You can have all the traffic in the world, but if it’s not converting, then you’re not making money. That’s why the crucial key to making money online is conversions.

How compelling is your presentation? How many prospects out of 100 actually BUY your product, both today and during your follow up sequence? Conversions are where you make your real money, both today and in the future. Affiliates won’t promote you if your offer isn’t converting. But if you have a high converting offer, affiliates will send you as much traffic as you can handle and sometimes more.

So how compelling is your sales letter? How branded are you? People buy from those they perceive have the answers. People buy from those they admire and from those they trust have the solutions to their desires.

There are many conversion techniques, but the big 3 to focus your efforts on are:

– Social proof factors like testimonials

– Claims backed by proof

– Scarcity

In fact if you were to focus all of your efforts on the first two – proof – then your offer would convert. Add in scarcity and you can’t miss.

I’m going to say something here that will seem almost sacrilegious to many marketers: Forget traffic. Traffic is simply a byproduct of conversions. If your offer is converting, you’ll have affiliates wanting to promote it. Just get 3 affiliates, and those affiliates will tell their affiliate friends how great your product is converting and so forth.

But if you can’t convert then you can’t get affiliates. And if your offer isn’t converting you’re also not going to spend time or money on traffic because it will be a waste. Think about this: When you convert and convert well, you can BUY all the traffic you want. You don’t even need affiliates. If you can spend $100 to make $110 then you’re in business. Increase your conversions and make $150 or $200 or more for every $100 you spend, and lounging on that beach can finally become a reality.

But you probably won’t want to get lazy on a beach because when you can convert, this business becomes addictive. You suddenly find you can make a LOT of money and you want to see that money continue to pour in.

Traffic is not money – CONVERSIONS are money. Yet I see marketers totally focused on getting traffic. They think if they can just get MORE traffic, they’ll make money. But if the traffic they’re already getting isn’t converting, how will more traffic help?

Sadly the vast, vast majority of people in this market don’t know a thing about conversions. They’re newbies and they ignore the one thing that is the most critical, most crucial, the paramount thing to make money in this business. It’s the one place you find the money – conversions.

Yet everyone stays away from studying and learning conversions. If they would just focus on how to get their offers to convert, they’d have tremendous results, more than they could even anticipate.

When you start focusing on conversions, the money will come.

So what should you study to convert better? What should you test? I’ve covered many conversion techniques in the past, but here’s a short list to get you started.

Study copywriting. I don’t know why, but copywriting tends to be something most marketers just gloss over, as though it’s the least important element. It’s not. If you have a great offer but do a lousy job of selling that offer to the prospect, you won’t convert. It’s that simple. Changes in your sales letter, or even entirely new sales letters or videos, can make all the difference. You’ve simply got to study what works and practice, practice, practice.

Social proof is huge. The prospect wants to know for a FACT that your product will do what you say it will do. They want to know that others have tried it and gotten the results you promise. They even want to know that your product is selling and selling well. Don’t just dump a few testimonials at the end of your sales presentation – weave them throughout. Make them the foundation upon which you build your sales letters and videos. And make them real, from real people who had real doubts until they actually experienced your product.

Another conversion element online marketers tend to ignore is branding – especially branding yourself. Make a name for yourself in your industry or niche. Become the go-to expert, the answer guy or gal people turn to for solutions. When you’ve built yourself a name, your name alone will make sales from your most loyal fans. They really will see you’ve got a new product, scroll down and hit the buy button. But it takes time and effort to build your brand and your reputation, and most marketers aren’t willing to do what it takes.

Decide what you and your brand stand for. You can’t be all things to all people, so choose who you want to be and then become that person, that expert. Build relationships with people in your niche, especially with potential JV partners who will mail your offers for you. Put a great deal of thought into how you present your products, what you put into your email sequences, what your graphics look like and so forth. This is a BUSINESS, not a magic button.

Branding and being a celebrity is actually the highest form of conversions because you build a reputation of knowing your niche. You’re talked about and people know you only put out real value and they buy based upon your name alone. You’re an expert, an authority figure. When Stephen King puts out a new book, do you think he needs to ‘sell’ it to his readers? No. They just buy it because HE wrote it, and they know they’re going to like it.

Give yourself a title. Who said, “I’m the greatest.”? Mohammed Ali, and everyone else took up the cry. Who said, “I’m the hardest working man in show business.”? James Brown, and that became his title.

Gary Halbert said, “I am the world’s greatest copywriter, and if you don’t believe me, you can go to my website. It says it there.” And the branding caught on and people called him the world’s greatest copywriter.

So don’t wait for someone else to give yourself a title, give it to yourself. Repeat it often enough and it will in fact stick, and after a while few people will even know or remember that it was you who gave yourself the title.

Bottom Line: When you focus on something (like conversions) the answers just start to appear. When you study emails and sales letters, ask yourself what the technique is, what the person is doing that makes it successful. Read between the lines. Make ‘conversions’ your mantra and you cannot go wrong in this business.