Use Multiple Personalities to Crush Your Control

Apr 13, 2008 at 9:31 pm in COACHING by ian

Use Multiple Personalities to Crush Your Control: A Simple, Schizophrenic Tip for WordPress Bloggers

In this post we are going to cover a pretty easy way to supercharge your conversions on your WordPress blog. This particular method works phenomenally well on niche blogs where you are driving traffic free from Craigslist, article directories, press releases, and even is a simple, but subtle way to convert a better percentage of your pay per click traffic. (As well as potentially raising your quality score as well) It’s free, it’s effective for fairly obvious reasons that should be sufficiently self evident, and best of all, it can be retrospectively applied to a large blog with lots of existing content to immediately make you more money.

The hardest and highest hurdle you need to leap if you want to make real money online is conversion. Getting traffic is fairly easy with group hug sites like stumble upon and it’s similar social siblings, you can be a good citizen there, create good content, do some basic seo, be diligent with off site content submission, see great analytics numbers and still not be able to pay your hosting bill at the end of the month off of your affiliate commissions. (Which statistically is where most bloggers fall – and I would bet even a lot of the more prominent blogging names are not making the kind of money that you would think)

Why? Because you aren’t converting your traffic. For whatever reason, the content pages that your visitors arrive on are simply not doing a good enough job in compelling them to click through, or take action on your offer. And everyone who runs a blog, or multiple blogs knows that banners convert for shit relative to good, solid text links woven into your content – yet, creating these sorts of links with each new post can be a bit daunting, and a bit more work than simply running a CJ banner above the canvas, in the sidebar and about the blog.

Here is a dead simple way to remedy this – and I can tell you from personal experience, this approach will crush your control on the traffic you currently have. All you need to do is create multiple users within your WordPress admin, and use a blog template that supports an author box with each post. (Or if you’re smarter than I am, simply modify the template you are already using)In a niche blog, let’s say diet for example – you could have one author for diet pills, one author for diet eBooks, one author for diet programs, etc.

Each author has a different call to action, a different series of links, or message at the end of the post by default.

I can tell you without question, as someone who has made and lost several small fortunes in the direct response marketing business (and will surely make and lose a few more before I’m done) nothing will kill your conversion faster than an irrelevant offer to your audience, EVEN if it appears at first blush to be a somewhat related product. And honestly, nothing is more common in the perpetually pushed online marketing space, especially for people who are just getting started, than to try to SQUEEZE every somewhat related, keyword into one offer that is actually, even though wordtracker may tell you it’s a good match – is so far from your target demographics purchasing "funnel" as to be totally irrelevant and a complete and utter waste of your time and effort.

A diet pill surfer isn’t interested in an eBook. Writing a great article on diet pills, syndicating it around the web, getting a ton of views and then sending that traffic to a beautiful landing page selling a clickbank diet book is a terrific waste of your time, and your talent.

And using the above trick, you can simply find all of the posts on diet pills or in that category if you are more organized, and add a new author for all of these posts which promotes a product that these folks are actually interested in buying. It’s really that simple.

There is a guy – as a quick side note – who sells in one of the same niche spaces we do. And everyday, up and down this guy kicks my ass with content. He churns out so many articles in this particular very lucrative affiliate marketing market that it almost appears superhuman.

And I write REALLY fast…so this really is a compliment.

But the truth is, while I have no idea what his conversion percentage is, I believe it most likely sucks. Why? Every one of the articles he writes goes to one landing page simply designed to funnel the reader to the affiliate offer. And while all of the articles are somewhat related, and the keywords being targeted all roughly the same theme….he is sending people who…let’s just say BIOLOGICALLY would not be interested in the same thing… And I can’t figure it out – how someone who is willing to work SO hard wouldn’t simply just figure out how to incorporate a simple secondary or tertiary offer into the mix, double his conversions at a minimum and take a stinking day off or two.

If you are blogging with WordPress and follow the approach above, I promise you won’t have the same problem.

Anyway – the template I use happily for this (on this blog and others) is Pressbox from the collaborative, (a non profit organization that is comprised of people far smarter than you and I) and I absolutely love it for this and other related reasons.

And no, that’s not an affiliate link – I just love supporting people who are actively involved in the world like these folks are – plus they offer great email support for questions about WordPress and beyond – like – is John Bon Jovi really the antichrist? Will the Flyers beat the Capitals in the first round of the playoffs? Or – how does Panpsychism further Jungs theories of a collective unconscious?

Of course they haven’t yet responded to these inquiries, but I’m guessing it’s because they’re still thinking.

If you have any questions about the above – don’t hesitate to ask.:-)

(* note – I am no longer using Pressbox for this particular blog – but love it still on my others!)