May, 2011 | Finch Sells

How White Noise Supercharges My Productivity

May 03 2011

There are so many productivity tips floating around the Internet that I would most likely require a productivity course just to stop myself from drowning in them. Being the sucker that I am for time management techniques, I thought I would share my favourite must-have tool for boosting productivity.

It’s free, it’s simple, and as far as my whimsical attention span is concerned, it’s a bloody miracle that the thing actually works.

The tool in question is SimplyNoise.com. SimplyNoise is a white noise generator that serves no other purpose than to bombard your eardrums with a collection of static frequencies. At first listen, you will find white noise a poor alternative to whatever you had locked and loaded on Spotify.

There are no lyrics. The beat doesn’t change. In fact, there is no beat. White noise is pretty much what Norman Bates would listen to and praise as his mother’s favourite song. There is method in the madness, however, and there is good reason why many people swear by white noise to maintain their focus.

As anybody who has recently seen Limitless will recall, the brain is a delicate organ. It can process a huge amount of information and then call upon it at will. But your brain doesn’t always meet your demand when you want it to. Hence writer’s block, procrastination and those times where any little noise or distraction is capable of disrupting your thought flow.

White noise helps focus the mind by blanketing all the distracting sounds that our brain tries to latch on to.

If you imagine a room buzzing with 100 different voices, the combined frequencies produce a sound that the brain treats similarly to white noise. By tuning in to white noise you can therefore block out distractions like construction work, noisy neighbours and crying babies. The brain still hears them, but it adds those distractions to the rest of the frequency pile and allows you to maintain your focus.

If you work at home like me, you’ll probably appreciate that sounds can be amplified by simply being on your own. I hear everything from my puppies barking to the building work going on outside. While I’d be an utter fool to use this as the sole excuse for failing to meet my goals, it definitely pays to master your undivided attention.

Many people rely on sites like SimplyNoise to help them sleep. In fact, any insomniac should be able to relate to the frustration of things that go bump in the night. By blitzing the bedroom with white noise, you can sooth your brain and tune out of your surroundings. You can also irritate your girlfriend if she isn’t the “Finchy needs to listen to his moonkissed dolphins or he’ll never get to sleep” kinda type.

You might not appreciate or even agree with the benefits of white noise, but a lot of workplaces already use it to generate a healthy working environment. Google search office white noise machine and you’ll find a bunch of companies that specialise in acoustics for the workplace.

My girlfriend refuses to acknowledge that SimplyNoise is anything more than a static irritant she could do without. I guess productivity is flexible like that. While she can happily work to the tune of Kim Kardashian’s inane fucking rabble on Channel E, I find myself getting distracted by my own iTunes playlists.

Let me know how you get on with the white noise generator. I’ve heard some positive feedback from people who’ve become addicted to it. You might not find it as enlightening as Mozart, but see if your concentration thanks you!

Recommended This Week:

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Do You Give Up On A Conversion Too Easily?

May 02 2011

When a conversion rate fails to live up to your expectations, how many excuses do you have ready?

“The network is scrubbing!”
“The quality of the traffic sucks…”
“Somebody stole my cookies!”

It’s important to realise that while some factors of a healthy conversion rate are beyond our control, we can still have a vice like grip on the others.

Over the last year, I’ve managed to muster some of the highest conversion rates in the dating vertical. And I’ve done it by simply losing less clicks than my competition. That sounds like a stupid statement, so allow me to explain.

For every product you promote, there are many different angles you can take in selling it to your customer. But the only angle that matters is the one that is specifically relevant to the needs of that customer.

The problem with a vertical like dating is obvious. Individual taste can cover such wildly different ends of the spectrum, you’d be fucking nuts to design a landing page that satisfies everyone. We can opt for laser targeted campaigns instead, and this gives us a much healthier conversion rate – but at the price of volume.

It’s always satisfying to run a mainstream high-volume campaign where your market isn’t restricted to a demo that has scaling difficulties from birth. These are usually the campaigns that turn on the money tap. To achieve them, you need to be able to restrict the number of conversions you lose through poor sales funneling.

Troubleshooting Your Sales Funnel

Your sales funnel is the one element that distinguishes you from every other marketer. We share access to the same stock images, the same offers and the same traffic sources. It’s only when we combine them together and create a sales funnel that the conversions are won or lost.

Fluidity Between Clicks – I’ve written about this before, but it never loses relevance. Your ad creatives must transition smoothly in to your landing page, and then serenely on to the offer. Bait and switch marketing can get you so far, but you have to deliver fluidity in your sales funnel to minimize the loss of conversions.

Let’s say your headline reads “Instantly Get More Messages On Dating Sites”

This grabs a good CTR by the balls, but without fluid transition in to a landing page that elaborates and successfully funnels the user in to your next action (presumably registering on a dating site), it’s going to be a letdown. You can’t use a headline like this and then say “…by joining Match free!“, without harming your original message.

If you’re going to bait and switch, your landing page has to deliver an effective transition between your clickbait headline and your end goal. So in this case, giving five quick reasons why joining Match will make you Mr. Popular would make the transition much smoother.

Understand “YES!” Psychology – The more often you can get your reader to subconsciously answer “Yes!” to rhetorical questions, the more likely they are to develop a positive frame of mind. A positive frame of mind is important because it inspires action. You don’t win sales by casting thoughts of reflection or indecision.

The single greatest burden that stops John Doe from becoming your next customer is his ability to conjure limitless excuses and alibis for not buying your shit. We are all blessed with an internal reasoning system. In order to justify spending money or time, we need to be sure that the positives far outweigh the negatives.

For many marketers, this knowledge gets lost with the illusion that simply catering a page for what the user clicked on will be enough to deliver the sale. It rarely is. A click shows no more than a fleeting interest. In order to convert that fleeting interest in to a paying customer, we have to satisfy their doubts and create a great deal of positive imagery.

To create positive imagery, you first need to cut down on the escape routes that every reader will instinctively seek. Cynicism is a killer for any landing page that doesn’t address specific concerns. If you fail to understand the primary concerns that would stop somebody from accepting your product as a solution, the game is over before it started.

Of course, some markets take less cornering than others. It doesn’t take much to sell a weight loss pill to a hopeless beached whale who believes any excuse that aligns with her disgust for the treadmill.

“Wouldn’t it be great to emphatically blast those pounds away and look fantastic before the summer?”

“Wouldn’t you pay a bargain $30 for exclusive possession of the superpill that works quicker than any diet to reverse YEARS of harmful habit? Is this a price worth paying to capture the body you thought had disappeared forever? We think the perfectly toned, healthy you is worth MUCH more than $30…”

By subconsciously answering yes to the enforcement of positive imagery, your reader’s brain is kept stimulated and occupied. More importantly, the common excuses and alibis – those deadly conversion killers – are never allowed to dictate the thought impulses.

The fastest way to apply this to your landing page is to make a simple change in the way that you look at them. Become the Scrooge of your target market. Brainstorm every last reason why a user would REFUSE to commit to your product, and then work backwards. Take the biggest excuses and blunt them with positive imagery.

In the example above, price is countered with scarcity (exclusive possession?) and the classic trick of asking what would be the much greater price of NOT buying the product.

It’s possible to spin almost any negative in to a positive. And that is the chief purpose of a good sales funnel. Kill indecision before indecision kills your conversion rates.

Monetize The Scraps – If you can’t get a conversion, get an opt-in. Failing all else, co-brand your landing page to add value to an existing site in your portfolio.

It struck me a few months ago that I’d been driving thousands and thousands of clicks to dating landing pages, and yet I’d never thought to co-brand them under the umbrella of the dating blog I already ran.

Sometimes the offer you’re promoting simply isn’t right for a certain kind of visitor. You can forget about that demographic entirely and accept the lost clicks, or you can attempt to monetize the scraps. This is possible either through a second upsell – “Well if you don’t want to join my dating site, how about an ebook to help you on the one you’re already on?” – or by co-branding your assets.

I figured that if I had a ton of clicks not converting in to sales, why not address it frankly on the page? You can post a simple notice saying that you’re sorry they didn’t want to join Site X, but you’d love for them to subscribe to your dating blog instead. Or to check out a different offer. Or to hand over their Amazon cookie. Whatever. There is no limit to what you can achieve with a little hustle and lateral thinking.

In conclusion… The best way to stop losing conversions is to remember that not every click comes from a user who thinks as you do. And for every impossibly low conversion rate, create additional value to monetize the sales that never were.

Recommended This Week

If you’re not already registered on PPV Playbook, you are missing a beat sunshine. Easily the BEST place to learn from marketers who are actually making money. It has some awesome case studies. The catch is that you will need to pay some of your hard earned pesos to access it. I swear from the bottom of my black heart, joining is worth every penny – BTW, I have a limited number of coupon codes giving new members $10 off their monthly subscription. Email me for a code.
If you’re working in the dating market, check out Adsimilis. Definitely one of the better networks with a wide range of dating offers, all on high payouts, including lots of stuff in Europe and South America. I think you’ll like them.
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