Dear Friend,

Have you ever heard that the “offer” is the #1 thing you should test on your page?

I think it’s true.  But what does it mean?

Mike Filsaime, quoting Gary Halbert, recently said that the offer is a matter of:

• What they get
• How they get it
• What they pay
• How they pay for it

And I think that’s an incredibly catchy way to think about all the ways you can try to change your offer.

So how do you come up with ideas for changing the parts of your offer?

Well, here’s a question that should help: “Do you know why people are currently not buying your product or service?”

List your answers to THAT question, and then ask yourself if any of the objections can be met by changing your offer in some way.

Let me use my own software as an example.

The Split Test Accelerator is a powerful piece of software that helps people increase their profits from any landing page they own.

So why wouldn’t someone purchase the Split Test Accelerator?  Why would someone go to all the trouble of reading the sales page, and close the browser without making a purchase?

I’m going to explain what I think is the #1 reason in a minute, but here are some other reasons:

1. They got there by accident. 
2. They are just getting started marketing online, and it sounds expensive considering they’re not making any money yet.
3. They are busy with other projects, and don’t think they can fit in split testing on top of everything else (though it does sound like a good idea).
4. They are happy with another solution they’re using right now, and they don’t see a need to change.
5. They don’t believe you can really test 20 factors with the same amount of traffic it takes to test one factor — or they don’t believe some other claim on the sales page.
6. Their website is on a platform that’s incompatible with STA.

Those are all good reasons to close the browser (or hit the back button) without buying. 

I can probably remove some of these reasons for some people  (perhaps with better explanations, more case studies, etc).   And I probably can’t do much to remove other reasons.

But here’s the number one reason I think people leave my sales page without buying — at least the #1 reason I can do something about — and I think it’s something I can do something about by changing the offer.

They’re worried about HASSLE.

For some people — a lot of people – software means hassle.

And if there’s too much hassle involved with a piece of software, we won’t use it, no matter how excited we are about the potential benefits.

Here’s an example:

Just the other day I downloaded a marketing video from some well-known marketers and tried to watch it.

It was in mp4 format.  I’m running Vista on my laptop, and my version of Windows Media Player didn’t have an appropriate codec for that format.

So I googled “mp4 codecs” and a few other search terms, and found a nice package of codecs I wanted to install.

Well, during installation, it told me I couldn’t complete the process, because I didn’t have administrator priveleges on my computer.

I’m the only one who uses this computer, and Vista says I have admin priveleges.  But, apparently that’s not “real” admin privileges.  To get those, you have to find and activate the “real” admin account.

There were conflicting suggestions about how to do this. I tried one method that came with nice screen shots.  But what was happening on my computer didn’t match the screenshots they provided.

I gave up.

I JUST WANTED TO WATCH A VIDEO!

Now, I’m a reasonably bright guy.  I’m fairly computer savvy. I have no doubt I COULD HAVE figured out how to play that video on my computer — if I really, really, really wanted to.

But, you know what?  I decided it just wasn’t worth the hassle.

Now, I’m not sure who’s to blame here. The marketers who used mp4 format? Microsoft for not including mp4 codecs with Windows Media Player? Microsoft for having a funky privilege scheme in vista? The creators of the codec package for not finding a way to allow installation without “real” admin privileges?  Or me for not just “knowing” from the moment I came out of the womb how to do all this in the first place?

Probably no one is to blame.  Mp4 is a valid format.  Incompatibilities like this just happen. 

My point isn’t really to say who was to blame here. But the end result was that, because the process contained so much hassle, I didn’t wind up watching the video.  And I wasted a lot of time “not watching the video”.

If a simple video can cause this much hassle, why wouldn’t someone guess that a complex Taguchi testing software program you install on your web server might be a source of hassle?

It’s a fair concern.

If it wasn’t my software, I’d be concerned.

I’d be worried that I might try to install the software, and it wouldn’t go right.  And I’d have to contact customer support.  Or, worse, I’d get busy and just set it aside, and wind up never using it.  Or I’d have to ask for a refund.  It’s nice that refunds are available, but, seriously, who ENJOYS asking for a refund?

Well here’s the good news.

I’m adding some new elements to my offer.

These are designed to put you at ease — to take away your fear of hassle.

For the first time, in June of 2008, I’m offering installation AND setup as part of a Split Test Accelerator purchase. (Now please note: you must always check the sales page for the current terms.  I reserve the right to reverse this decision at some point in the future.  I have to say this because this blog post will be here for a while, and I don’t want to have to edit it further in case I change the offer again).

I feel confident making this offer.  Here’s why.

Kirt Christensen recently asked me how many refunds I give.  And something dawned on me.  I honestly can’t think of a single customer who asked for a refund after actually USING the Split Test Accelerator.

The few refunds I’ve given have been because of incompatibilities.

So that tells me that if I can get YOU set up and actually using the Split Test Accelerator, you’ll love it.  You’ll almost certainly make back your money very quickly, and you’ll find out how much fun Accelerated Split Testing can be.

This way, if there is any hassle, I’ll be the one hassling it.

All you’ll do is order, give me some information I’ll need to do the installation, and wait for an email message from me telling you how to log in to your copy of the Split Test Accelerator and view the results that are already accruing on a test I’ve set up for you.

Of course if you still want to install the software and/or set up your first test yourself, you can.  And it will probably go as smoothly for you as it has for most of my past customers.

But if you want to eliminate almost all possibility of hassle, and get started with accelerated split testing this month, KNOWING that you’ll get at least one test set up right away, please, take me up on my new offer.

Here’s the link to the sales page

http://www.splittestaccelerator.com

And yes, I’ve been working on it.  There are many more screenshots, and some new explanations.  It’s also a 2-page letter instead of 4.  I’ll be reworking it more next month as well, but there’s some new information on there for those who have read it before.

– Jim

P.S., As always, feel free to leave comments below. 

NEW: Improve Your Sales — Not Just 10X faster, but 50X faster!

Dear Friend,

In my last post on this topic, I wen’t a little fast. This time I’ll slow down a little and work an example or two. There’s also a video of the new STA feature that allows you to “speed up Taguchi”.

You can read this post right off the screen, but it discusses a VERY IMPORTANT concept for testing, so you might do well to print it out and read it when you have some time, and can be comfortable and relaxed.

Let’s start with this fact:

When you want to improve your conversion rate (and thereby get more sales, optins, or whatever), you have to make some changes to your page.

So you test new ideas hoping to find something that will improve conversions.

Let’s say you test a new headline against your old one, and the new one is 20% better than the old one. You don’t know this at first, so you run some traffic to each version to see how each performs.

Now the question is: “How much traffic do you need in order to have a good chance of detecting a 20% improvement?”

And the answer is: “It depends on the conversion rate you start with.”

Here are some sample numbers.

Starting conversion rate: 0.5%
Ending conversion rate: 0.6%
Improvement: 20%
Visitors needed to confirm: About 60,000.

Starting conversion rate: 1.0%
Ending conversion rate: 1.2%
Improvement: 20%
Visitors needed to confirm: About 30,000.

Starting conversion rate: 10%
Ending conversion rate: 12%
Improvement: 20%
Visitors needed to confirm: About 2,700.

Starting conversion rate: 20%
Ending conversion rate: 24%
Improvement: 20%
Visitors needed to confirm: About 1,200.

Starting conversion rate: 50%
Ending conversion rate: 60%
Improvement: 20%
Visitors needed to confirm: About 250.

Starting conversion rate: 80%
Ending conversion rate: 96%
Improvement: 20%
Visitors needed to confirm: About 50.

So there’s a very important relationship between the starting conversion rate of your page, and the number of visitors it takes to reliably detect a 20% improvement.
Here’s the relationship boiled out in one spot:

0.5% — 60,000 visitors

1.0% — 30,000 visitors

10% — 2,700 visitors

20% — 1,200 visitors

50% — 250 visitors

80% — 50 visitors

We’ll call this “Principle #1“:

“The lower your starting conversion rate, the more traffic you need to detect improvements”

Have you ever noticed that you see split testing results for optin forms more often you see results for sales pages? Principle #1 explains why.

The typical optin form starts with a conversion rate of perhaps 10% to 20%. And the typical sale page starts with a conversion rate of perhaps 0.5% to 2%

It typically takes about 30,000 visitors to detect one 20% improvement on a sales page with a 1% conversion rate.

It typically takes about 2,700 visitors to detect one 20% improvement on an opt-in form with a 10% conversion rate.

Simply put . . .

All else equal . . . you can improve opt-in forms

ten times faster than sales pages.

However, . . .

There’s another principle at play here.

Ask a copywriter how easy it is to find a 20% improvement in each case, and you’ll get a trend diametrically opposed to the one noted above.

Going from 0.5% to 0.6% — Super Easy

Going from 1.0% to 1.2% — Easy

Going from 10% to 12% — A Little Difficult

Going from 20% to 24% — Moderately Difficult

Going from 50% to 60% — Very Difficult

Going from 80% to 96% — Practically Impossible

We’ll call this “Principle #2“:

The higher your starting conversion rate, the more difficult it is to find improvements of a given size (e.g., 20%)”

So here’s the deal. It’s super easy to go from 0.5% to 0.6%, but it will take you a very long time (60,000 visitors) to confirm the result.

On the other hand, it only takes 50 visitors to confirm an improvement from 80% to 96% — the only catch is that it’s pretty much impossible to do.

So the real action is somewhere in the middle.

There’s a “sweet spot” for testing where it’s moderatly easy to come up with improvements, and you don’t need a ton of traffic to detect them.

In my experience . . .

The real “sweet spot” is when a page has

an initial conversion rate between 10% and 50%.

And 20% to 30% is like a sweet spot within the sweet spot.

OK, so what does this mean?

Does it mean you shouldn’t run tests on your low converting sales pages?

No.

What it might mean, though, is that you shouldn’t optimize for “sales” on a sales page.

Instead, you should optimize for an outcome that’s correlated with sales, but which starts out in the “sweet spot”.

I’ve found two ways to move a low converting site into the “sweet spot”.

First,

you can break your sales page into multiple pages. Instead of having just a single page sales letter that goes to the payment gateway, you have, say, a 3 page sales letter that leads to the payment gateway. Then, on page one, instead of optimizing for sales, you optimize for the percentage of visitors clicking from page one to page two.

This “click-through” metric can be highly correlated with sales. And it often starts out in the “sweet spot”. It depends on where you make the break in the page, but “clicks from page one to page two” will probably start somewhere between 10% and 80%.

I think many marketers have already unwittingly take this approach by having a sales page and a separate intermediate order page. In other words, their sales page doesn’t lead directly to the payment gateway, but to an intermediate page that summarizes the offer before taking them to the payment gateway.

It’s not uncommon for someone using a sales page and an intermediate order page, with a 1% overall conversion rate, to see approximately 10% of people visiting the sales page click through to the order page, and about 10% of those viewing the order page ordering.

If your conversions break down like this, and you run a split test on both pages, you can essentially replace one super-slow test with two “sweet spot” tests.

And . . .

In 1/10 the time, you can improve

the “page” more than twice as much.

I used to see people debating the merits of having an intermediate order page. And for people who aren’t running tests on their pages, it’s probably a live question.

However, if you’re split testing, and your overall conversion rate isn’t intially in the “sweet spot”, having an intermediate order page is a “no brainer” when compared with having the sales page alone.

Here’s how it breaks down:

One Page Sales Process:

Measure percentage of visitors reaching the thankyou page.

Starting conversion rate: 1%

Traffic needed to detect a 20% improvement: 30,000 visitors

Two Page Sales Process:

Measure percentage of visitors reaching intermediate order page.

Starting conversion rate: 10%.

Traffic needed to detect a 20% improvement: 2,700 visitors.

Now, if “clicks to the intermediate sales page” correlates with “sales”, and it usually will to some degree (though you have to be careful to design your test for sales and not just clicks to the intermediate page), you could detect a 20% increase in sales with 1/10 the traffic.

You can also run a separate test from the intermediate sales page to the order page, though this will take longer since the intermediate page only sees 1/10 the traffic as the original landing page.

So, one way to move a low converting site into the “sweet spot” for testing, is to increase the number of steps taken by the visitor, and optimize for each step.

But there’s another way . . .

Second,

you can measure “time on page”.

It turns out that time on page is highly correlated with sales, and it’s usually in the “sweet spot”.

The percentage of visitors who stay 60 seconds or longer on the page (or take a desired action sooner), is often somewhere between 20% and 40%. It can be outside that range, but these are fairly common numbers in my experience.

And that’s definitely in the “sweet spot”.

So what you do is . . . instead of trying to take your sales from 0.5% to 0.6%, you can try to take the percentage who stay on your page at least 60 seconds (or take action before that) from 20% to 24%.

And what’s the benfit of doing this?

Here’s the big benefit in a nutshell:

Depending on how well time on page and sales are correlated, you could improve your sales the same amount with just 1,200 visitors instead of 60,000 visitors by optimizing for time on page instead of for sales.

Read that last sentence again. Please.

That’s why I’m taking time to explain this. Measuring time on page is not just a minor little feature. Depending on your starting conversion rate, how your page is set up, and the amount of traffic you get, it might be the ONLY sensible way to optimize your page.

And the time savings of “sweet spot” optimizing get compounded with the already incredible time savings you get with Taguchi testing.

Compared with ordinary split testing Taguchi testing can accelerate your testing 10X, and “sweet spot” testing can accelerate things 4-5 times (You might wonder why I don’t claim a 10X improvement for sweet spot testing . . . remember that, even though you can use less traffic, it can be a little harder to achieve 20% improvement when starting with a higher conversion rate. I’m giving a conservative estimate to take this into account).

So in combination . . .

we’re talking about perhaps 40-50X

faster testing on low converting sales pages.

Now, . . . is “time on page” perfectly correlated with sales?

No.

It’s pretty good, but it can deviate some.

And you have to be careful when you design your tests not to design FOR time on page. You still design your tests to improve sales. But you MEASURE time on page as a proxy for sales.

Also, keep in mind, that, on a long sales letter, only the stuff the visitor sees in the first 60 seconds will affect the time on page metric, so best results will be achieved by testing the “above the fold” and “near the fold” factors.

Anyway, I’m sure I’m missing some pros and cons (feel free to chime in :-D), but that’s the theory behind the new time on page feature in STA.

Now . . .

Let me show you how it works:

Click play to play the video.

http://www.splittestaccelerator.com/videos/timeonpage/timeonpage.html

. . . quick reminder . . .

STA will be up for sale again June 2nd and 3rd, 2008 (and in general the first Monday and Tuesday of each month).

Look for a new offer. I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but let’s just say that I’m going to be working hard to make sure my customers actually get a test set up as soon as possible after purchase.

It is my firm conviction (and a highly justified one) that no qualified customer who actually uses STA will fail to get their money’s worth.

So, once you make your purchase, I want to help you make sure you use it right away.

Stay tuned.

And, as always, please, feel free to comment on this post below.

Sincerely,

Jim

P.S. Quick clarification: Typically when you test a sales page with a low conversion rate, you’re not looking for any particular size of improvement, but you hope to find improvements of all kinds. I used 20% to simplify the discussion. With a low converting page, you’re not hoping to find 20% improvements, precisely because they take too long to find. You’re hoping to find 50% improvements for instance. And you don’t really run 60,000 visitors to your page. Instead, if you don’t find some 50% improvements by the time you’ve sent 10,000 visitors, you stop the test and start a new one. And it should be eaiser to find a 50% improvement on a site starting at 0.5% than one starting at 20%.

True enough.

However, due to the nature of the functions involved, there will still be a sweet spot between 10% and 50%. “Traffic needed” goes up REALLY FAST as the conversion rate goes below 10%. And the difficulty of improving things goes up REALLY FAST as the conversion rate goes over 50%. [feel free to clarify further, if you have questions about this, in the comments section at the end of the post]

Dear Friend,

I’m going to tell you how to install an upgradable version of STA for free.  It’s a limited version, but still powerful.  So read this post carefully if you’re interested.

It’s the first month of my new sales system, and I’m getting a lot done. 

(Just to remind you, I decided to sell STA only two days a month — the first Monday and Tuesday of each month.  The next opportunity will be May 5th and 6th.)

At the time I write this, there were 22 replies to the post I made explaining my reasons for the new schedule.

Some people liked the new system.  Others were a little more doubtfult about it working in the long run.  Pretty much everyone had something helpful to say.  Many gave good advice about outsourcing.  Thanks again to everyone who commented.

There was one concern raised that I want to address . . .

What about someone who wants to

get started with STA mid-month?

Well, I think I have a solution that will be a win-win.

I’m going to give people a chance to install a version of STA any time they like.  It will have all the features of STA, except it will only be a single-variable version, and it will lack the conversion summary and interaction reports.  Other than that, it still has all the other features:

• The same battle-tested STA tracking engine
• Multiple outcomes per test
• Drill down to the visitor level
• Visitor path tracking
• Exclude bad traffic by ip, agent, or referring domain
• Filter results by ad codes, keyword, domain, date.
• Integrate with Clickbank, CJ, and other affiliate networks that allow tracking IDs.
• Upgrades seamlessly to STA — your projects will be imported, and you won’t have to install STA once the free version is installed.
• Etc, . . .

Here’s How this benefits you . . .

If you think you might want to use STA, you can install it any time you want. 

If you’re wondering if STA will work with your current setup, you can just try it.  Install it, and see if you can integrate it.  I don’t always know if STA will work in a set of special circumstances.  This way, you can just see for yourself without paying anything up front.

When you purhcase STA, you won’t have to do another installation.  It will already be installed.  You’ll just load a single page into your browser, and you’ll be upgraded — with all your old projects imported automatically.

If you just want to try STA out before buying it, you can run an unlimited number of simple (single variable) split tests, and get a feel for most of what STA does before you upgrade to the ACCELERATED version.

I’m not asking for any payment information. All I ask is that you read the download page carefully, download the software, and use it.

This will benefit you,

but it will also benefit me.

It will cut down on many of the kinds of support requests I get.  Many people want to know ahead of time whether STA will work on some server configuration that I’m unfamiliar with.  Or they’ll want to know if they can integrate it with XYZ 3rd party software.  This way, I can just say, “I’m not sure . . . but you can feel free to install STA at no charge and see if it works.”

Also, sometimes a customer will get hung up on a step during installation.  STA is pretty easy to install, and it usually goes smoothly, but sometimes a host will mess things up by requiring a strange host name for database access or something.  When money is involved, the stress levels go up.  This way a user can take her or his time installing, and not feel the same anxiety.  And I will have more customers who already have STA installed at time of purchase.

Anyway, I am giving the download link to everyone in my “free course” autoresponder series.  If you’re already subscribed, you’ll get a broadcast message (that’s probably how you got here today). And new subscribers will get a message about this in the follow up sequence.

If you stumbled across this message in some other way, you can get my free course here:

http://www.splittestaccelerator.com/free_mvt_course.php

Please, if you’re thinking about purchasing STA — either this month (May 5th or 6th, 2008), or sometime in the future — take advantage of this. 

And if you hear anyone asking about good free split testing software, let them know that there’s a premium simple split tester available for free — almost certainly better than any other free split testing software, and probably better than the paid versions as well.  Just give out the link I mentioned a couple lines up.

Thanks.  And feel free to leave comments below.

Jim

Dear Friend,

As I mentioned in a previous post, the Split Test Accelerator comes off the market after April 8th (tomorrow relative to time of writing), and will remain off the market until May 5th.

By the way, thank you for all the great comments.  I’m taking all the wishes, advice, and so forth to heart.  Seriously.  I will revisit all the comments from time to time as I evaluate how the new arrangement is going.

For now, I’m testing the new arrangement, and I look forward to getting a lot of good work done during the break

Now, I want to tell you about something new.

STA has a great new feature

that will help you make more affiliate sales.

If you sell affiliate products (as an affiliate) through networks like Clickbank or Commission Junction, you can now use STA to run Taguchi tests on your affiliate pre-sell pages, and track conversions with the TID tracking codes they allow you to insert in your affiliate link.

That means you can try to double your sales through testing, even though you don’t control the thankyou page.  STA can rotate all your testing ideas for you, and keep track of which customers saw which elements on the page.

Clickbank calls it a ‘TID’, Commission Junction calls it an ‘SID’.  Other networks might call it something else.  You’ll know it by how it works.

When you insert a TID into your affiliate link, it looks something like this:

<a href=’http://affiliate-link?tid=444′>visit merchant now!</a>

To use this feature with STA, you just use the STA visitor id number for your TID. 

And the visitor id number can be automatically inserted into your link on your landing page.

 You just make your link look like this:

<a href=’http://affiliate-link?tid=<?php echo $visid;?>‘>visit merchant now!</a>

Then, you collect the TIDs from your sales report from the affiliate network (like Clickbank or CJ), and you feed them back into a special page, and all the multi-variate conversion data will show up in your reports, just like any other test you run with STA.   Here’s what the new TID entry page looks like:

Let me explain the numbered features.

#1:  This is where you enter the TIDs.  If the affiliate sale is your primary outcome, and you’re not tracking ROI (this is the most typical case), you can enter them one per line.  It’s as simple as it could be.

If an affiliate sale is not the primary outcome, or if you want to optimize for ROI instead of straight conversions, there are other simple formats for the data in those cases as well. (Note:  I don’t usually advise optimizing for ROI in most cases, because the variances are huge compared to the straight conversion case, and it takes a lot longer to get actionable information).

#2: This shows you what your affiliate link should look like.

#3:  This part explains how to format your data in the three main cases.

That’s it.  All you have to do is get the list of sales from your affiliate network sales report. Extract the TIDs from each sale, and feed them back into STA.  And then you will get the conversion data you need for your Taguchi test on your affiliate presales page. 

STA has kept track of which factors were on the page for each of these visitors, and it will give credit to the right options every time.

It’s pretty neat. 

Now, it might get even better, depending on how you drive traffic to your page . . .

Do You Use Adwords?

If you use adwords to drive traffic to your affiliate presell pages, things are really good with STA:

• STA tracks the actual long tail keyword the visitor used to find your page.
• It keeps track of which content network sites drive traffic, and what the conversion rates are for each, so you can decide which content network sites to exclude.
• It allows you to use an adgroup or ad-level tracking code, so you can track the conversion rates of your ads and adgroups
• You can even see how all the factors on your landing page perform for each ad, adgroup or keyword.

It’s kind of funny, . . .

The Split Test Accelerator

 is revealing itself to be 

an affiliate marketer’s dream. 

I’ve seen several tools pop up recently that just do some of these things.  And none of them let you run Taguchi tests on your landing page.

STA has done most of these things all along.  I just didn’t know to mention them until these other tools came out.

And, of course, STA is a great tracking and Taguchi-testing tool as well.

 Anyway, I hope to have a video about this made up for next month’s sales cycle.  But I wanted you to know that the new TID feature was live and running already, in case you wanted to get started.

 Remember, Tuesday, April 8th (tomorrow) is the last day STA will be available this month (until May 5th).

Here’s the link to the sales page:

http://www.splittestaccelerator.com

Good Success!

Jim

P.S. feel free to coment on the new affiliate product tracking features. I’m sure I haven’t covered all the bases here.

Dear Friend,

I told you last week that I would take STA off the market soon.  It’s true.

Let me tell you the “what” and the”why” of it.

The What

Basically, it boils down to this: STA will be available for purchase only on the first Monday and Tuesday of every month.

That means STA will be available this month only on April 7th and April 8th. 

Now this first month, I’m not actually pulling STA off the market between now and April 8th, so you can purchase any time between now and then.  But after April 8th you won’t be able to get it again until May 5th and 6th. And after that it will be June 2nd and 3rd.

Also, I’m only going to field sales-related questions for 7 days leading up to and including the days it’s available for purchase.  So I will field sales-related questions for the two days it is for sale, and for the 5 days prior to that. If I get any sales related questions outside of that window, I probably won’t read them.

I will, of course, continue to answer customer questions at all times.  And I’m open to Joint Venture proposals at any time as well.  But I won’t field any sales-related questions.

As for customer service after purchase, nothing will change. You will still have direct email support for a full 6 months after purchase.

Now I know this sounds a little brazen, so let me explain myself a bit.  I think there are some pretty good reasons for doing things this way.  I think you’ll see how the new arrangement might benefit you, so hear me out, and then let me know what you think. 

The Why

Why am I doing this?

Basically, it’s because I wear too many hats all the time.  In my little corner of the business world I’m the sales guy, the programmer, the copywriter, the tester, the new product developer, the customer service representative, and, yes, I even do the taxes

I’m sure some of you can relate to this.

And here’s the thing: Many people who have used multiple split testing products have told me that STA is the best testing product on the market for small businesses. 

That might be true, and I work hard to try to make sure it is true.  Many people love it.  I could impress you with a list of heavy hitters who use it. There are dozens of names you would recognize in an instant.  STA has kind of spread by word of mouth in certain circles.   

But among the average small business owner, it’s not the most used testing and tracking product on the market at this point. 

And that’s because I’ve been doing way too many jobs all by myself, and I haven’t juggled all the jobs very effectively.

Now it’s not the number of jobs that’s a problem.  It’s that not all the jobs are the same. They all require different levels of focus.

If you’re a programmer, you know that when you’re working on a programming project, you need vast stretches of uninterrupted time.

The mere possibility of being interrupted takes some of the attention away from the task and doesn’t allow you to focus as well as you need to.

Same goes for most product development projects, whether it involves writing, recording audio or video, or programming.

Unfortunately, in the past, when I’ve put on the product development hat, I’ve still had on the sales and customer service hats.

And that has put me at the mercy of other people’s schedules to some degree. Because many of the questions I get aren’t things I can just shoot off quick answers to. 

And that means I can’t focus as well on product development.

And that means it takes me twice as long to do new creative work . . .

. . . and it’s a whole lot less enjoyable when it’s riddled through with start and stop episodes.

Waaaaah! Poor Baby!

OK, I’m not saying all this for sympathy.  I don’t need sympathy, because I came up with a solution

Going forward I’m going to wear the sales hat for only 1 week per month.  The week after that I might have to field a few questions about installation and setup, and then I should have a good 2+ weeks every month available to focus on creating new things.

So how does this benefit you?

Well, I think you’ll enjoy some of the new things I’m planning on creating :-D  Some of it involves STA 5.0.  And there are some other projects in the works as well.

I’ll say more about that in another message soon.

Stay tuned.

Jim

P.S., please, feel free to leave your comments below.