
if such a tool already exists.

Lo and behold.

That day, i discovered session recorders for the first
time. [Inspectlet]
was one of
only a small handful of tools that could do the job. It had
a free tier which was nice, so i signed up to try it out.
Sure enough in a matter of moments i was watching
recordings of visitors arriving to my client’s landing
page.

I watched as these users MOUSED over the lines they were
reading. I could see them reading the disclaimer before
clicking into the form!

I watched as they typed part of their email address, and
then as they changed their mind and deleted it.

I saw them click in frustration at areas of the page that
they thought were clickable but were not.

As i saw the various problems with the page, i made
immediate repairs. By the end of the day, that page was
converting at over 60%. Ever since then, I have never
started a traffic campaign without it. And it’s how i
make sales and landing pages that work every time.

If you’ve never used a session recorder, i highly
recommend you give Inspectlet a try. It’s really simple
to setup.

Click my affiliate link below to create a free account
(no credit card required)…

https://yaghilabs.com/recommends/inspectlet

Once you’ve created your account, you will receive a tiny
bit of javascript to insert in the header of the pages you
want to monitor. They have a free Wordpress plugin which
enables Inspectlet on all pages of your site, but i DO NOT
recommend you use it otherwise you will waste your
recording quota quickly on recordings you probably don’t
need. This is not an analytics tool, it is a diagnostics
tool.

Just install the code on the key pages you need to watch.
Upgrade if you need more frequent session recordings or to
monitor more than a single site.

In recent versions, there are two different modes to
watch–one is recording and the other is live view mode.
With the latter, you can open it and wait for visitors to
arrive and then watch how they interact with your pages
live. You can see up to four sessions at the same time.

Additionally, they have a cool split-test mode that lets
you try font, colour, and layout variations without
modifying your page. Variations are rendered dynamically,
using client-side javascript. There’s no extra
configuration required.

And they have a fantastic form analytics tool, which i
HIGHLY recommend you use on your order pages to diagnose
why some people abandon cart.

Setup your free Inspectlet account at my affiliate link
below…

https://yaghilabs.com/recommends/inspectlet

~jim

P.S. If you have missed previous messages in the series,
check out the following:

– [Part 1: The “Yaghi Way” of Traffic Generation]

– [Part 2: Sending Traffic Straight to the Sales Page of a
D!CK PILL]

– [Part 3: Sell More With Amazing *Hybrid* Pages]

– [Part 4: Why “Funnel Templates” Cause Refunds &
Support Nightmares]

– [Part 5: Making Google Apologise to You]

– [Part 6: User-Friendly Buying Pages]

—

{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}

Heya,

Over the last few days, we’ve been talking about landing,
sales, and upsell pages.

Let’s move onto order pages. While there’s plenty to say
on this topic, i’ll focus on just one big idea:

User friendly buying interfaces 🙂

=============================
ASIDE: i’ve been getting questions about accessing past
purchases. Here’s how: Click any link in any email i send
you (while it is still fresh, within 5 mins of opening the
email) and you will be automatically logged in without a
password. You should see your email address displayed top
right of the page. Click it. You will find your purchases
along with other settings.

If you have trouble please email me back and i’ll figure it
out for you. Also, forgive the mess, i’m still cleaning
things up. But do email me if there’s ANY trouble and i’ll
handle it asap.
==============================

Chances are you’ve never optimised your product order page.
In fact, depending on the technology you’re using to
collect payments and create customers, the order page might
not even be your creation, or under your control.

Yet, the order page is the most important page in any
traffic campaign–it’s the very point at which you
collect money and convert a visitor into a buyer.

Do it wrong, and you WILL lose the sale.

I can tell you horror stories where so much money and
traffic were wasted, because of some simple oversight on a
poorly thought out order page.

So what gives?

Isn’t an order page just a form asking the customer for
their details and payment information?

Yes, true…but more generally, it is a BUYING INTERFACE
inside the piece of software you know intimately as your
“website” or “funnel”.

A USER FRIENDLY interface is one that is easy to use, that
doesn’t confuse or frustrate the user.

A USER FRIENDLY interface makes it clear what the user
should do and what they can expect as a result.

Similarly, with your order page it should neither confuse
nor frustrate to ensure a purchase action is completed
without interruption. It should be intuitive and clear
about what the user needs to do to complete their purchase
and what will happen when they do.

Potential buyers who arrive on the order page ready to buy,
they are at their most vulnerable. Even the slightest
confusion, frustration, or distraction can turn them off
their decision entirely.

I can’t tell you how many times i’ve watched visitors
click through to an order page and then go back and forth
to the sales page to cross-check the order summary against
it. And finally, BAIL without completing the order!

In my experience, you need PERFECT correlation between the
sales page and the order page. You must precisely and
completely match what is promised with what they are about
to pay for.

I like to do this in SEVERAL ways, to the point of
redundancy.

For example, suppose i’m offering a main product which
comes with several bonuses to make it more enticing.

On the sales / landing page, i mention the name of the
product, show an image of it, and describe it with some
text. Similarly, for the bonuses, i give each a cute title,
an image, and a description.

On the order page, i always summarise what the customer is
about to buy in addition to some bullets, sales copy, or
testimonials to encourage the customer to complete their
order.

Mine is not by any means a unique approach. Most marketers
do the same.

But here is their silent but deadly mistake:

They inadvertently use a slightly different title for some
of their bonuses….

…or they don’t show again the product image (or they
do, but it’s different in some way)

Mostly, these variations are so slight they seem harmless.
The trouble is you risk confusing the customer into
thinking they were promised something different from what
they’re buying. Even the smallest variation in the product
title, capitalisation, hyphenation, or abbreviation could
potentially create that confusion.

My advice…

If you used a title for the product or bonuses on the
landing / sales page, use the EXACT same title WITHOUT a
single word of difference.

Copy and paste it.

In fact, use the same colour.

Use the same font.

If you used an image on the landing / sales page, use the
EXACT same image on the order page. Keep the aspect ratio
the same or better yet, keep the same size!

If you wrote out your bonuses in a certain sequence on the
landing / sales page, repeat the EXACT same ordering on the
order page.

If you listed the bonuses horizontally on the landing /
sales page, show them horizontally on the order page too.

What these subtle cues do is they VISUALLY reinforce the
exact same offering on the order page. Guests should be
able to recognise what they’re buying as being exactly
the same as what they were pitched earlier. It should be
immediately apparent without having to read or look
closely.

No one should feel even the smallest doubt about it.

Do this right, and you will see a HUGE bump in your cold
traffic conversions.

You’ll notice this advice does not relate to any
copywriting trickery or tactics of what to place on the
page. It’s just about user friendly interface design for
collecting money. And that’s an area i invest heavily
into, in every page of the sales funnel.

So should you!

For more ideas like this, to learn how to build user
friendly buying interfaces that turn your traffic spend
into sales and profit, get the Super Traffic Machine.
It’s a rock solid internet marketing training that looks
like this in real life:

![(turn on images to see an image from one of our
customers)](https://storage.googleapis.com/assets.yaghilabs.com/1/2020/05/diystm-full-set.png)

Learn more about this series at the link below, and get
yours today:

https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit

More fun tomorrow,

~jim

P.S. If you have missed previous messages in the series,
check out the following:

– [Part 1: The “Yaghi Way” of Traffic Generation]

– [Part 2: Sending Traffic Straight to the Sales Page of a
D!CK PILL]

– [Part 3: Sell More With Amazing *Hybrid* Pages]

– [Part 4: Why “Funnel Templates” Cause Refunds &
Support Nightmares]

– [Part 5: Making Google Apologise to You]

—

{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}

Heya,

Over the years Google Ads has got better at dealing with
advertisers who break their rules.

In today’s email, i want to share some experience about
how to deal with the Google review system to get ads
approved, disapprovals reversed, and keep your ads running
smoothly with little interruption.

I want to show you how you can have Google APOLOGISE to you
after disapproving your ads and swiftly reverse their
decision without asking you to make a single change.

In the early days of “Google Slaps”, if you violated
advertising guidelines, that was it. Your ads were stopped,
your account was shut down, and there was nothing you could
do to get back up and running again. And this is perhaps a
good thing, because most of the internet fraudsters who
gooroo’d all over the place moved onto other networks and
left Google Ads for me to dominate.

Google’s rules have only become more strict, and their
enforcement more obscure.

The good news, however, is their treatment of advertisers
has improved. You can at least get someone on the phone and
figure out why your ads were disapproved and what you can
do to fix them.

Of course, in reality it isn’t this simple.

Often you’ll get the support staff on the line and
they’ll just read back to you the very reason the ad
interface says the ad was disapproved–and then recite
verbatim from the documentation the possible solutions.

But i’ve found a way to get around the boilerplate
responses and get some real answers.

First though, i want to tackle the reason for the obscurity
and inconsistency of when ads get disapproved. Nothing is
more baffling than to see two very similar ads in your
account–one approved and running without issue, the other
disapproved for some landing page issue when both are
pointing to the same page.

The simple explanation is this.

Google decided some years ago they’re an “Artificial
Intelligence First” company. What this means in the
context of Google Ads, is the human reviewers and support
staff are taking all their cues from machines. In other
words, the algorithms decide for some reason your ad is in
violation, disapproves it, and when you call to inquire,
the human support staff simply JUSTIFIES and RATIONALISES
the machine’s decision.

Intuitively, it would make more sense that the humans would
be giving direction and feedback to the algorithms,
correcting their mistakes. But this isn’t what happens in
reality.

A major criticism of machine learning amongst statistical
computer science purists is that most machine learning
algorithms are “black boxes”. Data goes in one end and
a decision comes out the other. There’s no explanation
for the decision given, you can’t reverse engineer the
decision, and it’s not possible to see how the machine
arrived at its decision should you want to debug / error
check it.

This is what’s really going on at Goole Ads.

No one REALLY knows why your ad was disapproved, only that
it was disapproved with a potential reason.

For instance, recently we had a video ad disapproved for
Google Ad’s “event tickets policy” which requires one to
have a certificate to sell / resell event tickets. However,
this client does not sell any kind of tickets. Upon closer
inspection, i found in the video she says, “people come up
to me at events and say…” This is enough to have
triggered the event ticket policy.

So calling support for explanation rarely gets you more
information than you would receive in the original
disapproval notice.

My first pointer then, is if your ad gets disapproved, you
need to firmly and politely ask for a manual review, point
out any inconsistencies, and don’t be so easily pushed
off the call.

You need human intervention.

Once you get a decision from the manual review, there’s a
good chance it will come back NOT in your favour. But
don’t give up. Call again and inquire about what
specifically is wrong and how you can get your ads approved
again.

In many cases they will tell you what to do.

Make the repair, call again, and ask for another manual
review.

Repeat this politely and patiently until your ad is
approved. (manual reviews may take a week or more to
complete, so be very, very patient).

A shortcut to getting around this back and forth is to
write a compliant page and ads from the start. And here’s
the major one you will want to take care of:

I’ve found the most difficult disapprovals to be those
related to the “Misleading Claims” policy.

This policy applies to any product the review bot
subjectively determines is being oversold–that you are
making claims about the results customers will get with the
product, but they are not realistically likely to
experience.

For example, making $47,327 in one month. Or losing 20 lb
in 30 days.

Both claims are considered “possible” but NOT “probable”. I
know this seems extremely subjective, because how does
anyone know what your product can or cannot do without
trying it? I have even argued with the support staff that
this is EXTREMELY subjective and that it is on the the
product and the product creator to prove their claim to be
true.

The advice i was given was priceless.

It turns out most of these problems can be easily solved by
writing a clear disclaimer early in the page (where a
reviewer will not miss it).

In my experience, if you get the disclaimer right, you can
sell some surprisingly fun stuff!

AND if they approve you once, any future disapprovals will
pass a manual review simply because your disclaimer is
there.

This is exactly how i’ve managed to get Google’s
support staff to APOLOGISE for disapproving my ads and
swiftly approve them manually without making ANY additional
change to my ads or landing page whatsoever.

But it’s tricky to get that disclaimer right.

So here’s my advice…

Your disclaimer should state what a typical result with the
product looks like…it’s not enough to say, “these
results are not typical”…you must say what the average
consumer of your product (historically) can expect when
using your product.

The more specific, the better.

The more damning, the better!

And if there is a money-back guarantee, you should state it
there too. If, on the other hand, you don’t want to give
refunds, read on i’ll tell you how to handle it (i’ve
done both styles and both worked).

So, if for example, you sell a make money product, you
would need to say something like the following:

“Most customers of this program earn less than $100 in
total.” (Or whatever the average person earns or loses).

Now if you’re looking at this and saying, “Oh shit!
This is going to kill my sales!”…then you’re about
80% right.

Here’s the beautiful thing, though, about writing such a
disclaimer…

Your refund, chargeback, and complaint rate goes WAY down,
to the point it disappears. You’re not going to
disappoint anyone who ends up buying because you were very
clear about the risk. And this is what Google wants from
you. To make buying safe for the visitors they send you.
They want you to alert the visitor of any risk involved
with your product and the extent of that risk. Take comfort
in knowing that what you lose in conversions, you save in
refunds and chargebacks and support time.

Still though, a disclaimer worded that way would probably
kill most possibility of sales.

That is, unless you can spin it in a nice way where
you’re being honest and clear about expectations while
still selling your product. However, you’re stating a risk,
it’s important to creatively then REVERSE that risk in the
disclaimer.

This is where your refund policy can really go a long way
to help.

Here’s an example of the disclaimer i wrote for our
“male enhancement” client:

“Some results featured on this website are not typical.
The average person sees a moderate improvement in erectile
strength, response, and durability over continued use of
our products but we make no guarantee any improvement will
occur. Individual results vary based on existing
conditions, diet, and age. This is why we have a 60-day no
questions asked refund policy on our product range. If you
do not notice an improvement, you may request a refund. We
additionally encourage and expect you to research our
products (see “Free Erection Tricks”), send us
questions, consult your doctor, and do due diligence to
make an informed buying decision.”

Notice the last sentence…

It reverses risk TOO because it tells them HOW they can
avoid making a mistake. Not only that, it even sells them
on using our “opt-in” form!

Now if you DON’T offer refunds, simply say that. Telling
someone there are no refunds is a type of risk reversal
too! (it’s what we teach in the Super Traffic Machine’s 3rd
User Manual – Offer)

For example…

“All sales are final and at your own risk. So please do
due diligence, write to our support, and join our mailing
list to ensure this product is a fit for you before
purchasing.”

Or something like that.

Such disclaimers set expectations correctly and
transparently. Which then frees you up to market your
product the way you like in the rest of the page. You can
now say, “How this ex homeless beach bum made $57,234 in
30 Days” or whatever crazy result you want to talk about,
you cheeky bugger…

Google MIGHT let it fly 😉

So that’s what i have to say about disclaimers for now.
And it’s a truly great discovery for getting ads approved
in some tough markets.

Of course there’s a LOT more to writing Google compliant
ads and websites–disclaimers are just one of many
important features of a compliant page. I discuss the rest
of them in the DIY Super Traffic Machine series.

So if you love these ideas and want to learn way more
intricate details about building solid Google friendly
websites, being transparent in advertising while still
selling profitably, check out our DIY Super Traffic Machine
series. It has step by step instructions, full worked
examples from A to Z, for writing amazing websites and ads
that work.

Get more info here:

https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit

Until tomorrow,

~jim

P.S. If you have missed previous messages in the series,
check out the following:

– [Part 1: The “Yaghi Way” of Traffic Generation]

– [Part 2: Sending Traffic Straight to the Sales Page of a
DICK PILL]

– [Part 3: Sell More With Amazing *Hybrid* Pages]

– [Part 4: Why “Funnel Templates” Cause Refunds &
Support Nightmares]

—

{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}

Heya,

We’ve been talking about landing pages in the last few
emails…i’d like to change direction today and talk
about post-checkout upsells.

I’ll come back to landing pages again in another email,
there’s lots more to talk about.

You’ll notice that for a “traffic guy”, i sure spend
a LOT of time working on and tweaking just about everything
EXCEPT the ad campaign.

I run traffic campaigns like a business, not like an
agency.

While agencies concern themselves with maximising clicks
and click-thru-rates and minimising cost per clicks
exclusively…

I focus on maximising average customer value and scaling
campaigns. This means often i’m troubleshooting landing
pages, order pages, and upsell pages.

With landing pages my goal is to maximise visitors who
click through to the order page.

With order pages, my goal is to maximise visitors who
complete the order form.

And with upsell pages, my goal is to maximise a
customer’s order value. Let’s discuss how to do this
effectively.

WHAT IS AN UPSELL PAGE:
========================

Immediately after a customer completes an order form to
purchase the primary offering, it is advantageous to
promote additional products that complement or supplement
their initial order. These are called “post checkout
upsells”.

Typically, marketers employ the “one time offer” (OTO)
model because it has urgency and fear of loss as
motivators.

With this model, the customer is shown offers for products
or prices not otherwise available to the public.

The customer is then given a choice–Yes, accept the offer
— OR — No, refuse the offer.

Depending on the choice the user makes, the marketer then
offers more expensive products when they get a yes, or
cheaper products when they get a no.

Price is not necessarily the determiner. It may be the case
you offer a similar product when you get “yes” or a
different type of product when you get “no”.

Either way, there’s a hierarchical decision tree /
flowchart type of structure to what is offered in response
to the user’s choice.

THE WRONG WAY TO DO OTO:
============================

Here’s the wrong way commonly practiced by most online
marketers when presenting a one-time-offer. This is
practiced obliviously by “industry leaders”, and it is
so common that in certain funnel systems you’ll see their
methods baked into their templates. So these bad practices
are perpetuated to newbies and advanced marketers alike.

The OTO page usually leads with a large notice like the
following:

“WAIT! Your order is not complete. Read the important
message below…”

Sometimes you’ll even see a progress bar at the top of
the page to further demonstrate that the order is
incomplete if the user does not read and respond to the OTO
sequence.

This is then followed by an offer for getting, eg, a 50%
discount on some additional product, but only if they order
it right now.

As such, you’ll see some kind of warning on the page
like:

“WARNING: IF you leave this page right now, you will
never see this offer again!”

Further down the page, at the point of the call to action,
you’ll see the choice prompting the user for a decision.

A big coloured button says, “Yes, add XYZ to my order for
only $69” OR (in tiny, gray hyperlinked text), “No
thanks, i don’t like saving money”, or “No thanks, i
like being broke and unemployed”.

If you’ve run an OTO, you’re probably familiar with
this model and you’re wondering what’s so bad about it?

In my experience, this approach is misleading. And if being
misleading doesn’t bother you as long as it’s making
money, the fact is it also hurts conversions and increases
refunds.

Here’s the thing…

By the time the user sees the OTO page, their order HAS in
fact completed. Funds have been deducted. Fulfilment has
begun.

Telling them their order is NOT complete indicates a
problem has occurred. It’s confusing. And if they
received the order confirmation email on their phone
immediately after making their order, they’re going to be
confused as fuck.

Since they’re a first-time customer and there’s not a
whole lot of trust given to you, many will either call
their credit card company and chargeback or write to your
support in panic.

So it’s not really smart to tell them the order is not
complete (when it has), JUST to make them pay attention.

Secondly, the whole fear-mongering of “if you leave this
page you will never see this offer again” it’s over the
top desperate. It doesn’t really have the effect you
might imagine on a buyer, to push them to order just to
lock in some saving.

Personally, it’s never worked on me. I’d rather pay
full price when i KNOW i want the product than to get a
discount on a product i might not even really want.

Thirdly, the negative action.

Why are we making it discrete?

Why do we make it so unattractive (even at times,
insulting)?

To bias the customer to accept the offer?

This is silly. The thing is, there are NOT two choices
here. There are three:

(1) accept the offer,
(2) reject the offer,
(3) or , CLOSE THE WINDOW!

And they WILL close the window if they do not like or do
not notice the negative option.

If you have a downsell sequence, the last thing you want is
them to close the window–because they won’t see your
negative sales sequence at all!

So you rather they click “no” than disengage entirely,
in order to show your downsell.

Here’s the RIGHT way to do upsells.

1. CONFIRM THE ORDER IS COMPLETE
===================================

Tell the customer their transaction worked. Use a message
like, “Thank you, we’ve received your order and an
email has been sent with further instructions.”

To get them to consider the OTO, follow with an appeal to
read further and some benefit to doing so. For example,
“Before you go, consider the offer below to get faster,
better results with XyZ product!”

This gives them a reason to stay, without confusing them
about the status of their initial order.

2. HIGHLIGHT WHY THIS IS AN OPPORTUNITY
=========================================

Rather than threaten the customer the price will disappear,
quickly highlight why this is an unmissable opportunity.
How does purchasing this second product enhance their
original purchase in a way nothing else can?

Does it make the results of the first product faster? Does
it make it easier?

Use the short time you have with them to get across your
reasons as impactfully as possible.

3. USE A BUTTON FOR THE “YES” OPTION
=====================================

Without too much copy, make your YES option well
highlighted by placing it in a button. I’d go so far as
to suggest using an icon that hints at “adding” to
their order. Explain that pushing the button will add $x to
their order. Eg, “Add ZYX instantly to my order for $49!”

Because this is a “one click” upsell, you don’t want
anyone clicking the button thinking they will have an
option to confirm later on.

When the customer is clear about what’s happening, they
are more willing to complete the action and it reduces your
complaints, refunds, and chargebacks.

4. HINT AT THE CONFIRMATION PAGE
==================================

For the “NO” option, you can use a text-based,
underlined, hyperlink. Using a hyperlink does make it more
discreet than the “YES” option.

But avoid going too small or gray or negative.

I suggest using red (for no) or blue (the traditional
hyperlink colour) and make sure it is deliberately
underlined to look like a clickable hyperlink.

This way, the option is readable and it is easy to
understand that it is interactive and clickable.

What should the link say?

After an order completes, most customers like to see an
order summary page. In fact, some like to print or save
this page for future reference. The negative option should
hint at progress or at reaching that summary page.

For example, “No thanks, i’d like to continue to the
next page…”

This way, if a customer doesn’t want your offer, they will
prefer to click “NO” than to close the window…and you
can make them a subsequent offer. And you’ll make more
money on average per customer as a result of doing it this
way.

—

Don’t underestimate the power of being transparent. These
are not TRICKS.

They’re just an exercise in clarity so users feel safe
when they are most vulnerable.

I’ve turned entire campaigns around just by reforming
their upsell pages.

These are just some of the ideas i have about writing an
effective post-checkout upsell page. For lots more ideas on
how to build excellent traffic converting pages, check out
the DIY Super Traffic Machine series of manuals.

They’re designed from the ground up to take you through
building a machine that converts traffic into customers
regularly and covers every aspect of online marketing
business.

Read more about what the Super Traffic Machine can do for
you at the link below…

https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit

Until tomorrow,

~jim

P.S. If you have missed previous messages in the series,
check out the following:

– [Part 1: The “Yaghi Way” of Traffic Generation]

– [Part 2: Sending Traffic Straight to the Sales Page of a
DICK PILL]

– [Part 3: Sell More With Amazing *Hybrid* Pages]

—

{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}

Heya,

Yesterday, i gave you 7 remarkable tips to run a
“straight to the sales page” traffic campaign.

When using a sales page as a landing page, i don’t
recommend you bother trying to collect email leads too. The
sale should be your ONLY objective.

I tried all kinds of ways to make a sales page work with
some sort of opt-in as a backup (eg, exit popups, timed
popups, scroll triggered popups)…and i decided it was not
a wise way to go.

Not all were inherently bad ideas. But the tech gets
finicky and it doesn’t always work the way it should, and
you risk distracting or putting off people while in the
midst of reading your sales letter, on the off-chance they
might opt in, when you could’ve had them buy.

Also, the biggest advantage of running traffic straight to
a sales letter is to avoid managing an email marketing
campaign to convert non-buyers. The strategy is to only
ever collect and spend time marketing to customer leads.
Which is smart.

Trying to also capture email leads on a sales letter would
defy the purpose.

If, on the other hand, collecting leads is important to
you, then the HYBRID landing page is the way to go.

However, there’s a few more good reasons to consider the
hybrid page you’ll shortly see.

A hybrid landing page tries to get the best of both worlds
by making a few compromises. It offers two choices of
actions to the visitor–

1) to buy,
2) or, to opt-in for information.

NEITHER option is a decoy. Each represents a different
sales flow. Let’s explore each in detail.

THE “BUY” FLOW
=================

In the past, i actually treated the “buy” option as a
decoy. The point was merely to prepare the user for a
buying action while expecting them to prefer to opt in for
free than to buy.

However, i’ve found by lowering the price of your
product, you CAN in fact expect sales on contact. Add
post-checkout upsells and this very quickly gives you a
decent return on investment.

The compromise you make, however, is that you have to drop
the long form “sales letter” format.

A hybrid page makes a simple, bullet-based, visual
presentation, with less wordiness and text. It features
mini sales blocks, each a self-contained unit that offers
some information–for example, three main benefits could be
one block, a series of animated testimonials could be
another block, etc.

Each block ends with a call to action to purchase or opt-in
for more information.

To see what i mean, (sort of), check out the yaghilabs
website homepage. I’ve actually got better examples but
i’d rather not distract you with them at the moment.

I’ve seen a lot of marketers recently try to build such
pages, but they’re not systematic or strategic in their
design. They’re just a haphazard information dump, most
likely because they think the format is cool. They’re not
doing it right.

I go into great detail about how to plan and build such a
page in the appendix of User Manual FIVE (Leads) in the
Super Traffic Machine. You don’t need to use our included
plugin to do it (although you could). I’ll show you some
better tech alternatives in Part 11 of this email series.

THE “FREE” / OPT-IN FLOW
=========================

The opt-in (free) choice has to be positioned as a way to
sample or demonstrate the product on offer.

You do not need to offer a “bribe” (although you could)
but instead should focus on giving a good reason for them
to tune into recurring emails.

I prefer NOT to offer bribes because it’s tempting to
promote the bribe only. This only gives the visitor a
ONE-TIME reason to check their email. Once they get the
promised item, there’s no reason to continue to check and
read emails from us.

The reason i want their email address is to market to them
REGULARLY. So i do NOT conceal that in any way.

You want them to know you will be marketing to them by
email, regularly. You want them to want this. Thus, they
need a reason to check their email recurrently.

HYBRID REDIRECT
==================

Originally, the redirect after a person fills out the
opt-in form with their details was either a “Thank You”
page, please check your email….

OR, it was a redirect to the long-form sales letter of the
main product pitched briefly in the hybrid landing page.

But recently, we found a much better approach is to treat
the opt-in choice as a “downsell”.

Meaning, you now pitch a DIFFERENT product that could
interest the user. I’ll give you a quick example.

In the male enhancement campaign, we found we had two types
of visitors:

1) pill buyers
2) and, information seekers.

So our primary “buy” flow promoted the bottle of pills. Our
secondary “free” flow offered information by email about
natural solutions for erectile dysfunction.

For the free flow, after collecting their email, we
redirected to a brief sales letter promoting an information
product about getting natural erections. If they bought
that information product, we would show them a sequence of
post-checkout upsells for other information products.

The email follow-up with the non-buyer leads also tended to
be focused on information products instead of the pill
bottles.

It was simply an experiment at the time, but what surprised
us is that we were actually often able to sell a MORE
EXPENSIVE product on the “free” opt-in flow!

And in many cases, customers were evenly divided between
the primary “buy” flow and the secondary “free”
flow.

—

While it’s a lot more work to create two sales flows (and
products for them), in addition to maintaining emails for
two customer lists and a non-buyer list, it’s certainly a
lucrative way to go.

I cannot tell you for certain whether the straight to the
sales page or hybrid page is the superior approach because
we have not yet setup that split-test…but i believe the
hybrid funnel is superior.

That’s all for today. If you’re interested in
learning more about hybrid pages, check out the amazing
Super Traffic Machine at the link below:

https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit

Until tomorrow,

~jim

—

{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}

Heya,

Let’s get right to it because we’ve got a lot to cover.

As promised, today we’ll talk about how to profit from
driving cold traffic straight to a sales page.

What i like about the approach is its simplicity. You go
right to selling your product without any intermediate
steps. Each time you pay for a click, that is one visitor
to your site who gets to see and consider your product.

Contrast this approach to using an optin only landing page.

Here, after you’ve paid for a visitor’s click, you
filter and qualify who should even see your pitch. Assuming
an “average” optin rate of 10%, that means only 10 out
of every 100 clicks you pay for will have a chance to
consider your product.

A couple of years ago, i started a campaign for a client in
the extremely risky niche of “male enhancement” (think,
dick pizzlez). To start, i suggested he market his product
as a premium pill and build an optin page to grow a mailing
list, and then send daily emails to build up its value and
sell it.

He resisted raising the price of a month’s supply. I was
thinking $400, he was thinking $30, and we finally agreed
on a “middle ground” of $120.

The approach worked and was effective. The client was
surprised that we were able to sell the bottle for this
price–but he wasn’t particularly interested in writing
so many emails, nor in outsourcing the work. He continued
to push for a straight to the sales page pitch.

I often advise a client with what i think is right–but if
they’re pushing hard against me, i let them have their
way. What happens is either they become convinced why i
advised them against this, or i learn something new.

So, reluctantly, i agreed.

For a week or so, we got absolutely SLAUGHTERED running our
Google Ads straight to the sales page. My point was proven.
But rather than be content with that, i couldn’t resist
the challenge.

So i began making some tweaks to counter the issues and
about two weeks in, i was able to turn this around to both
our amazement and it worked like gangbusters.

Before i explain what i did, let’s talk about why things
flopped so royally at first.

Despite the simplicity and intuitiveness of going straight
to the sales page, there’s a few issues with the approach
that have to be dealt with:

First, online shoppers have short attention spans.

While you probably need a lot of writing (or video) to
explain and sell your product, many visitors just don’t
have the time or patience to sit through it all. You have
to figure out how to grab attention and keep it long enough
to get to selling.

This means you need skills you might not have, and lots of
testing. If you’re not careful, your own copy could be
hurting you, serving as a really strict “gatekeeper”
that turns people off without seeing what you’ve got to
offer. You might spend a lot of money and never see a
single customer convert.

With this client campaign, the copy was not our problem.
But the length certainly contributed to the issue.

Secondly, visitors may not be ready to spend money right
now.

Even if your traffic is super qualified, and your sales
copy is amazing, and visitors read your entire sales
message, they may still not be ready to buy. Do not
underestimate the amount of effort someone has to go
through to reach for their wallet, pull out a credit card,
and start a checkout transaction.

Realistically speaking, visitors need to be exposed to your
sales pitch multiple times to be ready to buy. And each
contact is going to cost you money.

With behavioural targeting, there’s a simple solution to
this. But Google Ads considers “male enhancement” a
sensitive health issue and prohibits behavioural targeting.
So we could not benefit from retargeting visitors with more
ads.

Third, you’re exposed to the whims of Google’s
automated review system. Their crawler now has access to
everything you have to say about your product, and you have
multiple vulnerabilities and points of potential violation
of their terms.

With a product like ours, we had lots of potential for
issues–the sexual explicitness of the ad copy, the health
claims, and a range of prohibited trigger keywords.
Although this issue did not come up until later and i’m
not going to get into it in this email–perhaps in a later
one.

So how do you counter these issues and run a successful
Google Ads campaign that goes straight to the sales page?

1. INSTALL A SESSION RECORDER
==============================

This is always good practice for troubleshooting any
landing page. A [session recorder]
captures in
real time how individual visitors interact with your page.

It captures scrolling, mouse movement, and keyboard
strokes.

LOL! This is not as sinister as it sounds, i promise…I
programmed such a system before so i’ve got some
experience with how they work.

Session recorders do NOT do any screen grabs. They simply
capture the events of scrolling, tapping, and clicking with
the precise time each event happened. On the server side,
the system simulates the rendering of your page with a
browser, device, and screen size similar to the visitor’s
(all easily detected). Finally, an animation is made by
playing the events against the simulated page, which allows
you to visualise how the user interacted with your page as
if you were there watching them do it.

You see if someone gets frustrated when something doesn’t
work the way it should,
… or how long they spend reading,
….or how much attention they give to your pitch,
….or at what point they start skimming and skipping,
….or when they slow down,
….or when they lose interest and click off.

With that information, you can easily see points of failure
in your sales presentation and fix them.

When we watched my client’s visitor sessions, we were
extremely impressed with how engaged users were and that
they were genuinely reading carefully our lengthy written
presentation.

However, where many lost interest and clicked off, was when
they reached the price point. More on this next.

2. LOWER THE PRICE
===================

This will make the most fundamental difference in any
campaign that has sales as its primary objective. You
can’t easily sell a premium product on contact.

You need the visitor to make an impulse buy.

For this to work, the price has to be low. The lower the
better. It has to make sense for your business, of course,
but if it means creating a simpler variation of your
product, then do it.

For example, we considered doing a 7 day supply of pills
for $9.99. You can probably go as high as $49 before it
stops being an impulse buy–but i’d suggest lower.

The beauty of having a low price is you don’t need to do
a LOT of selling to sell it. A guarantee is optional and
not at all required (for another client we disclaim that
there are no guarantees at the head of the presentation and
it still kicks butt).

A low price automatically makes your pitch low risk.

3. BUILD A SCANNABLE SALES PITCH
==================================

Formatting and usability is absolutely critical, more
important than choosing the magical combination of words.

Realise that people will not read everything you write to
sell them, and you don’t need them to. Break up your
presentation with graphics, headlines, lists, and so on to
give relief. People often alternate between reading and
scanning. Give them reasons to take breaks, and give them
reasons to re-engage.

I go into great depth on how to do this masterfully in the
[Super Traffic Machine]
User Manual
THREE (Offer).

4. PROMISE INFO & HINT AT BUYING
================================

From the ads themselves to the landing page, you want to
set expectations for reading (or watching) with a hint at
price.

When you have a large amount of text in your presentation,
position it as an article / editorial instead of product
information. For video, position it as an interview or
tutorial.

This is not to say that you should be sneaky about it–but
just give visitors educational value when they consume your
sales pitch, before you start selling. I also like to push
sales sounding stuff further DOWN the presentation so it
doesn’t scare people off too early.

5. DO A CART ABANDONMENT CAMPAIGN
=====================================

Many visitors will click your purchase button, get to the
order page, fill some information and then stop short.

What happened?

Aren’t they good prospects?

In addition to the session recorder to identify issues in
your order page, also use an order page solution that
stores emails of people who begin checkout but do not
complete the purchase and tries to recover them.

One idea is to use a two step checkout where you get the
email in one step and the payment information in another.

Alternatively, some solutions use ajax to capture partial
information and create a “draft customer”. If after a
time the order is not completed, the cart abandonment email
sequence begins.

In a future email, I’ll talk more about the technology
stack to pull this off. There’s a lot of options here and
[there’s one in particular i like, it’s free]
.

Ideally you want to begin the sequence by asking if they
need help, offer support by phone and email, and give them
the link to continue their checkout. If your solution
stores the details they filled out, even better, because it
reduces friction.

You don’t want too many emails in the abandonment
recovery campaign–perhaps 3 at most. In the last email, it
would be a good idea to give a small discount as an
incentive to finish their order (but hold off until the
last email).

In my experience, we’ve been able to save some 60% of
started orders this way!

Also this is a good opportunity to create a retargeting
list for everyone else whose email was not captured but
clicked through to the order page. We do that in campaigns
where behavioural targeting is permitted.

6. UPSELL TO INCREASE CUSTOMER VALUE
======================================

The only way to recoup your ad cost when your price is
already reduced is to have several post-checkout upsells
and order bumps. Usually it’s easy to push your average
ticket here because once the credit card is out and the
order form has been filled the biggest obstacle has
disappeared.

You still want to think in terms of “impulse buy”
pricing, but it really depends on your skill in choosing
good upsell products and what your market wants.

And the upsell process has to be frictionless, so always
use a one-click upsell solution.

We’ve pushed this to $300 without trouble.

I’m going to talk about this in another email we’ve got
some counter-intuitive tricks to make upsells work. And the
technology stack is another important discussion.

7. USE FOLLOWUP FOR HIGH TICKET SALES
=======================================

The real money is going to be in the repeat sales you do
AFTER a customer has bought from you once.

I’d say almost everything up to this point will cover
your customer acquisition costs and perhaps a small amount
of profitability (which you may well lose when you try to
scale your ad campaign).

Reinvest everything you earn in the front-end and
post-checkout upsells into advertising.

After you’ve collected a list of customers, you must
immediately begin follow-up to maintain a relationship,
even if you’re selling nothing. It could be a support
mailing list to help them benefit from their purchase or
something similar.

Planning and building a high-ticket backend product
($1,000+) needs some careful consideration. When you’re
ready, you can begin to promote several such products to
your customer list. But be sure you maintain an email
relationship, even when you’re not selling otherwise you
lose ANY value in that customer list.

This is a topic discussed in great detail in User Manual
SIX (Customers) and SEVEN (Follow Up) in the [Super Traffic
Machine] series.

—

I think this covers the major pointers i have for you if
you’re trying to make things work with direct to the
sales page type of pitches. Most of these pointers apply to
the hybrid page also. But i’ll talk about some
differences in how you might handle it in tomorrow’s
email.

In the meantime, please check out the Super Traffic
Machine which will give you all the groundwork you need to
actually implement most of the above.

Read more about it at the link below:

https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit

Until tomorrow,

~jim

—
{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}

heya,

While managing traffic campaigns for clients, i’ve had to
adapt some of my techniques over the years, as new
technologies emerged and as the market matured.

Since we’ve been out of touch for a while, i’ve not had a
chance keep you abreast of those changes.

So today, i thought you might be interested in following
along with me, in a mini series of emails about what i’ve
been up to, what’s changed, and some of the reasoning
behind why i’m doing things this way now.

To start, let’s talk about LANDING PAGE strategies for
promoting a product or range of products to cold traffic
using Google Ads or Facebook or whatever your choice of
traffic platform is. (My choice is still Google Ads)

In the past, the primary goal of my Google Ads was to
generate (email) leads.

I then monetised the generated leads, by promoting and
selling products, using email marketing and follow-up.

Hence, all ads directed to a landing page which asked
visitors to subscribe to receive emails about some topic of
interest to their query. Ultimately, the topic of emails
would also relate to the primary product i’m selling.

I reasoned, previously, it was difficult to recoup your
investment in ad spend by making the sale directly on
contact…and that generating leads is a more forgiving
approach. It quickly preserves your ad spend (by saving the
lead) and gives you multiple “second chances” to make
the sale.

This is particularly important if copywriting and sales
presentations are not your area of strength (like me), and
particularly if you don’t have a big budget to test
different sales presentations until you find one that gives
you a reasonable return on investment (like many of our
students).

I still believe this to be true.

However, i’ve changed my tune somewhat to make “SALES ON
CONTACT” the *PRIMARY* objective of all traffic generation.

Collecting leads has been downgraded to a secondary,
backup, or even optional objective. On the front-end,
collecting leads can help you fill in some revenue gaps.

The reason for the shift in priority?

Here are a couple:

1. COMPETITION
===============

Advertising costs have gone up as more businesses learned
the value of paid online advertising.

I remember when i first started teaching traffic
generation. Saying your product taught a “paid” traffic
method was like a curse word. We named early programs PPC
Domination and PPC Supremacy to be accurate but
deliberately used the abbreviation “PPC” to avoid the
stigma associated with spelling out “PAY per click”.

To the point when we wanted to sell PPC Supremacy, we ran a
major prelaunch campaign to educate the market on the value
of paid traffic.

We wrote a free report that described every popular “free
traffic” method in such a way that it became more
powerful with this “secret” thing called the “Google
Switch” which amplified and multiplied the result…

And only at the end we revealed that the mysterious
“Google Switch” was nothing more than building an email
list with paid traffic and using email marketing to
leverage that audience to boost free traffic techniques.

Without this prelaunch campaign, it would have been
extremely difficult to convince the market of the value of
training program on paid traffic. When in the first place
they could not see the value of paying for traffic when
there was an abundance of available “free traffic”
methods.

Things have changed now.

Today, it is really taken for granted that if you’re
serious about building a business online, you must have an
advertising budget, and you are willing to spend money on
promoting your product or service. Even outside our little
industry of internet marketing, local businesses and other
laymen see the value in paid Facebook or Google ads.

Because of this, competition on PPC platforms is at an all
time high, and cost to acquire leads and customers has
increased exponentially.

This trend is likely to continue. And thus it becomes more
important than ever to get a fast return on investment and
to identify customer leads early on.

2. TECHNOLOGY
================

Behavioural targeting has improved and we can now simulate
the effect of “second chances” by showing different ads
to visitors who already visited and performed some (non
buying) action at our site. This is known as retargeting or
remarketing.

Although using retargeting means you have to spend money on
the second chances, typically you’re not reluctant to do
so.

Retargeted visitors are more likely to complete a buying
action, hence, you are prepared to up your bids to close
the sale. Then you recoup the extra ad spend in
post-checkout upsells and backend sales.

(For more on behavioural targeting, check out Manual EIGHT
– Traffic – in our awesome Super Traffic Machine course)

—

So there’s really two approaches you might consider when
starting a paid traffic campaign:

1. Pitch your product and make the sale your ONLY
objective

2. Or, pitch your product AND your mailing list (two
objectives)

There’s advantages and disadvantages to both approaches.
In coming lessons, i talk about my experience with both and
when you might prefer one method over the other.

But yeah, basically, the first one means you’re doing a
“direct to the sales page” campaign and only collecting
customer leads.

Contrary to popular belief, Google has no bias against
“sales pages”–they’re a little tricky to make
work–but one of my most lucrative campaigns uses this
approach exclusively.

AND what’s more impressive is we’re making it work without
using retargeting (it would have been awesome if we could
have, but the product is considered a sensitive health
issue and as such as not allowed to use any behavioural
targeting).

I describe how to build such a page in the Super Traffic
Machine’s Manual THREE (Offer).

The second strategy uses what i call a “Hybrid” Landing
Page. It’s a page with two flows where the user is
encouraged to make a choice between a “free” and
“paid” flow.

I describe this in detail in the Super Traffic Machine’s
manual FIVE (Landing Page). At the time of writing, we
considered it an advanced topic so the specific steps and
instructions are primarily in the appendix. We always tried
to keep things simple by moving all things we considered
“optional” into an appendix or a “resource book”.

But being in the appendix doesn’t mean there’s any shortage
on details–in fact it is usually the opposite.

In the meantime, you can learn more about the
comprehensive Super Traffic Machine series of manuals at
the link below:

https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit

Tomorrow i’ll get into more detail on how to make
“direct to the sales page” offers work on Google.

until then,

~jim

—

{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}

heya,

Shortly after i wrote, “How to win an argument with
Google,” and after winning the argument with my doctor by
proving i had a bladder infection…

i ended up in the hospital to treat said infection.

One thing led to another, 20 days of hospitalization and
two surgeries later, they found a tumour in my bladder and
i was ultimately diagnosed with stage 3 bladder cancer.

I’m ok, i’m getting treated and i’m working through the
pain.

in case you haven’t noticed this email and others have been
sent some time after they were written so the timeline
sometimes appears to distort somewhat. I’ll explain to you
why in this message. It’s pretty cool really.

i was presented with a problem, while building my new email
platform, which i think you would benefit from.

Particularly if you have previously built a large email
list (as i did)…

…didn’t email them for a really long time (as i
shamefully did)…

…and now you’re thinking to start emailing again (as i
now am doing).

If you kept your Aweber subscription active, the instinct
is to just start emailing. Otherwise, if you managed to
export / backup your contacts, the instinct is to import
them into a new email provider and start emailing.

Please don’t do either thing.

Here’s why…

When you send emails, the ip address of the sender is
associated with a reputation. If you have been absent for a
while or you change email marketing provider, that
reputation no longer exists.

Meaning, complaints and bounces can seriously impact your
ability to land in inboxes than they would impact a sender
who has millions of (recent) email sends under their belt
and has the occasional burst of complaints or bounces.

Let’s pause to define “bounce” and “complaint” so
we’re on the same page.

WHAT IS A BOUNCE:
==================

Bounce, in the context of email, is an instance of a
message sent to a recipient, but is for some reason
undeliverable.

There are different types of bounces–some are permanent
and others are temporary.

A temporary bounce can be caused by the recipient’s
mailbox being full or the server being valid but
temporarily unreachable. This is not a problem for the
sender to worry about.

A permanent bounce, on the other hand, is typically caused
by trying to send to a non-existent (1) domain or (2)
mailbox.

The simple case is when a subscriber types a fake email
address, either on a valid or invalid domain to bypass your
optin page.

Another example, suppose your recipient had their own
domain (eg, johndoe dotCOM) which they setup to receive or
forward mail for them, subscribed to your list with this
valid email, and then after a while they let the domain
expire. When you next send after a long pause, their mail
server domain is invalid / unreachable.

This could happen to any sender, any time, of course, even
if you’ve been mailing consistently. However, if you’ve
been absent a while, the probability of having LOTS of
subscribers with expired domains at the same time would be
significantly higher.

Each unreachable domain causes the message to “bounce” and
your email marketing platform will count it against you.
Lots of undeliverable mail is a good indicator your email
list is out of date.

Another way you could get a permanent bounce is if your
subscriber was once a user, for example, of AOL, hotmail,
Gmail, or some other public mail provider, they subscribed
with that address, and then later, during your lengthy
absence, their account was cancelled. The domain is valid
and reachable still, but their mailbox no longer exists.

Or, your subscriber was once employed in a company which
provided them with a business mail address, or they
attended a university or school that provided its students
an address. If they subscribed while still at that company
or school, then later they left, and you emailed after a
lengthy absence, it’s likely the company or school domain
is still reachable, but the mailbox is no longer valid.

In these cases, the subscriber’s mail domain is reachable
and will reject receiving the message (because it has no
mailbox to route to). Your email marketing platform is
subsequently notified, so it counts the permanent bounce
against you.

Additionally, the domain you sent to (eg, Gmail) will count
the bounce too. If you send to a lot of users on the same
domain with expired / non-existent mailboxes, your sending
domain can get blacklisted from sending to that domain in
future.

Even if you were mailing consistently (without a long
break), this can happen with several email addresses on
your list on ANY given day. It would not normally be a big
issue. But when you’re sending after a long break, the
probability of having hundreds or thousands of these type
of bounces is extremely high and then it’s a problem.

When a sender sends too many messages that bounce, it
indicates their email list is out of date and does not have
currently engaged recipients. Too many bounces and a sender
can get blacklisted. Blacklists are often shared across
multiple email clients and they are cross-checked when
determining if an email should land in spam or inboxes.

WHAT IS A COMPLAINT:
=====================

Complaint, on the other hand, is when a recipient gets a
message and then manually marks the email as “spam” or
specifically hits a “complain” button in their email
program to indicate the message is unwanted.

Note this is NOT the same as clicking “unsubscribe”. Even
if it is done using the email platform’s own unsubscribe
button (some email providers give the option to unsubscribe
from the mail header).

Unsubscribes DO NOT count against your sender reputation.

In the case of complaints / reporting spam, the email
server of the recipient will note the message was not
desired, and will send a report back to the sender to stop
further emailing. If the sender does not comply, the email
program will add the sender to a blacklist which will
affect the deliverability of future messages.

However, complaints, whether you comply or do not comply to
stop emailing, they still count against your reputation.

—

Bounces and complaints are NOT usually an issue IF:

1. you collect emails correctly using opt in forms with
proper disclaimers,

2. you make it easy to opt-out,

3. you build up your subscriber list progressively and
naturally,

4. and, you regularly email your subscribers

If you do 1, 2, and 3 correctly but not (4) and you stop
emailing your list for a long time then resumed again, you
appear, with no reputation, to be sending a LOT of
emails…

Which would be fine if no emails bounced and no users
complained…

But the longer you are absent from your list, the more
likely your contacts are to be outdated and the more likely
those who were once interested in hearing from you have no
recollection of ever subscribing to you.

So how have i been handling these issues of reawakening my
email list, and how can you do the same?

Here’s four easy steps to follow…

1. REMIND THEM WITH PROOF:
===========================

To start, before even writing a word of email, i crafted an
opt-out message to appear at the bottom of all my emails
that included as much data as i had on the user’s
original subscription. This is to prove they genuinely and
deliberately subscribed for emails from me.

I included:

* A timestamp of their original subscribe date,

* the url of the page from which they subscribed,

* the ip of the device they used to subscribe,

* and the geographic location their device was in when
they subscribed

Most email providers store this information for you
automatically, so you can do this too. Just use the
relevant merge codes to show the information.

2. REINTRODUCE YOURSELF
=========================

this may seem redundant, but the first email you send when
reawakening your list is the most crucial. You must
RE-INTRODUCE yourself to your subscribers. Truthfully,
you’re probably not that important to be remembered after
years of absence. Even if they remember you, your
reintroduction reminds them why they used to want to hear
from you.

Remind them why they subscribed to you and remind them who
you are and why you’re reaching out to them now.

Check if they’re still interested. Early on, present them
the opportunity to opt-out if they are no longer
interested. This is critical because many will not give you
the chance to read the entire message or look for the
opt-out link at the end. You want to avoid them hitting the
complain button and to prefer the unsubscribe one instead.
Remember complaints count against you while unsubscribe
don’t.

So present an unsubscribe link early in the message, but
not too early so you can appeal to their interest to try
and remember who you are.

3. CLEAN THE LIST
================

There are a number of services that will check an email
list for you (for a cost).

Service levels range from checking domains only and
checking domains AND email boxes. The latter is usually a
more expensive service and will probably get you a few
false negatives (reporting an email as invalid when it is
valid). Weigh both options up and consider price. I
personally prefer the domain-only check but it isn’t
necessarily the best choice for everyone.

Keep in mind list cleaning services are not completely
foolproof and will not eliminate all bounces in and of
itself. However, doing this step will save you from sending
to many inactive/non-existent email addresses.

I recommend investing into at least a basic list cleaning
service.

4. SEGMENT THE LIST & EMAIL IN CHUNKS
=====================================

This is probably the hardest step of all but is extremely
important. I started in March 2020 and completed it in June
2020. So i know it works.

The objective is to simulate the “slow and steady”
buildup of your list, while monitoring your reputation.
Depending on the size of your list, i’d recommend
dividing it into smaller pieces. For example, if you have
15,000 subscribers, perhaps divide it into 15 segments of
1,000 subscribers. If you have 1,000 subscribers, divide
into 10 segments of 100 subscribers.

Write your first email and send it to the first segment.
Monitor your bounce and complaint rate over the next 24-48
hours.

If it is acceptable, send that same email to the second
segment, and reiterate.

If, on the other hand, your complaint or bounce rate rises
to an unacceptable level, you need to hold off on emailing
a new segment. Instead, write a second email and send it to
the FIRST segment only.

Don’t worry, you can reuse that same email with the other
segments later…but don’t email any new segment yet.

The objective is to dilute your overall complaint and
bounce rates by using progressively cleaner sublists of
your original list.

So if a segment has already been emailed once, presumably
anyone who wants to unsubscribe has already unsubscribed.
Anyone who wants to complain has already complained. And
any email address that needed to bounce has already
bounced.

This is not always entirely the case, but the probability
of a bounce or complaint is reduced the more times you
email a segment.

Your email marketing provider will automatically not send to
bounced or complaining addresses the next time you hit the
same segment. So this gets you more sends under your belt
with lower probability of complaints and bounces.

You can send a third and fourth email to the same segment
until you have reduced your complaint and bounce rates to a
level you’re happy with.

Only then can you move onto one of the subsequent segments.
Repeat. In the beginning it may take 7-10 emails before you
can start mailing a new segment, but each time you
reiterate, you get more clean segments which more quickly
dilutes the bounces and complaints of new uncleaned
segments.

It took me a total of 22 emails to safely clean my list
and i lost more than 20% in bounces and unsubscribes.

What is an acceptable bounce/complaint rate?

I’d suggest checking with your email marketing software
what they allow. I try to shoot for less than 5% bounce and
0.1% complaint rate calculated against ALL emails sent.
That is:

Bounce Rate = 100 x total bounces / (total recipients x
emails sent) < 5% Complaint Rate = 100 xtotal complaints / (total recipients x emails sent) < 0.1% This is the basic strategy i’ve been using and why there may be a longer or shorter delay between when you get messages from me. And why the time lines seem stretched or squished. If you’re interested in learning more about how to get ideas and write engaging emails that sell while reawakening your subscribers, check out the Super Traffic Machine DIY Kit at the link below: https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit Please be patient if links are slow to respond. the email platform, the blog, the shop, and the membership area all currently run with the same software. I'm working on making the system scale on demand by modularising the components but i'm significantly slower at getting things done now that i'm ill. Thanks for your patience, ~jim --- {can-spam} {address} {copyright}

heya,

You may think me a push-over…

But i know how to win a fight with Google. Truth is,
i’m willing to go to great pains to be armed with the
certainty of being right.

Then i’m LETHAL!

In fact, this arguing “style” is how i get an advantage
over mainstream traffic networks and what led to being
hired by a dream client in a high risk category last year.
We built an impressive campaign on Google Ads, doing things
that most people in the industry say NOT to do.

This is the story of how i used the same method of winning
an argument with my doctor to win an argument with
Google–and how you can build lasting, resillient traffic
for your marketing too.

In my last email, i mentioned having a painful recovery
from surgery.

I’m not exactly thrilled with the quality of medical care
in Germany. For the last two years, i’ve been battling
two different medical problems. Both started as minor
issues, but over the course of treating them, the doctors
CAUSED something worse.

Last year, i barely dodged a surgery to the face that would
have left me disfigured…and this year, i’m still
battling the possibility of a prostate surgery that could
leave me infertile.

Medical training in Germany cautions doctors about “over
prescribing” antibiotics for fear of antibiotic
resistance–to the point that many will either not
prescribe when needed or incorrectly prescribe with a dose
too low or a course too short.

Case in point, my recent surgery.

It all started when my family went on vacation and i used
the extra time to overwork to the point of exhaustion.
Suddenly, i had an increased difficulty urinating.

Upon visiting a urologist, he treated the issue as
prostatitis (prostate inflammation) caused by too much
sitting and small amounts of “dust” being released from
my kidneys. Notably, he did not test for bacterial
prostatitis nor entertain the possibility.

Pretty soon, his “treatment” of this minor issue led to
several visits to emergency, catheterisation, and
ultimately bladder stones so large they required surgical
removal.

Thus, to remove the stones blocking my wee, I was admitted
into the hospital with an existing bacterial infection
(caused by catheter), did the surgery while still infected,
and returned to the ward for recovery where for 7 days, and
without medication a nurse checked my temperature daily to
see if i would develop a fever from sepsis.

I was released, still unable to pee without the help of a
tube through my belly.

worse…

Where the tube entered my belly, I had an infected surgical
wound and was STILL not given a drop of antibiotic, despite
asking the surgeon for it! I even returned to emergency
some days later with fever and vomiting and was sent home
with neither blood test nor medication.

Eventually, my urologist tested for infection, for which i
was positive. He was “kind enough” to give me a brief
course of antibiotics.

However, upon completing the course, i asked to test if the
infection had cleared which he refused. He brushed off my
continued pain by saying, “Don’t worry the antibiotic
works for three days after treatment.”

I appeared to give in.

In such a circumstance, i know many people who are
willing to fight tooth and nail, even if they’re only 51%
certain of being right–that is NOT me. And for this, you
may mistake me for a push-over.

Here’s the thing… As a computer scientist, i enjoy
precision.

I’d rather not fight for something and turn out to be
wrong. It feels like mud on the face, you know? Everything
you said during your fight, suddenly has no value, or in
retrospect, is an overreaction.

Being armed with certainty is extremely important to me.
Because when i have it, it becomes a potent weapon in my
hands. I feel empowered to fight with all i got.

And i ALWAYS win.

Because right, is right!

No one reasonable can argue with wrong and win against
right.

So when i was first approached by the client mentioned
earlier, i told him we should set up his advertising funnel
in a way both compliant (as in follows the rules to the
letter) and transparent about any claims made.

I argued that while this may seem like a lot of work, the
wonderful thing about having a compliant site is that any
results we attain are LASTING.

Nothing is worse than building a business around a good
result, expanding out, making new hires, moving into a
fancy office location, expanding your lifestyle and
financial commitments…only to have it all yanked from
under you, overnight.

More importantly, it allows one to be on the “right side
of right”, in case Google decides to disapprove our ads.

That is, if Google’s moody automated review system deems
our ads somehow “wrong”, we can fight with the full
confidence of knowing their system made a mistake, not us.
And we can demand strongly that they perform a manual
review and reapprove the ads.

If you’ve done any advertising with Google or Facebook,
you know disapprovals are just part of the game. No matter
how careful you are. But getting your ads reapproved after
disapproval is not a luxury most advertisers enjoy.

Back to what i was saying about the urologist…

The moment i left his office, i vowed to independently
prove that my troubles are caused primarily by untreated or
mistreated bacterial infection. Meaning, he was wrong, and
i was right–after which he’d have to be my bitch and do
what i say.

No sooner did i get home, i searched online and found i
could order a professional urine testing kit from Amazon. I
ordered and waited eagerly.

Over the next week, i endured a great deal of pain,
irritation, discomfort, sleepless nights, brain fog, lack
of concentration, and moodiness. I could have easily called
the urologist on his personal phone and asked to see
him–he may have even run the test this time and treated
the infection.

But i did not.

That’s how TWISTED your boy is.

I chose instead to find out for certain if it was me who
was wrong, or he.

When the kit finally arrived, i did the test. And LO AND
BEHOLD!

i still had an infection and he should NOT have
discontinued treatment until it was eliminated–otherwise
the bacteria that survived two weeks of pummelling by
antibiotic are the ones that regenerate (ie, he would CAUSE
resistant bacteria, the very thing he was trying to avoid).

Immediately, i called the doctor and asked to see him.

The difference now is i can confidently demand he test,
treat, and test again and keep treating with antibiotics
until the issue clears. He will never be able to brush me
off by refusing to run a test, because i can always run my
own.

If ever he tries one of his old excuses, i can point to the
time he was wrong and i proved it.

This too is what happened with my client.

After we set up our Google Ads campaign and ran it, we
had extremely promising results early on. We quickly scaled
up and were spending around $500 per day and KILLING it
with sales. We were about to double our budget, when all of
a sudden…

Google disapproved the ads.

I was calm. I called and argued and demanded a manual
review.

About a week later, they sent me an apology email and
reapproved ALL the ads without change. You can look in my
Facebook feed to see the email they sent me.

Not only that, but on the basis of THEIR apology, i fought
any further ad disapprovals, again without changes to what
was already working for us.

Could i have done that had the site been non-compliant?

Had i broken their rules or violated their terms, what
value would all my frustrated yelling have when they could
come back and show me the places in my work i had ignored
their terms and conditions?

This is my philosophy.

You do things the right way so you’re on the right side
of right. So no one can point at your flaw or mistake and
make you look bad. This is your armour. Then you go and you
beat the living heck out of anyone who tries to say
you’re wrong.

This is how i do my advertising and why i’m able to run
ads in some of the most notoriously difficult markets, and
do things unheard of…

This is what YOU should do if you want to get serious
traffic that scales uninterrupted.

Build a marketing funnel that focuses on BOTH a) compliance
with the rules, to the letter, and b) conversion. IN THAT
ORDER.

In fact i built an 11 volume course detailing every
single step of building such a funnel that can run on
mainstream advertising platforms, that can scale
uninterrupted, and that you can defend with complete
confidence you are right and anyone who says otherwise is
the one wrong.

Read more about this course and what it can do for you at
the link below…

https://yaghilabs.com/supertrafficdiykit

see you inside,

~jim

—

{can-spam}

{address}

{copyright}