New To The Forum, My Story and a Question

6 replies
Hi, my name is Liam. I've been running an online tutoring company (vtamethod.com) for almost a year now. I didn't get a single sale for 5 months and now I'm getting on average about 2-3 sales a week which isn't bad but I'm still lecturing part time to supplement my income and the actual tutoring is the complete opposite of 'passive' income.

Here is my question: What is your one tip to take my company to the next level? It's a five figure business right now and I want to move it up to a six figure company.

- I have an amazing process set up with 14 part time tutors and 5 virtual assistants
- The company runs itself, I have literally nothing to do on the bureaucracy side (I'm a sociologist by trade so I'm great at getting things to run smoothly)
- The site converts at approximately 1.7% (that's last month) and I literally have no idea how to bump it up (please rip apart my ad copy)

I think the real answer is traffic, I have no idea how I can move my traffic to a reliable four figure range (some days I get a spike but it's mostly due to reddit or digg and they send crap traffic anyway)

I've been checking out this forum for a few weeks and since my tutoring business is cooling off over the next month I'm looking for more traffic to boost my sales and I'd like to offer everyone here a bit of a challenge.

I see everyone talk about how they make oodles of cash off the net, if you can show me a honest way to make money with little to no investment (monetarily I mean, I'll work my ass off for it) I will give you all the money I make from that venture over the next month.

Oh and nobody pitch me about buying some product. I've bought a handful of them and they never seem to pan out even when I implement them, best way to show me your product works is to show me a technique that makes me the money to pay you!
#forum #question #story
  • Profile picture of the author Tony Hetherington
    Hi Liam,

    If possible, my suggestion would be to offer a new package based on the guru course model.

    Purchasers of this model pay less - a new entry level
    They get videos and pdf training from the tutor/course
    Plus - once a week/ 2 weeks they can join a webinar or teleconference and get questions answered.

    Once the videos etc are set up once the actual work is automated except the weekly calls.

    You can then upsell to the more staff intensive options (and raise the prices of those)

    You can probbaly boost your site (which is very nice) with...

    press exposure
    testimonials to help boost the conversion rate
    Offer a sample to capture emails and build a list

    Tony
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  • Profile picture of the author NikkiG
    Tony has some good advice there.

    I don't know much about your market at all so assuming there's more traffic to be had (probably a safe assumption) then you've got a great candidate for press releases, JVs with other sites / companies, free videos and of course offline marketing too. And you may be doing those things already.

    The site and copy is OK but I bet a nice video / report package would do well to capture leads and pre-sell your customers.

    1. Get more visitors.
    2. Improve conversions.
    3. Add upsells, downsells, cross sells.

    Those three can take many 5 figure businesses and boost them to 6.

    If you've got some steady traffic then personally I'd start by improving and testing the whole sales funnel. See if you can raise the conversion rate, get some subscribers going and find other ways to monetize the existing visitors.

    You might find that extra money is hiding until you get a lead capture sorted.

    Then I'd start getting more traffic, I just prefer to get the machine well oiled before throwing a lot of effort into promotion.
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  • Profile picture of the author NikkiG
    Oh, and of course if there's a good profit margin then why not get a few affiliates in to do some of the grunt work for you?

    You've told me your conversion rate so then it would be my job to find some quality traffic....
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  • Profile picture of the author asiffaridi
    I dont know ,whats the effective answer.
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    • Profile picture of the author rosetrees
      My immediate reaction when I looked at the page was - "what's the VTA method?"

      The first part of your page, the bit above the fold before you make people scroll is totally wasted.

      To be blunt it tells me nothing. At the very least it needs to make it clear that it is supplementary, personal tutoring for undergraduates to help them improve their learning and grades (at least, that's what I take the site to be)

      Most visitors will click away if their first look at your site doesn't tell you what it's about.
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  • Profile picture of the author LiamMcIvorMartin
    Danke! All very useful critiques, here is some more data.

    I have been doing split tests for 2 months now and have gone through 13 iterations to get the conversion up and bounce down (I'm at 65% bounce right now from 73% for my root, is that good?)

    I have tried a pay less model (a 1.95-3.95 trial) but got less people to opt in for the trial tutoring session and the ones that did opt in demanded much more since they were paying their 1.95 and converted at the same level.

    The free session includes 4 20 minute videos reviewing the main aspects of academic success delivered through my membership site which is coupled with an autoresponder sequence and concludes with a free tutorial from my sales team.

    I have a few upsells which I present to my customers (started that since 1shoppingcart implemented that handy new script) but the opt in is around 50% and since they are already buying a deluxe product I don't know what else I could sell them. (I currently sell them an 'academic success club' which is an extra 17 dollars a month and is a monthly video product)

    My questions:

    @rosetrees: You are absolutely right about my page above the fold, would you suggest I autostart the video (as some people have suggested that) but I don't want to appear spammy and unfortunately wordpress theme's are incredibly difficult to split test.

    @nikkiG What software would you use to start an affiliate campaign (other than 1shoppingcart) and what would be the specific steps be in setting up a press release and how much traffic could I see from something like that?
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    In Times Of Change, Learners Inherit The Earth

    Liam McIvor Martin

    Outsourced Facebook Marketing

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