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slopes.

Tweaking Your Way to the Bank: The Big Picture

The not-so-secret to improving income in an existing business is through tweaks:
small changes that create a big impact. If a product typically has a 1.5 percent
conversion rate and you increase the rate to 1.75 percent, the difference adds up
to a lot of money as time goes on. If a business normally attracts four new
customers a day and begins attracting five, the impact is tremendous. Not only is
the business now earning 25 percent more income, it has diversified its customer
base.*

If you grow your traffic a little and also increase your conversion rate a little
while also increasing the average sales price a little … your business grows a
lot. These are the most important areas on which to focus your tweak efforts, so
let’s look at them closely.

INCREASE TRAFFIC. Whether you have a website or a storefront, without
people who regularly drop by to see your offer, you have no business. Traffic
means attention. How much attention is your business getting? I heard from a
new business owner who was disappointed in the results of her first product
launch because only four people had purchased. “How many prospects were on
your list?” I asked.

“I’m not entirely sure,” she said. “Maybe one hundred?”
I said I was impressed, because 4 percent is a great conversion rate for many
businesses. The problem wasn’t getting more of her limited audience to
purchase. It was getting more of an audience in the first place. The best thing to
do in this situation is to focus on increasing traffic, thereby bringing in more
potential customers.†

INCREASE CONVERSION. Once you have a stable base of attention (whether
measured in site traffic or another way), you’ll want to look closely at the
conversion rate: the percentage of prospects who become customers. The classic
way to increase the conversion rate is through testing by measuring one
copywriting attempt (or offer, or headline, or something else) against another