How I Increased My Conversions By 35% This Year

My fiscal year 2011 just ended and I gotta say I'm pretty proud of myself.

I grew my overall sales by 130%, and increased my profits by 89%. (In order to increase the sales I had to stop being a one man army, hire employee's, get coached etc, so that's why the profits didn't increase as much as the sales)

One of the things I'm most proud of is that I increased the conversions on my sales pages by 34%. This was not an easy task.

I tested a lot of things, headlines, offers, layout etc. But the biggest thing I did, I think is that I became a much better writer.

I tend to not be the most organized person in the world, so it takes me a long time to write good copy. My typical sales letter takes me 70 to 80 hours to create, I'm not sure what others spend, but it seems to me that I'm slow.

I've been sitting around a bit today and trying to figure out the most important things I did, and one of the most helpful things I did was read more winning copy.

Any time I heard about an offer in my niche that was converting well, I went and printed that sales letter out and read it. I'd mark it up, take notes and try to figure out what went into the copy.

Before Clayton Makepeace stopped selling his products I bought "Steal These Secrets" volumes 1 and 2. These are basically massive swipe files of Clayton's top promotions.

Clayton is one of the top financial copywriters of all time.

Each week I would select one letter from Steal These Secrets. Then, every night before I went to bed I would read that letter for an entire week. That means I'd read each letter seven times.

Then after having read it seven times, I'd print it out and go about trying to figure out the promotion myself, and think about ways I could use what I learned.

Overall this has been my best year in business. Not only in terms of the amount of money I made, but also in terms of my growth as a business person.

It's not always been easy - and I certainly haven't been able to lay around on the beach sipping Corona's and making money with seven clicks of the mouse, and sometimes my wife and kids thought I'd lost my mind, but overall it's been great fun and I can't wait for what's to come.

So anyway - that's what I did to become a better copywriter this year and increase my conversions.

How about my fellow copywriter warriors. I'm wanting more ideas so I can continue to grow....so what is it that you have done to become better?

Kelly