Is your business “turned on”? Are you making consistent sales every day? Are new and more exciting opportunites coming up around every door? Why (or why not)?

A few days ago I wrote about stepping out of your comfort zone and making things happen with your business. One of the toughest things about being an entrepreneur is that many times you’re on your own. There’s no one there that’s going to kick your butt, call you on your laziness, or motivate you when things aren’t going as well as you’d like them too.

Here is a fun update I just received from one of my clients who sells awesome wall murals and photo murals:

So, you want to know about how changing my attitude directly affected my sales? Last week, my mentor Nate from Prosper and MollerMarketing.com gave me a little phone call. It was a kind of business kick in the butt talk. And man did I need it.

I was spending 8 to 11 hours daily at my website, fixing keywords, adding new content, videos, podcasts, crunching numbers, and analyzing things to death. Truth was I hadn’t made a single solitary sale in 30 days. I felt like crap!

When Nate called, I sure let him know my sad story. He didn’t buy it for a minute. “Lisa, one year ago our attitude and enthusiasm was contagious. Why aren’t you making sales?”

Why indeed. I have known Nate long enough to get the message. I was not focusing on what I can do every day to make sales! Because of the 30 day business slump, I was not believing I could achieve big things. I was sabotaging myself and my business by staying on the proverbial pity pot.

The phone call gave me cause to look at myself and realize I needed to re-focus my attention on what I could change (my cruddy attitude!) The next day, I was back on my game. I got my moxie back ( or mojo for all you young-uns out there.) Was it uncomfortable? A little. By the end of the day I was a changed woman.

I went out to local businesses with my business cards and networked. I made things happen. I told people what I do and what I sell. The cool thing was, out of 8 businesses I approached that day, only 2 said no ( and I could hear Nate in my ear saying, “Who cares? Welcome to business!.”)

It has been 4 business days since that phone call. In addition to feeling great on the inside, I have made 3 sales, each for over $350. I also have 5 – 8 other sales in the works as well as 4 to 5 prospective joint ventures. Is this magic? Hardly! It’s simply what Nate reminded me: Believe it and you can achieve it. And small success leads to big success!!

Thanks Nate! Your old pal, Lisa

So what can we learn from this: a positive attitude has a direct correlation with success. Lisa’s business didn’t really change; the economy didn’t all of a sudden take a turn for the better; gas prices didn’t drop; but a slight change of attitude “turned the business on” again.

Thanks for the great case study Lisa. It’s stuff like this that I encourage clients to print out, pass along, and read from time to time as a reminder.

Add this to your favorites and email it to 5 people to help them get “turned on” too

For Christmas this year I got my first MacBook Pro. I’ve been really excited about all the functionality and ease of use. As they say, “Once you go Mac, you’ll never go back!” So it is with me.

However, lately I’ve been getting this pop-up and it reminds me of Windows:

So, why is Apple trying to subtly force me to install Safari? I read an article about Firefox being really ticked off about this.

What Apple is doing now with their Apple Software Update on Windows is wrong. It undermines the trust relationship great companies have with their customers, and that’s bad — not just for Apple, but for the security of the whole Web. What they did yesterday was to use their updater for iTunes to also install their Safari Web browser –what follows is some background and analysis. – John Lilly

What’s the status? Is Safari really that good? Is is better than Firefox?

What’s worse than this initial pop-up is the 2nd one I got:

Persistence can pay off I guess.  But is Apple really that desperate to get Safari on everyone’s computers? I’ll bet many people have uploaded Safari without even knowing what they did. Interesting strategy Apple – please don’t fall in to the Microsoft or Windows campaign…

I know, corny title but it’s true – if you are wondering about the effectiveness of a particular strategy, test, test, test. One of my mentors who sells memory foam mattress products is infamous for this – he’s always testing, trying, evaluating, and then re-testing to see what gets the best response over time.

Over the past few years I’ve worked with hundreds of clients in a variety of industries. Surprisingly, all of them want to see results and make sales I’ve learned through my own testing that there are certain things that work consistently; other things may work great for my industry or what I’m doing, but they may not get the same response for a client doing a teleseminar on getting free advertising on the radio or whatever other ideas you might have.

I recently found a cool post while twittering. It is titled “Do Buttons Get Clicked More Than Text Links? A Case Study” by Justin Premick. It talks all about testing in regards to an email campaign. Justin and his partner Marc wanted to determine

…how to increase clickthroughs on the emails we send to our blog subscribers.

One of the ideas that came up was to replace the text links that we had been using to drive people to the blog with a “button.”

Previous testing on the website had shown that in many cases, buttons make better calls to action than text links do. We thought the same might hold true for email. (italics and bold added for emphasis)

So, Marc created a button-shaped image with the words “Read More” stamped on it:

We then created A/B split tests for our Blog Broadcasts, inserted this image into one version as the call to action (to read the full post on our blog) and continued to use text links in the other version as we had before.

The emails were otherwise identical – we kept subject lines, sending dates/times and templates the same for each version.

They had a question, they thought about things they’d done in the past that had worked, and they began the test.

I like that they pointed out the A/B testing: this is one of the only ways to really tell for sure which of two ideas is going to work best. Otherwise too many factors may contribute to the outcome. Like they said, besides the text link and button, “the emails were otherwise identical”.

They go on to talk about initial results:

As we expected, the button grabbed readers – attention and incentived them to click through, much better than the text link did…At this point, about 2 weeks into our test, it was tempting to say, “The button clearly draws more attention and clicks than text links. Let’s just start using buttons and move on to another test.”

Did they stop there? Nope!

We ultimately ran the button-versus-text split test about 40 times, over the course of several months.

For a while, the button continued to beat the text links – but we noticed that it wasn’t doing so by as large a margin as it first had.

While over our first five tests, the button beat the text by over 33%, after 20 tests it was only winning by an average of 17.29%, and the text version was beginning to hold its own in the win column.

With each new split test, the text asserted itself as the better call to action.

By the time we ended our experiment, text links were consistently outperforming our button, winning nearly two-thirds of the time, by double-digit margins as high as nearly 35%.

What can we learn from this? How does this apply to YOUR website? How do YOU plan to implement this testing case study?

To sum it up best, let’s read on to see what conclusion they came up with:

What works today may not work tomorrow.

Had we stopped our testing after one broadcast, or even one or two weeks, we would have concluded that buttons were better than text links.

It’s important to continually test your email campaigns to make sure that you know what works, rather than assuming you know what works.

Finally, one last point I feel obligated to make:

What works for someone else may not work for you.

The text links won out in our split test, but that doesn’t mean a button can’t be an effective call to action for you.

Again, don’t just take our word for it. Find out for yourself through your own testing.

Running an effective business, both on and offline, takes analysis like this if you plan to see the long term results you want to see. I am currently doing a test right now with a client email campaign and will let you all know the results in the upcoming weeks.

I talked recently about continuing to educate yourself, even after your site starts making sales and things seem to be on the up and up. Education seems to be so essential in whatever field you are in. As some of you know, I love sports. The best athletes seem to be the ones who are “students of the game”. They know what they are going to do in every big situation because they’ve studied it out, watched film and are prepared to succeed. This preparation also has a direct effect on their confidence, which really separates the mediocre from the extremely successful.

One of the things I’ve been studying about a lot lately is online sales conversion. I found a great article that gave a long list of things to do to improve sales online and keep your clients coming back. These are a few of the things I felt were most important:

• Set up an analytics program. I recommend two stat tracking tools – StatCounter.com and Google Analytics. Both are pretty easy to use and free.
• Track visitor trends. Watch where visitors are coming from,what they are doing on your site, what keywords they are searching for to get to your site, and work on improving bounce rate (the visitors who just come to the home page and then leave without doing anything).
• Analyze keywords visitors are using to find your site. Make sure that the products matching the three most popular search terms appear on your home page.
• Resize and compress your images using an image editor. While you can resize an image by simply changing the ‘height’ and ‘width’ attributes in HTML, that doesn’t make the file smaller. So someone may sit for 30 seconds waiting for that postage-sized image to download.
• Always evaluate your home page. Does it have a clear ‘shop now’ call to action, above the fold? If it doesn’t, add one! Some of your visitors don’t even know they can buy from you, direct, online.
• Remove any animation you have on your home page that doesn’t directly sell a product. It’s a distraction. Get rid of it.
• Remember, you’re selling products. Everywhere you show a product, show a price and a ‘buy now’ button, or at least a ‘learn more button’. This is one I need to implement on my clogging shoes website.
• Promote yourself! On your home page, make sure you have a heading that says why you’re great. “We ship overnight” or “All walnuts checked by squirrels” are great, compelling calls to action.
• Ask for the sale! On your home page, show your products! So many online stores fail to do this. Instead, the front page is a testament to their web designers’ talent (or lack of talent). Don’t make that mistake.
• Make products easy to find. If you don’t have a search tool on your site, get one. Google custom search is easy to set up.
• Use your web real estate wisely. Don’t put ‘about us’ in the main navigation. Frankly, no one cares. They want to buy stuff, not hear about you and your three dogs.
• Show multiple ways that visitors can contact you. Put your phone number and other contact information in plain view on each page of your site. It tells people that you’re for real.
• Keep your text simple and easy to read. Use sales copy that scans well. Short, 2-3 sentence paragraphs and bullet points scan more easily than huge paragraphs of text.
• Use a spell checker. Nothing says ‘You will never receive your order’ like a page full of misspellings.
• Get a second opinion. Have someone else proof your writing.
• Get names and emails from visitors. If you don’t make a sale to a new visitor, at least get them to sign up for something. A name and email is almost as good as a sale – it’s future sales if you use the list wisely.
• Paid Search Marketing: If you don’t have a pay-per-click account, start one, at least with Google Adwords. Spend $.10/click or so to start, and see how it helps sales. These should be the first ad dollars you spend online. Nothing else makes sense until you’ve tested the PPC waters.

These are just a few ideas I found that I either implement now or plan to implement in the near future. Let me know how they increase your sales and which ones work best.

One thing I’ve realized lately is how important it is to not sit back and “wait” for sales to happen on a new eCommerce website. No, you don’t have to be a jerk like the picture below explains but you do have to go out there and make things happen.

I run one website that sells clogging shoes and dance bags. One of the initial ways I made sales was to start contacting people I already knew that may be interested in what I was selling. Yes, I had to take a few big steps out of my comfort zone at first; however, as I talked to friends and family, they were willing to give me good feedback and even criticism which helped my site make progress.

Some of that feedback was positive. I used this feedback as the start of a “testimonials” section. Am I positive that it had a direct effect on sales? No. I do know that many large companies use feedback and reviews to give their products and services more credibility.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about goals and how this ties in to sales online. I heard that Monday, January 21st is known as “Blue Monday” because people realize they probably aren’t going to keep their infamous “New Years Resolutions”. Three weeks have come and gone, they realize they’ve fallen in to the same patterns as always – they decide to give up and quit.

Why does this happen? Were they not serious when they set these goals in the first place? Were they not committed? Did they not want to succeed or overcome a bad habit? Of course they were serious; of course they were committed (at least at first); obviously they wanted to succeed or cut the bad habits. But, in my opinion, their goals were probably based on “outcomes” and not individual “performance”.

I would say that my greatest “discovery” to date as an entrepreneur has been a better understanding of how to set and accomplish goals. When it comes to sales, some things are obviously out of our control. I really wish I could just turn on a magic button and all of a sudden the money would flow in to my merchant account on a consistent basis. However, this doesn’t happen as often as I’d like. Why, Why, Why? I’ve actually heard a few clients ask this very question: “Why the hell am I not making sales?” My simple response, “What have you done TODAY to make a sale?”

So my advice is this: as you think about your goals, what you want to accomplish with your online business, or with anything, ask yourself the question – “How much control do I have of that outcome?” If you can honestly say you have COMPLETE control, this is the type of goal you go after. Here’s a ficticious example:

Goal: Make $60,000 this year with my online business.

Let’s break it down:

• To make $60,000 this year, assuming we are starting today, Tuesday, February 19th, means we have 10 and 1/2 months.
• $60K / 10.5 = $5715 per month.
• $5715 / 4 weeks = $1430 per week.
• $1430 / 7 days = $205/day.

By doing this break down I can actually see what it’s going to take on a day to day basis if I want to achieve this financial goal of $60,000 by Dec. 31, 2008.Now I have to ask myself that important question: How much control do I have of that outcome – to make $205 per day?” Some might say this is debateable but think about it, can I actually MAKE a visitor to my website buy the products I am offering on a specific day? From my experience, the answer to that is NO. However, there are things I can do every day that will improve the likelihood of this happening. What are they? Phone calls, emails, weekly or daily promotions, testing different wording strategies, client feedback and referral systems, offline marketing, joint ventures – the list can go on and on. But look at this list – “How much control do I have of [these] outcomes?” All the control!

I can set a goal to make X amount of phone calls today, send Y amount of emails to my database. Then, after doing these things, I can monitor my progress. Maybe today I called 20 people and 5 of them purchased for an average of $50. That means 25% of my contacts purchased something and I made about $250 today. If I contact 50 people tomorrow I have a chance to sell to 12.5 people for about $625 in sales. The numbers won’t always be perfect every day, but keep track of your progress (what was working, what didn’t seem to work), and then duplicate your successes more and more and more!

I’ve rambled long enough today. These strategies will pay off with your businesses. As the cliche states: “Practice makes perfect!” Now start practicing!