Self Employed Success

I did an interesting test over the past few months, with astonishing results.

I sell an ebook about mastermind groups on three of my sites. I’ve been tracking the sales results for 4 years, across three different sites. Conversion rates (the percent of people who purchase as compared to the total number who view the page) ranges from 2% to 14%, depending on which site.

A second edition of the ebook was launched this year, and on each site I used this book cover graphic, with the “second edition” graphic on it:

Six weeks ago, I ran a test, removing the current book cover graphic and replacing it with the exact same book cover, but WITHOUT the “second edition” graphic on it, like this:

An amazing thing happened: conversion rates FELL by 75% using the plain book cover without the “second edition” graphic.

I did not change the book cover graphic on the other two sites, and their conversion rates remained stable.

Conclusion: People who visited the article page felt more trust when an ebook was in it’s 2nd edition, deducing that an ebook that had been updated was a popular ebook that contained up-to-date information.

As we know, trust is a key element in marketing, especially ecommerce. What are you doing to instill trust in your site visitors?

You can see the new graphic in place in the article, here:

http://www.passionforbusiness.com/articles/mastermind-group.htm

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1. Finding Royalty-free Photos and Graphics
2. What’s New in Internet Marketing – Part 3: Email Marketing
3. People Will Judge You on the Quality of Your Marketing Materials