You might be thinking that you are not qualified to coach anybody on anything. After all, what kind of an expert are you to be telling others how to run their business or their life, right? Actually, the odds are you couldn’t be more wrong. I’ll show you WHY and HOW…

When we think of coaching, we think of it on a grand scale. For example, helping someone to turn their entire life around, or to start and run a brand new business from scratch.

But those are just two types of coaching and not what we’ll be talking about here.

When you get into online marketing, what is one of the first pieces of advice that you receive? To choose a particular niche, and then narrow that niche down to a profitable target market you can help.

Coaching can work the same way. Instead of trying to be all things to all people, or to teach someone every facet and nuance of starting a business from scratch, why not coach them on that one thing you are very, very good at?

Maybe you’re excellent at writing, or at getting ghost writing assignments. Maybe you are terrific at website building, or at SEO, or at getting traffic.

Or maybe your specialty has nothing to do with online marketing, but instead you are a master at meditation, or organizing your life, or at prioritizing or dealing with ADHD. There are infinite possibilities. And if you think about it for just a moment, you will realize that you are really, really good at a certain something that others want to learn.

It’s by getting so specific that you can become a very successful coach starting right now.

Maybe you are a master at deciphering a holy book. Or you are amazing at helping people over 50 lose weight and get fit. Maybe you’re terrific at helping people find their sense of direction in life and discovering what they are meant to do. Or perhaps you can help someone present their business in a way that makes it stand apart from all others. The list is endless.

What skills do you have? Do you want to share them with others? Would you enjoy honing those skills even more as you teach them? Because when you become a coach, a side benefit is you become even more skilled and proficient on your subject. You get better and better at teaching it. And thus you can charge more and more as you progress and as you get positive testimonials from your clients.

Getting back to the online marketing realm, forget about trying to coach a new marketer into building their 6 figure business and instead focus on just one aspect, such as adding 1,000 subscribers a week to their list, or on creating amazing content, or on using social media to become a star in their niche.

There are tremendous gaps in the coaching realm, and if you can fill one of those gaps you can get more clients than you can even handle.

To do: Once you have chosen your coaching niche, you might create a simple information product on the topic that sells for a low price of perhaps $10 or $25. Then offer your coaching as the upsell.

Write guest posts and do interviews to talk about your specialty. Give lots of good info, but make it clear that if they don’t want to go it alone, you can coach them, too. Spread the word and those folks who need your coaching will step up to claim a spot before they all disappear.

Since the actual coaching can be done through Skype and email, you can coach anyone anywhere in the world.

And once you get really good at teaching your specialty, then you can create a big ticket course that teaches everything you would teach a coaching client. You can then sell this course for $100 to $1,000 as a alternative to your coaching services.

Don’t dismiss this concept thinking that you have nothing to offer. Worse case scenario, you might need to bone up on your skill before you start coaching. But one week of concentrated study can make you more of an expert on your topic than 99.9% of the people on the planet.

You can do this. You can become a coach. And it’s as simple as doing what every good marketer does – finding your specialty that appeals to a small but zealous segment of the market who want what you offer.

Wouldn’t it be terrific if you could go from being Mr./Ms. Marketing Nobody to imediate “guru” status overnight? You’d enjoy instant authority in your niche and a high level of credibility with your potential customers as well as your potential JV partners. People would trust your opinion. You’d be quoted in blog posts and asked to do guest posts…

You could get interviewed. You could join lucrative joint ventures and mastermind groups. Your social media accounts would become magnets to followers and fans. Customers’ sales resistance would go down and your sales would go up, and so forth.

Becoming an ‘overnight’ authority in your niche shaves a few years off of your online marketing career path. You’re taking a quantum leap from being an unknown to being – well, KNOWN in your niche. And you receive all the benefits a known expert in your field gets, only without the years of work.

Sounds pretty good, don’t you think? Yeah, it’s cheating, but it’s not. Who ever said you have to take years and years to accomplish what can be done in a few days or weeks?

Here are 5 ways to do it:

1. Interview others. Oprah wasn’t an expert, she interviewed experts. And by doing so, she became associated with every expert she interviewed. In your case, you’ll want to go much more narrow and deep than Oprah, choosing your targeted niche carefully and then interviewing anyone and everyone in that single niche.

2. Buy named rights products and sell them. These are products sold by big name marketers that allow you to keep their name on the product when you sell it. You’re basically co-featuring with an established expert. At the bottom of the salesletter you can write something like, “From the desk of ‘your name’ and ‘guru’s name.’ Buyers will assume you have partnered with the guru in putting this product out. These types of resale rights generally aren’t cheap, but that plays in your favor as well, since it greatly limits any competition.

3. Create a product yourself, then let a big name marketer be the co-author and co-owner. This heightens your profile and generally brings in a lot of sales from that marketer’s list, as well as from affiliates who promote for that marketer.

4. Write/edit a book full of other people’s articles. Choose a topic and then find articles written by the experts on this topic. Ask their permission to place their articles in your book, giving them full credit and links back to their website. You do the editing, write the introduction, and also add notes at the beginning and end of each article if you choose. But the experts are still doing all the heavy lifting, while you get to associate your name with theirs. In fact, it looks like a collaboration between you and all these big names, with YOUR name on the front cover.

5. Do all 4, along with guest blogging and being active in social media. All of a sudden people will say that they see and hear you everywhere.

Some people take a lifetime to go from the mail room to the boardroom of a company. But this is your business, and YOU make the rules. Don’t wait years to become an expert in your niche – decide to become one today.

Getting traffic isn’t rocket science – it’s actually pretty easy when you know a few of the best tricks pro-bloggers are using every day to get more traffic to their blogs.

Create an not-so-secret inner circle of your best buddies.

Put together a list of your very best and most influential readers. These are the ones who regularly interact with you or post replies to your posts, share your posts with their followers, send you articles, buy your products and so forth.

Put these folks on your special inner circle list, and email them to let them know of their newly attained status. Let them know the benefits – they’ll get to see your posts before the general public and they’ll be apprised of any new offerings, updates and ideas before anyone else.

Solicit their feedback on your posts. This creates a sense of ownership for them and increases the odds they will go out of their way to share your content with their followers. Give them special benefits to thank them for their help, and offer to help them in return.

Make it brain dead easy to share your content.

If content is too difficult to share, your readers and inner circle are less likely to share it. So add the appropriate social sharing buttons for sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Write in-depth content that makes your readers look sexy-smart.

Here’s a little secret: People like to look super smart to their readers and friends. Okay, so maybe it’s not a secret. But the fact is, in-depth articles tend to get shared more because the people sharing them want their friends to think they read in-depth articles. Plus, when someone new lands on your in-depth article, they are more likely to subscribe to get even more info than if they land on a simple fluff piece.

Another secret: Posts with images, lists and videos will attract over 5 times more links than posts containing only plain text. So don’t stop at just the words – add things like images and graphs to make it share-worthy.

Cheat. Just a little.

This isn’t really cheating, but it sure feels like it. Look at your old content and find the pieces that are still relevant, whether they were written 3 months ago or a year ago. Now share them again via social media. This way you get new traffic without having to write new content – how awesome is that?

Write a mini-sales letter to promote each blog post.

Traditionally, when a blogger writes a new post she sends out the title and first paragraph to her list with an invite to click the link and read the rest. But the real meat of a blog post isn’t in that intro paragraph, which is why this method isn’t worth beans.

Instead, write a mini sales letter that gets the email reader curious and excited to know more. This doesn’t have to be long; 50 -100 of the right words is perfect. Build curiosity and show them what the big benefits / takeaways of reading your article will be, and your click-through rates could double if not triple.

That’s it – 5 simple tips to increase your blog traffic. Pick out your favorite and try it right now, then make a note to use the other 4 within the next 7 days and you’ll begin to see a real boost in your traffic within the month.

What a great daydream this is: You make a ton of money online and then go tell your boss to ‘have a nice day.’ This is the scenario you see in sales letters all the time. “Buy this product, put it to work and next week you can kiss your job goodbye, forever.”

Real life doesn’t always work like a sales letter. In fact, life continually gets in the way. You make some extra money but then it dries up. Or you have an emergency and the extra money bails you out of that crisis but you’re no further ahead.

Or – and this is the most common of all – you have the best of intentions but you never quite get around to making that fortune online. And so you are still at your job. Even though a year ago/two years ago/five years ago/ you swore you would be retired by now.

Whoops.

How do you eat an apple? Unless you’re a horse, you eat it one bite at a time. In my early years I found that building your online income and telling your boss to shove it works the same way – you go through the process of replacing your income one step at a time.

It’s a funny thing: You can make $5,000 a month online fairly easily, but only when you KNOW you can do it. Until you KNOW it, it seems just out of reach. And as long as the goal seems out of reach, your subconscious will sabotage you every step of the way to see to it that it never happens. If you can’t conceive it, there is no way you’re going to achieve it, no matter how hard you try.

It’s like getting a job. You can’t get the job without experience, but you can’t get experience without a job. Same way with making money online.

But right now, this instant, I’ll bet you know that you can make enough to cover just one of your bills, right?

So pick a monthly bill of yours, any bill. Now get enough income coming in each month to completely cover that bill. Maybe it’s your $100 water bill. Great. All you need to make is a consistent $100 a month, and it’s taken care of.

Don’t spend this new income on anything but paying that bill. Any money you make above what it takes to pay the bill is either reinvested into your business, or…

… you pick another bill and start covering that each month, too. And you just keep adding another bill and another bill into the mix until they are ALL covered, including your mortgage or rent, including your food, including everything.

But notice how you did it – not all at once, but simply one bill at a time. Your mind can wrap itself around this concept of taking it one step at a time. Your subconscious will stop fighting you and you’ll be surprised how easy the process becomes. It’s all about small steps that prove you can do it, that prove you can move on to the next level, and the next.

Once you’ve got all of your bills covered and then some, you can quit your day job with confidence, because now you KNOW you can make money online. There is no question. You’ve already proven you’ve got the confidence and the skills.

The magic is this: Instead of sitting down at your computer and thinking, “Okay, I’ve got to make enough money to cover all my expenses this month,” you simply tell yourself you’re going to make enough to cover one little bill.

You’re no longer trying to create an entire business, you’re simply taking the first steps. You’re enjoying numerous successes along the way that fuel you to keep going.

Get that first bill paid and you’ll be on your way to achieving total financial freedom, one step at a time.

Twitter can be one of the best tools in your marketing arsenal when you know how to leverage this social network to your maximum advantage. That’s why I’ve compiled some of the best tips and tricks for building your lists of followers and converting those people into sales. First, we’ll start with the tips which serve as a great review for seasoned users as well as an awesome guide to those new to Twitter. And then we’ll then move on to the more advanced tricks where you can really turn up the volume on your marketing.

Twitter Tips

Have a killer bio. Make it benefit oriented for the reader. Give a clear indication of what they can discover from following you. Add in a touch of humor, show that you’re human, add a bit of intrigue, and target it to the exact person you want to attract. Yes, it’s a tall order for a short bio, so work on it and then don’t be afraid to tweak it as you think of better ways to word what you want to say.

Tweet consistently – as in every day and even several times a day. Use a social media tool to schedule great content and even retweets to be dispersed at the best times throughout the day.

Make your tweets short enough that other people can retweet them, adding a short comment of their own. Generally 250 characters or less is good.

Reposting is cool if your content is great. In fact, it’s not only cool, it’s unfair to followers if you only post it once. What if they missed it?

Respond to everyone. Whether they’re retweeting you, mentioning you or favoriting your tweet, be sure to respond back. Think of it this way: If someone standing next to you at a party said to the group, “You’ve got to hear what this person just said,” and points to you – or if they ask you a question – wouldn’t you respond back? Of course you would. And imagine how they would feel if you just ignored them. Ouch.

Tip your hat often and liberally. When you link to someone’s content or share something from someone else, add an @AccountName mention. People love to get credit for their own stuff, and they should get credit for it, too.

Let everyone see your tweet – unless you don’t want them to. If you place a mention at the beginning of your tweet, only you, the person receiving your tweet and anyone who happens to follow both accounts will see the tweets in their streams. This is useful if you want to keep your exchange private, but not if you want everyone else to see the tweet, too.

Get your Twitter emails down to a manageable amount. Go to Twitter’s email notifications center and you’ll see that Twitter has over 20 different email settings you can turn on or off. Customize these settings to suit you so that you stay in the loop but don’t get overwhelmed.

Don’t try to read every Tweet, because you can’t. And even if you could, it takes too much time. Instead, carefully choose whose tweets you want to read. Then create a Twitter list of just these accounts.

In the beginning, follow a lot of people to maximize the growth of your own followers. Later – if you want – you can use one of the many tools available to weed out those who no longer use Twitter, don’t follow you back, don’t engage, etc.

Twitter Tricks

Whether you’re a new or a seasoned Twitter user, odds are there are at least a few Twitter tricks here you don’t know about yet.

Get every Tweet you ever made. Maybe you want to see what you were doing on March 10th, 2009. Or you want to glean all the great tips you’ve given throughout the years and put them in a book. Whatever your reason, you can get ALL of your tweets since the beginning of Twitter by following the instructions here: help.twitter.com/en/managing-your-account/how-to-download-your-twitter-archive

Use Twitter advanced search to find ANYTHING. Twitter advanced search is a powerful tool for finding tweets on any topic or tweets to or from particular people. Plus you can search geographically, search certain time periods, search for a key term coupled with a URL, search for particular attitudes on a topic and more. Here’s a list of search operators and how to use them: support.twitter.com/articles/71577-using-advanced-search

Use hashtags. A lot. When someone searches for a particular hashtag, your tweet will show up regardless of whether or not they follow you. Tweets with hashtags get more engagement, more new followers and put you more in the spotlight while improving your reputation. Those little hashtags pack a powerful punch.

Like shortcuts? Twitter has a BUNCH of them to save you time. For example, click ‘n’ for new tweet, ‘f’ for favorite, ‘r’ for reply and ‘t’ for retweet. To get the full list, type ‘?’ into Twitter.

Tweet during the work day on Eastern time, Monday through Thursday for the greatest engagement.

If you’re using Twitter for business, schedule it into your day. Be sure to check Twitter once or twice each day to respond to conversations.

Find out what lists you’re on. From your lists page, click on “member of.” You might get some interesting info from seeing the types of lists you’re on, as well as insight into how people perceive you.

Subscribe to lists. You can only subscribe to public lists, not private. Go to the person’s profile, click ‘lists,’ and choose what list you’d like to subscribe to. This is a great way to get info on a particular niche, as well as getting yourself acquainted with players in the field.

Use Favorites your favorite way. Favorites is a versatile tool. You can favorite because you like something, because you want to bookmark something for later or because you want to end a conversation. Some use it as an endorsement, such as when they want to privately back one side of a Twitter debate. Others favorite because they don’t want to spam their followers with a lot of tweets.

Use Favorites to entice someone to follow you. If you follow someone on Twitter and want to express approval for a tweet they sent while making them aware of your own presence, sometimes hitting the favorite button is the way to go.

Find your best followers. Using Social Rank (socialrank.com), you can find out which of your followers are the most engaged, which are the most valuable and which are overall the best. Social Rank looks at things like influence, follower count, content and engagement when making this determination, so you’ve got real info backing the choices and not just your gut instinct. From there you can choose which followers are a priority to build relationships with.

One more thing: Do you think Twitter is just for the young? Think again. The fastest growing demographic on Twitter is the 55-64 year age bracket. In fact, this demographic has grown 79% since 2012. So if you’re marketing to this group, Twitter can reach them.

Another amazing fact: 25% of smartphone owners ages 18-44 say they can’t recall the last time their smartphone wasn’t next to them. In fact, 63% of smartphone owners keep their phone with them for all but an hour of their waking day. This gives you potential access to your prospects at all times of the day, every day of the week.

Bottom line: As with most marketing strategies, your best bet is to ALWAYS get prospects to your squeeze page and onto your list as fast as possible. Social media can be fickle – you may or may not get a particular message to your followers. But once you’ve got them on your list, they’re yours to market to anytime you like.

Standing apart from the crowd of other emails in your prospects’ inbox isn’t easy. There are gimmicky ways to do it – write subject lines that shock, use lots of funny characters in the subject line, use the latest “hot” subject line [for the past year this has been “Hey”] and so forth. But how do you get your recipients to become avid readers of your emails?

Sane Method #1 – Tell stories. There is a marketer who appears in my inbox about once a day. Gmail highlights this email, because Gmail knows I read his emails. Why? Because he entertains me with stories. I know when I click his email I’m going to get swept up into another world. And even if it’s just his world and just for a minute, it’s a great escape to my otherwise sometimes monotonous day. And yes, I buy his products, too.

There’s an added bonus to telling stories besides the fact that your emails get opened and read, and it’s this: Telling stories is fun. Instead of selling, selling and more selling, you’re now entertaining. You can embellish, you can be flamboyant, you can add your own personal touch, you can get creative and you can have a blast doing it.

Suddenly your day is just a little more exciting because every moment you’re watching for the next story to fall into your life. Even a routine trip to the store can become an exciting adventure. The newspaper holds new meaning and the websites you visit are a treasure trove of possible stories you can share.

Sane Method #2 – Be a coach. Think of your readers as your students. Love your subject and stick to your subject. Only build your list with people who want info on your particular subject, then teach them all you can about it. When it comes to recommending products, tell them the good and the bad. Give them lots of detail. Be their coach first and foremost and they will hang on your every word.

This method works especially well if you love your topic. If you find yourself spending hours on the Internet learning about this topic, hitting all the forums and websites, finding the best products and so forth, then this method is for you. Every new site you visit is an adventure because you are continually on the lookout for more information you can share with your students. And selling becomes easy because again, you are simply sharing your knowledge with your students.

The [Not-so] Crazy Method – Hide clues in your emails that lead to prizes. I haven’t yet tried this method but I’ve been tempted. What if every email you send out holds a clue to a valuable prize? Collect all the clues and you find the prize online. There’s little doubt this method will get your emails opened, but will they be read? In the right niche, yes. Imagine doing this in a gaming niche – what a killer technique. The viral effect alone could be huge.

So tell me – is this last method crazy, or a millionaire maker? I don’t know of anyone who’s doing it – yet. But no doubt someone will. And in the right hands, it could be powerful, indeed.

Did you know there are actually 4 types of residual commissions? Let’s explore them…

Automatic recurring commissions – these are likely the ones you’re most familiar with. You promote a membership program and you get paid monthly for as long as that customer retains the membership you sold.

Cookie commissions – when you sell a product, a cookie is placed on that customer’s computer. Then anything else that customer purchases from the seller is linked to you, and you get a commission. But if the cookie is deleted, or if the customer changes computers, then you will no longer receive commissions on their purchases.

Lifetime commissions – this works like a cookie commission, only instead of a cookie the product seller uses the customers email address to track sales. Thus, as long as the email address remains the same, you can receive commissions on all sales from this customer for years.

Second tier commissions – this is when you refer other affiliates to the merchant. Sort of like a multi-level program, you get a small commission for the sales your referral affiliate makes.

Now then: If you make a traditional affiliate sale, you get paid and that’s it.

If you make an monthly membership type of sale, you get paid until the customer cancels which means you usually get paid for several months. Not bad.

But if you promote products with either cookie or lifetime commissions, you can get paid for years on anything else they buy from that vendor in addition to the original sale.

Imagine a product seller with a fleet of 30 or 40 products. You promote just one of their products, and 20 of your customers buy that product. Now over the course of the next few months and years, this product seller promotes other products to these 20 customers, resulting in a further 80 sales over time. Normally you wouldn’t make a dime on these sales, but in this case, you make the full commission on each and every one.

So next month you get unexpected commissions, and the month after that, and five years from now, too.

Nice.

And it’s all because you promoted products with lifetime referrals or cookies.

So where can you find these products?

One method is simply to keep your eyes peeled. Not all selling platforms allow for lifetime referrals, so by looking at those that do, you can find the product sellers who will pay you for every product they sell to your customers, not just the ones you promote.

Next, use a search directory, such as www.affiliatescout.com. When doing your search, choose “lifetime commissions” under “features” without any other search parameters and you’ll find hundreds of results. Go back and narrow your parameters to find the exact programs your audience might be interested in.

Most of all, anytime someone asks you to be their affiliate, ASK if they pay lifetime commissions. Sometimes they’ll have two programs, one in which they only pay commissions on the first product sold, and a second, secret program they reserve for their heavy hitter affiliates in which they do pay lifetime commissions. It never hurts to ask.

Bottom line: If you can make recurring or even lifetime commissions from your promotional efforts, why not go for it? You do the work once, and you get paid over and over again. You can’t beat that.

There are a number of hot topics and common questions being asked in the top internet marketing forums right now. Instead of answering each of these people individually, I thought I’d write this post to share my responses and insights on these subjects with you and other aspiring internet marketing professionals.

Q. What’s the best tip you can give to do better in business and in life?

A. You’re going to be surprised by the answer: Journal. That’s right, keep a journal and write in it everyday. Write down your ideas, what you learn, what you want to implement in your business, your goals, your thoughts… everything. Just write it down. This will allow you to do the following:

• Work through issues, emotions, hurts and so forth that might be holding you back
• Clarify your goals
• Remember what you’re learned so you can use it
• Solidify your ideas
• Get all of this stuff out of your head so you can think more clearly

Sure, it may sound new age and just a little bit woo-woo if you’ve never done it, but try journaling every day for one month and then decide – I think you’ll begin to see a difference in your life and in your business.

And by the way, your journal is one place that neatness does not count. Feel free to make it as messy and as fun as you like – it’s your journal.

Q. I have a list of buyers and need to make some serious cash fast. I don’t have time to create a product – what should I do?

A. Offer a status experience that comes with bragging rights and personalized attention – something created just for a few of your best customers. For example, offer a 3 or 4 figure-a-month coaching program custom tailored to their individual needs in which you spend one-on-one time with each person. They’re not only getting results – they’re getting your personal time and attention. They’re getting status.

It’s a lot like getting a backstage pass at a concert to spend time with the band – it’s an experience they can long remember and brag about. And in the case of coaching, it can produce real results for them as well. Plus, you can set it all up in one day – all you need is the sales page and a series of emails to send to your list to get started.

Q. I’m worried that I don’t know everything I need to know to successfully start and run my business. How do I learn these things?

A. By starting. It might be a comfort to you to know that Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google and many, many other success stories were started by people who were figuring it all out as they went. They didn’t have all the answers before they started, and in fact they still don’t.

In hindsight, these entrepreneurs and in fact MOST entrepreneurs don’t know what they’re doing in it’s entirety, but they do know the value in starting. Because once you start, you’ll discover which questions are the important ones you need to get answered. And you’ll also find that some of the details you were obsessing about don’t even matter. It’s only by undertaking the journey that you will discover the opportunities and roadblocks in your path. And as you come across each one, you can decide then and there what to do about it.

Q. What’s a good method for getting a quick cash influx if I’m an affiliate marketer?

A. Obviously promoting a product that pays out immediately is a good idea, especially if you’re promoting it to your list. But if this isn’t enough, you can always send traffic directly to a high converting offer.

In other words, instead of sending traffic to your squeeze page (which hopefully, you’re already doing) you can divert that traffic straight to an offer to make more immediate money. You won’t get the leads, but you will make more immediate sales.

Only do this until you’ve got the cash you need and then return to sending traffic to your squeeze page first so you can capture and nurture the leads.

Q. How do I get my subject lines to stand out from the hundreds of other emails my prospects are receiving?

A. Believe it or not, the answer is Wingdings. Remember those little symbols?

Arrows, stars, mailboxes, smiley faces – Wingdings 1, 2 and 3 were the hit of the 90’s and largely forgotten in recent years. Until now. Because now you can put them in subject lines to make them pop out at your readers.

Of course this isn’t a magic bullet – you still want to have a great subject line. But the addition of a Wingding (also known now as Emoji’s) can’t hurt, and in fact it increased the open rate in every test run by Portent. Here are the results:

www.portent.com/blog/internet-marketing/symbols-in-email-subject-lines.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+conversationmarketing%2FMRJI+(The+Portent+Blog%3A+Conversation+…

Even the smallest changes can sometimes result in the biggest increases to your conversion rate. Take the headline split test, for example. Headline A, B and C are tested against each other. Headline A converts at 1%, Headline C converts at 2.5%, and Headline B converts at 4.9%. Hmmm, which one should you pick? The choice is obvious, you go with Headline B.

But what if you hadn’t split tested? You would never have known. Just imagine: You write a terrific headline, which happens to be Headline A. It looks like a sure winner, so you don’t bother to test. And sure enough, it converts at a respectable 1%.

BUT, if you had tested, you would have chosen Headline B. And for every 100 people who hit your site, you would have made 3.9 more sales. If your product sells for $47, that’s another $183.30 you would have earned for every 100 visitors. But you didn’t test, and so you didn’t know, and so you lost thousands of dollars. Ouch.

Testing might seem like an irritation, but there are few things that can pay off as handsomely as a simple split-test.

That’s why I’ve made a list of things you might want to test in your next sales letter or even in your next email. I’ve left out the common things like headlines, pre-headlines, sub-headlines and calls to action. You already know about those. But have you thought about testing these?

• Various bonuses tested against each other and against no bonus
• Person next door tone versus formal business tone
• Header versus no header
• Placement and look of testimonials
• Adding more images, arrows, underlining, etc.
• Adding/changing the text underneath the images
• For low priced items – Placing the price at the top (beginning) versus at the bottom (end)
• A soft sell versus a hard sell approach
• Adding more call to actions throughout
• The design of the page itself
• Wording directed to your best customer versus more generic copy
• Changing the color scheme
• Changing the color or text on the order button
• Variations on your product image(s)
• Variations on your product image size
• Variations on your product image location(s)
• Renaming your product
• Focusing on benefits versus focusing on the pain of no solution
• Placing bullets closer to the beginning versus further into the page
• Focusing on one major benefit versus a laundry list of benefits
• Having all copy or video on one page, versus using steps with a progress indicator
• A trial offer versus asking for the entire sale up front
• Sales – a percentage off versus a dollar amount off
• Coupons versus sales
• And perhaps the most interesting of all: Using dark emotions like jealously or revenge to get the sale [“You know that snobby woman at your child’s school who thinks she’s so terrific? Right now she is praying you NEVER get this program, because if you do you’ll lose that weight and look ten times better than her. Imagine how envious she’ll be then!”] Heh heh.

Mind you, this list is to get you thinking and moving in the right direction. There’s no way you’re going test all of these things unless you’re a compulsive profit-seeking entrepreneur who can’t rest until you’ve got the most finely tuned sales presentation in the history of the world.

For the rest of us, pick and choose what you test. If you haven’t already, start with the basics like your headlines and calls to action. Then choose something from this list and see if you can’t boost your conversion rate even higher.

To stay motivated, do the math to find out how much more you will earn on every 1,000 visitors for every tenth of a point you increase your conversions. Write this number down and post it where you’ll see it. Then every week, or every day if you’ve got the traffic, test something new. There’s no easier or faster way to give yourself raise after raise than continually split testing.

Alright, some of you are going to say I’m over simplifying and others will simply disagree, but after years of being super serious about my business, here’s what I’ve discovered:

Everything in life – EVERYTHING – is actually a GAME.

You know how you sit down with a few friend to play cards or a board game, and there’s always that one person who takes the whole game WAY too seriously? They’re getting mad and frustrated when things don’t go their way, they’re celebrating like it’s New Years when things go right, and half the time they can’t even follow the conversation because they’re too busy concentrating on the game.

Yeah, that person.

Well guess what? I’ll bet you that when it comes to Internet Marketing, you are that person.

If you’re taking every decision so seriously, then it might as well be life or death. Exactly how should you word this email? What color should your header be? Should you promote this product at 6a.m. on Tues, or at 9a.m. on Wednesday? And so forth.

These are choices that should take seconds.

Yet I was agonizing over each one like it was a declaration to declare war.

I thought I had to nail every decision and make it all perfect. Nothing could be left to chance. If it took me a week to decide something, it’s because that’s how long it should take.

Wrong.

Now I flip a coin. Seriously. If I need to make a decision – but based on all the facts I have I can’t decide – I flip a coin. Sort of like rolling the dice in a game. Because you know what? It’s better to take the wrong action than no action at all.

Sure, fast decisions can turn out to be bad ones. But guess what? So can slow decisions. But no decision at all? That will get you nowhere, fast. Every kid who rides a bicycle can tell you that it’s far easier to change direction once you’re moving. But if you’re sitting still on that bike, you’re not going anywhere.

And the long term difference between good and bad decisions isn’t even in the decision itself, or the results it produces. Instead, the difference is in how you react. If you make a bad decision and then confine yourself to bed for a week, that’s not going to help.

But when you play marketing like a game, a bad decision is simply telling you to move in another direction. You shrug off the bad choice, glad that now you have more information to head in a better direction this time.

Laughing at your bad choices is a good idea, too, because it’s a game. It’s all a game. LIFE is a game.

If you’re down two goals in football, do you over think what to do next? No. You get the ball and start moving it down the field. If you encounter something new and surprising in a video game, do you shut it down? No, you try different things and see what works. At most you pause the game, go online and find out what to do. It takes you 5 minutes at most before you’re back in the game, fully armed with the knowledge you need to win.

Any difficult obstacle you face can be thought of as a game. And just shifting your mindset to game mode can make all the difference.

I had a friend years ago who went to military boot camp. He looked at the whole thing as a game, and afterward he reported that boot camp was one of the easiest things he ever did. Other people in his camp took the training so seriously, they were literally getting sick from fright. Same boot camp, two different mindsets.

I had another friend in the U.S. who was facing an IRS audit. Scary stuff, and let me tell you, he was deeply frightened and ready to do anything – including signing over a big check – to make it go away. Then he changed his outlook. Now instead of quaking in fear, he declared, “It’s a game, me against them. Let’s see how we can win this.” His fear vanished, he took action, and at the end of the audit the IRS paid HIM.

Do you want start an online business? Launch a new product? Approach 25 gurus in the next 25 days? Make it into a game and 4 things will happen:

First, you’ll relax – and people do their best thinking when they’re relaxed.

Second, you’ll have fun – and people do their best work when they’re having fun.

Third, you won’t feel stressed – at least not the negative kind of stress – and you’ll literally live longer and be happier.

Fourth, when it’s all done and regardless of the outcome, you’ll be eager to do something else because you’ll want to have even more fun in your game.

“Yeah, but this is serious business and I’m a serious person!”

Really? Or is that simply how you choose to look at things and who you choose to be?

Life is a series of choices, and one of the biggest choices we make is deciding how to frame what we’re doing.

Me, I choose to make it a game – one I can’t wait to get up and play each morning. A game that just happens to also make me money. Lots of money.

How about you?