Welcome to The Lede.

Every week I’ll be digging up and linking to stories, news, and opinion relevant to online marketing and copywriting.

Email, social media, innovation, SEO, productivity, mobile, conversion, publishing, and everything in between.

No commentary, just a fast, single page of headlines that you can grab, scan, and squeeze for all they may (or may not) be worth.

All right then, on with it …

About the Author: Robert Bruce is Copyblogger Media’s copywriter and resident recluse. Get him on Twitter.

If you’re a diligent researcher, you might think you know everything there is to possibly know about your prospect.

Deepest fears, pain points, income, business, marital status, family status. You might even know their hair and eye color.

If you’re writing to that person (and you really have those details correct), your copy will likely convert well.

What you might not know about is a secret weapon you can add into the mix that, if used correctly, can skyrocket your conversions through the roof.

Do you know your prospect’s productivity personality? No? That’s all right, not many do. And that’s precisely why this knowledge can give you an unfair advantage as a marketer.

There are four basic personality types that profoundly affect human preferences regarding organization, time management, and productivity strategies.

If you know the personality type of your ideal customer, you can make your copy speak to them on every possible level, from the problems you’ll solve to how you’ll go about solving them.

Let’s take a look at all four, and how to write for each of them …

1. The Fantastical type

The Fantastical personality type is energized by wrestling with problems and coming up with creative solutions.

They learn best by doing, and they have a tendency to lose track of time when they’re caught up in an interesting project.

The most distinctive mark of a Fantastical, though, is that they need to have all the pieces of a project in front of them, otherwise they’ll forget it exists.

My Fantastical business partner goes so far as to refuse to use the produce drawers in her refrigerator because otherwise she’ll forget she bought the fruits and vegetables!

Fantasticals want more than just a plug and play product.

When writing to Fantasticals, make sure you assure them that they’ll get full explanations of all the actions suggested in your product, and then tell them how they’ll solve their problems and learn by doing.

Once you’ve closed the sale, keep up the Fantastical copy by making sure your product dishes out the background theory and information, because your Fantastical customers will want to know all the details.

2. The Structural type

Structural types are natural organizers (and, not coincidentally, are the authors of 99% of the productivity books on the market).

A Structural thrives in a calm, structured environment and doesn’t do well with uncertainty or surprise.

The Structural is the one everyone turns to when there’s an event to be planned, a schedule to be created or a pile of files to be organized.

They can typically pull off feats of organization that amaze lesser mortals, but take away their planner and to-do list and they’re lost.

Therefore, your copy needs to tell a Structural prospect exactly what to expect and what format you’ll be presenting it in.

You also need to explain why your product is better to solve their problem than any other product out there.

And don’t forget to provide testimonials, because a Structural will be reluctant to try it without some evidence that it actually works.

Including clear steps and checklists in your product (and your pre-launch content) will help Structurals to implement your ideas, and trust your word.

3. The Environmental type

Environmentals are all about connections and people.

They care that everyone around them is happy, healthy, comfortable and has what they need.

The Environmental type thrives on human interaction, and has been known to miss meetings and appointments because they were deep in conversation with a friend or coworker who needed a hand.

A strong Environmental type will even go so far as to save anything that might be of use to someone someday — like my grandmother, who ran the string that bound the Thanksgiving turkey through the dishwasher each year and tucked it safely away into a drawer (we did actually find a use for them one year, thus vindicating Oma for everything she’d ever saved).

So, in your copy, make sure you emphasize the personal attention Environmentals will receive as they go through your product.

If you’ve included forums, tell them all about the great interaction you’re expecting and the support networks of peers that they’ll have a chance to contribute to.

The icing on the cake would be to mention all the people the Environmental customer would be able to help after they finish your product — thereby selling the outcome rather than the tool.

4. The Analytical type

Analyticals are success-driven, goal-oriented individuals.

They work well with summaries and numbers, and they don’t have patience for anything that appears unnecessarily elaborate or potentially ineffective.

An Analytical is gifted with the ability to see the big picture and plan accordingly, but their ability to track the smaller details isn’t particularly strong.

It’s not that they aren’t capable of doing so. They just don’t view the financial paperwork or files to be essential to the big picture in their head.

Copy for Analyticals needs to be precise.

Don’t beat around the bush; condense your benefits into concise points and tell your prospect exactly what you’re solving and how you’ll go about doing it.

Extra bonus points if you can fit it into a chart or graph that can be understood in seconds — Analyticals are all about understanding valuable information quickly and effectively.

Many Analyticals have assistants or informal helpers, so structure your product with the understanding that your Analytical customer may not be the one handling the minor aspects.

If you can communicate all this succinctly in your sales copy, you’ll have a great shot at winning the business of your Analytical customer.

Why write for personality types?

By writing to your prospect’s personality, you can connect with them on a level that everyone in the marketplace ignores.

You can also structure your product offering to suit the style of the primary type in your audience, thus increasing the chances that they’ll be able to implement it effectively.

Writing to your audience’s personality allows you to accurately cater to them from pitch to result, giving you more money in your pocket and a cadre of fans raving about how awesome your product is.

There’s no marketing strategy that’s more effective than that!

About the Author: Kirsten Simmons is an author, a coach, and the creator of the Personalized Productivity program that uses your personality to create your ideal productivity system. She’s a Fantastical (in case you were wondering), and she’s also a full time grad student studying mathematical models of epidemics. Come take the personality quiz to discover your type, or connect on twitter @kirstenasimmons.

When was the last time you wrote something with the intent to specifically motivate your readers to take action?

Admit it or not, we’re all in the same game.

Whether you want someone to buy your product, join your email list, retweet or +1 your post, you’re doing one thing — leading your audience down a path at the end of which lies the action they’ll take.

You want them to do something.

In other words, you’re selling.

Unfortunately, many content creators don’t know the first thing about selling.

A few years ago, neither did I. Well, not online, anyway. Not until I developed one skill that changed everything.

I’d had plenty of experience selling at the flower shop I owned. But selling through the written word was an entirely new skill.

To learn this ancient skill, I turned to the experts — those who make millions every year because of their ability to write great sales letters.

Sales letters are roads paved with words which lead buyers to solutions, sellers to profit, and writers closer to their happily ever afters.

Yet, most freelance writers and professional bloggers never consider learning to write sales letters.

Writers often feel as though that particular skill is above their pay grade, while many bloggers prefer to hire a professional when it comes time to creating their sales copy.

That’s probably because neither these writers or bloggers have any idea how life-changing learning to write a sales letter can actually be.

Let’s take a look at five reasons you should learn to write a great sales letter …

1. Never create crap content again

Some clients want nothing more than keyword-stuffed filler content for their sites, and they’re willing to pay you very little for the privilege. They don’t want to hear anything about how Google’s Panda update has made this approach silly, they just want mountains of low-quality content, stat.

Writing crappy content in bulk sucks. Do it for too long, and you’ll wonder why you thought writing online was a good idea in the first place.

Worse than being paid by the pound is the feeling of indentured servitude that comes with being a breath or two beyond running in circles, but nowhere near where you need to be to break away.

Knowing how to write a sales letter elevates your skill set, meaning you can make more money for every word you write, virtually overnight, whether or not you’re a wordsmith for hire.

2. You’ll only need a few clients a month

Managing low-paying copy usually means juggling a long list of clients because you’re stitching one job into the next, quilting your ends until they hopefully meet.

With the much higher earning average of longer form sales copy, just one or two jobs per month can fund the rest of your writing business.

Every sales letter you write makes you a better writer than you were before.

Constantly write, continuously improve, and quickly build a long list of people willing to pay you top dollar for your time.

When you deliver a sales letter that converts, you’re never hired only once.

3. You can develop streams of passive income

Once you know how to write an effective sales letter, you can become your own best client.

Write an eBook, put together a training course, offer a special suite of services, then write a letter to sell it.

You’re doing it for others. Why not do it for yourself?

If you’re a writer, you have the unique ability to synthesize and simplify information.

It’s the next logical step to package what you know and put it online.

4. More time for what you truly want to do

You can always make more money, but you’ll never make another minute.

By being able to charge more money for the hours you work, you will have more time to write the things you love.

You didn’t become a writer to write crap content, or to get lost in the daily blizzard of disposable blog posts, did you?

Earning more per billable hour will give you the time required to build the bank of assets that will elevate your legacy, along with your bottom line.

5. You’ll be better a much better writer

Even if you only write one sales letter in your life, knowing how you did it will make you a better writer.

Sales letters are paint-by-number persuasion, connecting dots we all have in common. You can’t sell if you don’t understand your reader.

Yet, once you know how to slip inside their mind, you can channel their desire.

On a sales page, that means clicking the BUY button.

Offline, it can mean creating word-of-mouth about your latest book, inspiring the reader to tell friends, and maybe even review your product on Amazon.com.

Selling vs. selling out

When I first started online, I wanted nothing more than to write blogs posts and fiction.

Selling seemed like an anti-art, lacking in purity, or just plain “selling out.”

But when you think about what writing is — getting people to feel something, spreading ideas, or connecting with people across great divides — it’s not all that different from selling.

Whether you’re selling a product or selling yourself, learning how to write a good sales letter is one of the best investments you’ll ever make in your writing.

About the Author: Sean Platt is the author of Writing Online and How to Write a Sales Letter that Works (Without Wasting Your Time!). Get his free report, The 9 Mistakes Most Writers Make That Are Keeping Them Poor. Follow him on Twitter.

Everybody’s talking about it.

Most of it is rumor, hearsay, and innuendo …

We idolize the exploits of the people we look up to, and try to skirt the mention of our own experiences (and shortcomings).

No, I’m not talking about sex — I’m talking about split-testing.

What does split-testing have to do with sex?

Actually, quite a lot…

Let me explain.

Everybody says they’re doing it …

Just like sex in high-school, split-testing is all the rage.

Everyone likes to pretend they’re an expert. Buzzwords and rumors abound … stories about increasing conversion rates by an order of magnitude by changing the color of a checkout button (but nobody shares the magic color!).

Most importantly, nobody wants to admit that they don’t really know what they’re doing, or (gasp!) have never done it themselves. Many join the conversation without wanting to let on that they don’t even know what split testing is!

Let’s start with a simple definition.

Split-testing, also known as “A/B testing”, is an invaluable strategy that compares two versions of a web page, with one difference between them — say, for example, a different headline.

Then you measure how many people take the desired action (like buying a product) on each page, to see which variation works better.

Now that we’ve explained it, let’s be honest.

You don’t split-test, do you? Maybe you did something once — a small, unsatisfying and inconclusive experiment, but you’re not testing on a regular basis … right?

Most people don’t want to admit this, because they feel like they’re the only ones not doing it. Everybody knows that split-testing is absolutely critical to effective marketing online — so who wants to admit that they’re the only ones who aren’t doing it?

Well, relax.

It turns out that “most people” can’t be the “only one” — funny thing, right?

Hardly anyone is really doing it…

Everybody’s talking about it, but that doesn’t mean everybody’s actually doing it.

The truth is that many of the exploits that you hear about are fueled by a vivid imagination, rather than experience; only a very small proportion of the talkers are actually doing the things that they describe.

And that’s okay … maybe you aren’t ready.

To do split testing right, you don’t just need to test different variations of a page, you need to measure results, and the differences between the results generated by each variation.

This is challenging, and often impossible for websites that are just starting out and don’t have much traffic.

Let’s explain why with a short example:

Variation 1: One page page received 974 visits, and 5 people converted
Variation 2: The modified version of the page received 961 visits, and 7 people converted

You’d think that Variation 2 is the clear winner, right?

Wrong.

Crunching the numbers, we find that there is only a 45.27% chance that over time, Variation 2 will continue to outperform Variation 1.

In other words, there’s a 54.73% chance that the difference between their success rates was the result of random chance.

Okay … where did I get these numbers?

Split testing is all about finding results that you can be confident in based on statistical significance. This isn’t a touchy-feely kind of confidence — it’s calculated mathematically, and you want it to be at least 90%, and ideally 95% or more to choose a winner.

You don’t have to worry about calculating the numbers yourself; there are free tools out there that can calculate the statistical significance of your results for you (you just plug in the number of impressions and actions for each variation, and the rest is done for you), and split-testing tools like Google Website Optimizer will do the calculation for you as well (and plugs right into Premise).

If you don’t want to calculate the actual significance of your test, here’s a rule of thumb that you can use (borrowed from Tim Ash’s book Landing Page Optimization):

• If there are 100 impressions in your sample, you need to see a 20% difference between variations to be sure that they actually mean something.
• If there are 1,000 impressions, you need a 6.3% difference.
• If there are 10,000 impressions, you need a 2% difference.
• If there are 100,000 impressions, you need a 0.063% difference.

Do you notice the trend here?

To detect small differences in improvements (which are what most split-tests are likely to reveal), you need a pretty large sample size.

The moral of the story is that if you don’t have much traffic, then maybe you need a solid growth strategy instead of better split-testing.

But what if you do have the traffic?

After all, most sites and blogs have at least a bit of traffic, which is enough to test the more important things, like headlines and opt-in placement.

Most aren’t doing it very well …

Like sex in high school, split-testing is something at which even those who are doing it don’t have much experience, and their actions are often controlled by impulses and urges, rather than skilled intent.

Let’s take a quiz, and see if you’re making any of the mistakes of most would-be split-testers:

Do you test one thing at a time? Most wannabe split-testers don’t; they change half-a-dozen things at a time, based on the latest and greatest ideas to have entered their minds. The trouble with this is that when things work (or don’t work), you don’t know which changes are responsible. To effectively split test, you need to isolate variables, which means testing one thing at a time!

(Okay, yes, it is technically possible to test multiple things at once — it’s called multivariate testing. In practice, though, doing it requires huge traffic numbers, and a much more complex setup — if you’re not already doing it, then it’s probably not for you.)

Are you measuring results? I mean actually measuring, with numbers? This is also a rarity — more often, it’s an anecdotal “I feel like we’re getting more sign-ups” kind of ‘measurement’. Be careful with this, because as humans beings we all suffer from a confirmation bias, which means that we’re much more likely to favor evidence that supports what we want to believe. Measuring with actual numbers is critical to effective split testing!

Do you let your experiments run until you’ve reached a 95% confidence level? This is where the greatest number of mistakes are made; an experiment is setup and allowed to run, until the experimenter feels that “this one is working better”. This occurs before reaching the point at which the numbers actually prove what you’re trying to prove, which means that the results are really inconclusive, and can’t be trusted. And what’s the point of doing experiment after experiment if none of the results can be trusted? You absolutely have to let experiments run until you reach a statistical confidence in the results!

Are you tracking your experiments? Rather than flittering from experiment to experiment, keep a journal that documents each experiment, and the lessons that you learned from them. This will prevent you from running repeated experiments that test more or less the same thing, without ever learning your lessons. Setup your experiments as hypothesis tests — each experiment is meant to test a guess about something that you think will influence your audience!

Do you focus your experiments on your conversion goals? There’s no point in experimenting just for the sake of experimenting, and yet it’s more common than you might believe. There’s no point testing something unless you think it will contribute to the conversion goals that you have for your site. So rather than setting up test after test, consider first what your objectives are, and what you might be able to test that will contribute to reaching that objective!

You’ve probably answered “no” to at least some of these questions, but that’s fine — the important thing is to learn and adjust your practices, so that the experiments that you run tomorrow will be more effective and fruitful than the experiments that you ran yesterday.

Now that you’ve got the processes worked out, let’s talk about some of the things that you might want to experiment with.

Do you feel like experimenting?

Experimentation can be great, but if you’re a professional blogger or business owner, you’re not just in it for the fun — you need to focus on the experimentation that will be most gratifying to your bottom line.

Here are some of the most important things that you should be sure to split-test:

The headline. This is the single most important thing that you can split-test, because the headline is the first “gateway” that your readers have to pass through. You will lose more people at the headline than anywhere else on the page, so test the headline first.

Opt-in placement, text, and colors. Try different placements of the opt-in box on your site, different calls to action, and different box and button colors. Since you probably get more sign-ups than sales, this is a much better place to start your testing.

The order button text and colors. Experiment with changing the text of the order button (options include “Get It Now”, “I Want Access”, “Buy Now”, “Add to Cart”, “Proceed to Checkout”, and more), and with the color of the buttons (yellow, red, blue and green are good places to start). This applies to your email opt-in box as well.

The format of the offer. This is a little more work to test, but if you have the option to do it, you might find that a lot more customers are willing to buy one format than another. Experiment with your offer as an ebook, report, video series, podcast training program, infographic and so forth.

The price. This isn’t always possible to test, but if it is, you might find that you’re leaving a lot of money on the table; it’s possible that increasing the price will not affect sales, and it’s even possible that increasing the price will increase sales as well!

The style of the introduction. After the headline, the first thing that your audience will read is the opening paragraph. Experiment with different styles — try making bold statements, vs. telling a story about their problem, vs. describing the ideal outcome. See what works best for your audience.

The product imagery. Try different versions of your product picture — you’d be surprised how much of an effect this sort of thing can have.

Trust seal choice and placement. Different audiences will respond to different trust seals, and will want to see them in different places. Good places to test are near the description of your guarantee, and of course near your order button.

Email subject line. This is just as important as the headline of your sales page, particularly if you’re using confirmed opt-in, in which abandon rates of 20-30% are common. Split-test the email subject line of your email confirmation messages to make sure that as many subscribers as possible actually get on your list.

There are lots of other things that you could test — for more ideas than you’ll ever be able to test, check out the Landing Page tutorials here on Copyblogger.

Getting started with split testing…

If this is the first time you’re hearing about split-testing, then your head is probably spinning right now.

That’s okay — it’s a lot of information to take in.

Even if you’ve been thinking about split testing for a while (and have even tried a few experiments), you might be wondering about one thing: how to actually get the experiments going.

That’s where Premise comes in — it’s a drop-dead simple and complete landing page package that plugs right into WordPress, and you can use to:

1. Generate all kind of landing pages, including templates for Sales Pages, Content (SEO) Pages, Pricing Table Pages, Email Opt-In Forms, Video Pages, Tab Scroller Pages, and Thank You Pages.
2. Add all kinds of standard elements into your landing pages with the click of a mouse.
3. Run split tests to make sure that you’re incrementally advancing towards your conversion goals!

So enough fence-sitting … if you want to get serious about split-testing, go get Premise and get started!

Okay, over to you …

Have you experimented with split-testing? What has your experience been? Where did you get stuck?

Do you have a Premise success story to share?

About the Author: Danny Iny is an author, strategist, serial entrepreneur, and proud co-founder of Firepole Marketing, the definitive marketing training program for small businesses, entrepreneurs, and non-marketers. Visit his site today to download a free split test checker, or follow him on Twitter @DannyIny.

How would you like to sell more of your products or services … without increasing your traffic?

If that’s your goal, then you need to improve your conversion rate. Which is a very wise goal — I know I’m always looking for the tweaks or additions that can optimize the performance of my sales pages.

The slightest changes to a headline, one item in a bulleted list, or the overall picture you paint can pay off in massive ways.

Sometimes even seemingly tiny changes — the headline color or the words you use on your buy button — can double your sales.

A little while ago I performed an experiment in the hope of boosting my conversions. And the results were nothing like I had imagined.

I asked some very talented and very successful people for advice on how my pages might convert better.

The results of this experiment were shocking, weird and entirely unexpected. It’s a simple, but extremely valuable lesson that I think you can benefit from.

The wisdom of the crowd?

Some of my subscribers were telling me one of my sales pages looked “spammy.”

Unfortunately they couldn’t define exactly what it was about the page that smelled so strongly of spam. They just knew it did and by golly they needed to tell me to fix it.

So I turned to a group of marketing-savvy friends and acquaintances for advice for how to de-spamify my sales page.

All the suggestions, advice and critiques were given honestly, generously, and kindly.

Can you guess what I learned?

You can’t write compelling copy by committee.

None of the feedback worked. In fact, it was worse than that. My conversion rate steadily dropped to zero.

Individually the advice might have been valuable, but this is one case where the whole was less than the sum of its parts.

Why this approach doesn’t work

How did a group of smart marketing types steer me so wrong?

• Some good advice is counter-acted by other, contradictory good advice.
• Tips can be technically correct (the best kind) but not correct for your specific product or prospect.
• People will tell you not to do something because it makes them feel personally uncomfortable.
• They will give you advice based on individual preferences or even prejudices.
• Most of this advice will be given with conviction, but based on no valid experience or expert knowledge in your market.
• The people you are talking to are unlikely to be your target market.

All that really counts are data and dollars.

(Actually, of course dollars are data … just a particularly important metric.)

My sales page is now (thankfully) getting healthy conversions again. Plus, I had fun and I learned a lot in the process. So it’s all good.

Getting back to basics

So, what is the correct approach to boosting your conversion rates?

• Use a split testing tool rather than “edit and guess” — Use Google or Visual Website Optimizer.
• Make one change at a time, recording the changes you make and what resulted.
• Take suggestions from two kinds of people: those who are achieving what you set out to do, or those who are in your precise target market.
• Consider advice, but test to verify. Tailor the advice to your particular audience and target market — one size does not fit all.
• Make it easy on yourself to start with proven copywriting best practices and then test individual tweaks for yourself — the Premise landing page system makes this easy.

The bottom line is, you’ve got to be very careful of making changes to your sales pages based on dangerous feedback from the wrong people — even if those people are smart and have a decent grasp of marketing.

To make sure you’re focusing on the right feedback, follow these three steps:

1. Know who you’re trying to convince with any landing page (and what, specifically, you want them to do while they’re there).
2. Obsessively measure that single action you want the reader to take. It could be sales, sign-ups for your list … whatever your single goal is for that page.
3. Systematically and objectively test tweaks to your pages. Only keep the changes that give you the result you’re looking for.

Your audience will tell you if you hit the mark or not … and the way they do that is with their wallets.

About the Author: Chris Garrett is a professional blogger and the founder of Authority Blogger, a course that teaches you how to become the most trusted advisor in your market by turning your blog into the go-to resource. He blogs at chrisg.com.

P.S.

If you need help improving the conversion of your landing pages, check out Premise. It not only lets you create great-looking landing pages quickly and easily, it also gives you proven copywriting advice right in your WordPress dashboard, and makes tweaking and testing simple.

I was talking to a concerned client recently.

After taking my advice, his traffic and blog comments had started to decrease. We’d had three or four sessions, and he’d diligently done all I suggested, and he was implementing and enjoying himself and excited about his business.

But that graph kept trending downward. And it was starting to get to him.

Honestly, I could see where he was coming from. You hire a coach, and he tells you what to do, and your numbers go down?

Awesome.

But here’s the flip side:

During that same time that he was sweating readership and some zeros above his comments sections, he got his first big sale. Then his second big sale.

His number of customer inquiries went up, too — a growing pool of people who hadn’t hired him yet, but were on the right track to do so.

I told him to stop worrying about traffic. His goal wasn’t to attract as many eyeballs to his site as possible. What he really wanted was to find the action-takers and the customers — people who loved him and would prove it via their wallets.

No matter what your business, the goal isn’t to amass as much raw material as possible. (For a business centered around a blog, that “raw material” is typically traffic.)

The goal is to sift through that raw material, discard the junk, and find the small amount of true gold inside.

Small and engaged is better than big and vaguely interested

When the Third Tribe opened its doors earlier this year, Sonia and I talked in the very first seminar about the smallness of our lists. Sonia said that the big gurus would laugh at the size of her list, and I told Sonia that she’d laugh at mine.

Since that time, not much has changed. Relatively speaking, I still don’t have a large email list. I don’t have huge traffic to my blog.

But I don’t care in the least, because what I do have is a connection to a relatively small group of people who are pure gold.

They’re like me. They like me. I like them. I can talk to them like old friends. I can tell a borderline joke and nobody leaves, because we all have the same sense of humor.

I can make them an offer that I think is great and be pretty darn sure that they’ll think it’s great, too.

My people and I feel more like a club than a crowd. We’re not a huge group, but I’ll take close bonds with a few over a larger but more disconnected group of people who “read stuff from some guy online somewhere” any day. We’re small, but we’re a unit. Team Johnny, if you will.

That didn’t happen by accident. I had to sift and sort to find these people, and doing that is a lot harder than “increasing traffic.”

I don’t care about traffic if it’s unfiltered and nonspecific. Hell, I could increase traffic tomorrow if I wanted, but if it isn’t traffic that converts into sales, what’s the point?

Asking for more traffic is like asking for more vaguely interested people to shout at over a megaphone. I don’t care about that. I want new members to Team Johnny, so I only care about that big crowd for as long as it takes to sift through it to find the gold.

A simple, 2-step plan for finding for your own gold

Regardless of whether your traffic increases or decreases — or whether your number of comments goes up or goes down — the question you should always be asking is, “Am I getting more gold in my pan, or am I just collecting meaningless rocks and dirt?”

Commenters are more interesting to me than raw traffic, but even commenters are the wrong people if they’re just hanging out.

So if you’re out to find the gold in them thar hills, here’s how to go about it:

1. Get a guide

You don’t just need to know where to go to find gold. You also have to know what specifically you’re looking for (i.e. gold is usually in small flakes, not giant nuggets — and correspondingly, your ideal people may not be who you think they are) and how to tell the real stuff from fool’s gold.

Your guide in the quest to find more of those best people is intimate knowledge of your ideal reader.

Writing content is the blogger’s way of hiking through the trails and kneeling in the rivers to look for that glint of gold. That sketch of your perfect person is your map, so stick to it and don’t wander around trying to write for everyone. Think narrow and precise.

If a prospector’s map showed a hundred-mile circle bearing the legend, “Gold is in here somewhere,” it’d be pretty useless as a treasure map.

2. Sift and discard the junk

People look at traffic and blog comments because they’re incredibly easy stats to see and to measure. But people also forget that they’re largely irrelevant.

You don’t care how many people come to your site; you care how many people LOVE your site — and go on to take the action you want them to take.

You don’t care how many people comment; you care how many of them come back again and again, and use your comment section as a way to know, like, and trust you.

You don’t care how many people look at your products and services, or how many eyes see your offers.

Don’t turn down traffic that comes by chance, because more eyes means more potential customers. We all need traffic. But what you ultimately care about is how many people buy your stuff, not just the raw number of visitors.

Put all of that riverbed dirt through your sieve, and let go of everything that isn’t gold.

Don’t be afraid if people leave your site or unsubscribe from your email list, because those people aren’t the ones you’re looking for.

The question you want to ask is, is your connection to your ideal people increasing? Are you seeing more sales or more inquiries about possible sales? Those are the metrics that matter.

One quick warning

Do you know another reason for decreased traffic and decreased comments?

Those things also happen when your content sucks. So it doesn’t always mean you’re doing things right if your stats go down. Far from it, actually.

The lesson here isn’t to ignore or scorn traffic, but instead to pay more attention to the numbers that really matter.

• Are you generating more true fans?
• Do people buy your stuff, or buy on your recommendation?
• Do they tell their friends about you?
• Do they ask questions about your products and services?
• Do they tell you that they really love your incredibly awesome free content?

If they’re doing more of that, you’re finding your gold, and traffic becomes a bonus.

Now get prospecting!

About the Author: Johnny B. Truant is setting up WordPress blogs for free this week. Get yours before time runs out!

P.S.

If you’re looking for a map to the gold in your online business, sign up for the free Copyblogger email newsletter, Internet Marketing for Smart People. It kicks off with a 20-part tutorial on how to boost the numbers that really matter in your business.

I’ve always been a big proponent of having actionable anchor text for links when I really want someone to click. From a copywriting standpoint, it’s a no brainer—it’s been proven time and time again that if you want someone to do something, you’ll get better results if you tell them exactly what to do.

Simple as that.

So, it catches me off guard when people question something so fundamental. I’ve had people email me to settle disputes over the issue, such as the time a reader told me about an argument he was having with his boss. The employee thought it was archaic to tell people to “click here,” and his boss thought otherwise.

I politely replied that for once the boss was right. I never heard back.

Another reader once chastised me for wasting anchor text with the words “click here,” even though my primary goal for the link was to get people to click (shocking, I know). This is when I first realized that Google is truly making people retarded. Somehow, this person no longer saw links as navigation for actual people to use; they only exist to pass on “juice” according to an algorithm that no one outside of Mountain View fully understands.

Someone has the wrong idea.

It’s been a bit since I’ve seen any independent testing data on the use of actionable link anchor text (outside of my own), so I thought I’d share the results of a Marketing Sherpa experiment performed with their newsletter readers. The goal was to find out if the wording used in hyperlinks could make a difference in click through rates.

The answer is yes. They found that the right two or three “click” link words can lift click through rates by more than 8%.

Here are the results:

• “Click to continue”: 8.53%
• “Continue to article”: 3.3%
• “Read more”: (-)1.8%

Since there’s no relevant difference between an HTML email message and a web page, the lesson is clear. Not only should you use actionable anchor text if you really want someone to click, but you should also tell people to take the exact action you want them to perform in order to get the best response. Click here to read the original Marketing Sherpa article in its entirety, and have a good Monday.

If so, you can participate in an analytics experiment that might just bring you a ton of exposure that won’t cost you by the click.

Eric of Stone Temple Consulting and Jonah of Alchimist Media are seeking additional participants for their Comparative Analytics Study. Basically these guys are trying to determine which website metric analysis tools work best, and they will publish the results to an eager SEO and online marketing crowd.

Here’s what’s in it for you and the requirements for participation:

1. Data on how the various analytics packages performed on their site. This may help the participant better understand the best analytics vendor(s) for their needs.

2. Detailed analysis of your site metrics by veteran SEM consultants using a variety of analytic tools. Our efforts to normalize data across these tools may also help you better quantify your ROI and understand current analytic issues.

3. Credit and acknowledgement for participation in the project. While we cannot quantify the word of mouth benefits or guarantee a number of backlinks, we anticipate that this study will be widely discussed in the press, in the blogosphere and at conferences.

The types of participants we are looking for will have a PPC spend of at least $10K per month. In order to conduct this study, we will need to analyze performance data outlined below. We recognize that some of this is sensitive and confidential information. The confidential specifics of your campaign are not pertinent to the study, and will not be published. What is important to us is the relative data, information such as the differences in conversion data between analytics vendors, for purposes of evaluating the
performance of the vendors.

We will mask all specifics, such as keywords, products, campaigns, the categories that the campaigns relate to, etc. In order to guarantee participants that we do not reveal sensitive information, we will allow each participant the opportunity to review our intended publication prior to releasing our results.

If you are interested in participating, shoot an email to eenge [at] stonetemple [dot] com.