Travis Ketchum

Blow your customers away with amazing service

It seems like my inbox is flooded with promises of “ninja ways to increase conversions” from some guru who got a special insight from a drunk guy in a Russian bar that generated an extra $100k in profit. B.S. radar going crazy yet?

Besides the obvious problems with this kind of nonsense, is that even if these tricks DO work – it never lasts. The name of the game should be sustainability of income.

Worst yet, the refund rates from people who feel duped by whatever method you used to get them to buy feel taken advantage of and even betrayed.

And in case you haven’t noticed, a customer who feels betrayed is not only a high PR risk but they are next to impossible to keep around with their wallet open.

People hate to feel tricked. (DUH!)

So while there are thousands of things you can do to make a sales page better such as better copywriting, split testing images, better explaining your value proposition etc there is one thing that blew ALL of those out of the water for me.

I found that changing one little thing in the way I approached sales pages created a massive 381% increase in sales conversions and historically low refund rates for my product.

It completely blew the doors off of my business and I’ll never be turning back.

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Obsessively checking your stats

The trendy feature of every analytics tool right now is real-time data. You’ll get to watch visitors move through your site so you can pull insights in real-time and react immediately.

This sounds great in theory but it’s a waste of your time.

Why? Because you need two things in order to get any value from real-time analytics.

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Woo Themes Framework

If you use any of the very popular Woo Themes then you may have woken up to a bit of a nasty surprise today – but there is a solution!

They sent out an email letting all of their users know that they’ve been getting pummeled by a DDoS (Denial of service, basically people who want to hurt their business) attack.

This not only made their site intermittent, but has left a gapping security hole that needed to be patched up. They suggest updating the underlying architecture that their themes rely on called the WooFramework.

However, when many people go and click the “update framework” option in WordPress it’s saying their Framework is up-to-date when it’s actually just not updating.

Don’t worry though, I’ve got you covered on how to manually secure your site. After all even the website for my popular WordPress plugin Contest Domination was running on a modified WooTheme so I had to secure that as soon as possible.

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Get your visitors to convert

For those of us who run a blog, own a website or work in Internet Marketing, the goal has and will always be to get as many visitors to our site to convert as possible.

While the conversion part may be a little different for some of us (sales, reads, shares, subscriptions, etc), the work behind it is all the same.

We treat our website like a house, we would ideally like everyone to walk through the front door to the homepage. But in Google’s eyes you’ve left every door unlocked, windows open and even the code to the garage pasted on the wall. Every page of a website has the possibility to make the first impression for a new visitor.

This is why website owners must pay close attention to every potential landing page on their site. We treat each one of the pages as if it were the homepage.

Everything from design to SEO efforts, all so they hopefully sit down for coffee stay for dessert and end the night converting with you (like what I did there?)

While I may not be an expert I have noticed through research, experimenting and experience, four aspects of a landing page that people quickly look for before popping their cherry as a new customer, subscriber or reader.

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The Monopoly Guy There has been a lot of buzz recently about the sky rocketing cost of getting an education in the United States because, most recently, there is talk about the Government stepping in to do something about a proposed doubling of student interest rates.

It’s worth nothing that not too long ago, student debt exceeded credit card in the United States.

Read that sound bite again, I’ll wait.

Student Loan Debt > Credit Card Debt.

The Entrepreneurs Dilemma

If you knew me back as an 18 year old, back in 2006 you might have chuckled.

You see, I was running quite a profitable business drop-shipping 200-300 laptops per day on eBay and all was right with the world.

I was even having to hack the school filter to run my business (and then I sold access for others to get around the filter for a quick buck too since I had setup my own proxy server at home haha).

The point of telling you this was that, for an 18 year old I was making way too much money. It’s not to brag, but rather to give you context.

I was 18 and “crushing it”, but it had been beaten in to me that to be successful there was a way of going about things.

1. You went to College and got a respectable degree
2. Good jobs were supposed to be easy to come by, and you work your way up
3. It didn’t matter how much school costs, you were just supposed to do it

This couldn’t have been any more misleading. Did I have a great experience at school? ABSOLUTELY, there are definitely perks to doing it.

BUT, were those perks worth the current cost of entry? I’d say for at least 50% of people going to school it’s a horrible financial decision.

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Want to Post on The College Startup?

by Travis Ketchum

What’s one way almost everyone tells you is a great way to get links and attention? Guest posting! But it’s a ton of work. There’s usually big process in approaching people to let you write excellent content for them. It’s a bunch of back and forth that I want to try and minimize, and I’d [...]

Internet Marketing For Everyone Else

by Travis Ketchum

It’s pretty typical for people in the “Internet marketing world” to basically just try to out market each other, and we have to work so incredibly hard to try and stay ahead of the game. To make matters worse every time we find something that works, it has an expiration date on it before other [...]

Introducing The College Startup Forum

by Travis Ketchum

I love working with people I meet through The College Startup, but I’ve always felt like something was missing. People either love or hate forums, but I always thought it would make a welcome addition to the community here. And while I had played around with countless solutions they all seemed to more or less [...]

Why Online Marketing is About Partnerships

by Travis Ketchum

This is a guest post by Matt Smith. Matt (@MattASmitty) is an online sales and marketing dude. Currently Matt runs BusinessPirate.com, which teaches you how to build your own video course business. So you want to be an online marketer? The dreams of controlling a million person email list and having thousands of consumers visiting [...]

Your Traffic Means Absolutely Nothing

by Travis Ketchum

I have a point of contention with the way many people approach online marketing. There appears to be an arms race to the number of likes, follows and blog page views with little regard to what they mean. Let me explain, there are many services out there that will email a crazy large database or [...]

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