There are millions of dollars spent in e-commerce every year.

   Some of it is done with good websites, some of it is done with bad websites.

   But all of our experience has shown us exactly what really is working better.

   Certainly, direct response in Internet marketing is what’s needed. What you’ve learned from any of your direct response marketing, and especially from us, applies on the Internet. It’s the biggest mistake people make. They get on the Internet and they forget about direct response.

   Direct response in the Internet world is just like in the brick-and-mortar world. Direct response means we get them to take action and do something. In the offline world, it’s pick up the phone and call us and order. On the Internet, it’s e-mail for more information or simply click a button and fill out our order form and buy.

   Now, if you’re just doing image advertising on the Internet, like many people make the mistake of doing offline,  it’s certainly cheaper on the Internet than it is in the brick-and-mortar case.

   So unless it’s image advertising (which we don't recommend), you want the visitor to take an action, whatever that may be. So how do we create a site that really sets us up for the best success here and really puts us in a good light to get visitors to respond the way we want them to. We don’t want all these things cluttering up the site and causing them not to do what we want them to do. So we’ve got to be very specific. Same thing we do in regular offline direct mail.

   So what I want to give you here is a quick synopsis of the items we’ve found in our testing of all kinds of factors that give our Web pages the most success and have gotten us the best direct response from the visitors that come to our site.

   Number 1 and foremost, always, is that it must load fast. We used to have a very large Web page at www.instantprofits.com  but we’re always testing  shorter pages. There’s also a trick to get large Web pages to load faster. The faster the pages can load, the better. We actually try to go all HTML and no graphics, but we end up using some graphics for a particular reason. Usually, those reasons promote the response we want.

   Number 2 is there’s got to be customer benefits. They’ve got to be clear, they’ve got to be exciting, they’ve got to get them to act, and they’ve got to be early in the message or a click away. It’s just like if you get an envelope and you open it up. You need a hard-hitting headline and you need to pull and yank them right into that letter with benefits so they don’t throw it away. Same exact thing, but we’re just translating it to the Internet.

   Finally, the offer’s got to be risk-free and hopefully build trust. We tried to do that. We’ve said, "Just ask for your money back and you get it." We can’t be fairer than that. We tell people to use their credit card because if we do something deviant, you can call your credit card company and they’ll help you out.

   Let’s look at these four points one by one.

   The first one is creating a website that loads fast. Remember the old days, when you were on a 14.4 modem and you’d click and go get a drink. It took forever for sites to load. People don’t put up with that anymore. Minimum modems out there are 56K in most people’s computers. And now, companies like @Home are bringing cable modem to homes. So we’ve got to load fast or people will click out and go somewhere else. That’s only going to continue to be more of a factor. As more people get on the Internet, things will slow down. And as more people get faster modems, they’ll want to see things faster. That’s why this is number one.

   Two things can happen. Obviously, if they’re waiting, they can become impatient and just forget it and go somewhere else. Two, if they stay around a while and wait, they’re already kind of ticked off that they had to wait. They don’t get the same experience moving through your pages. Their judgment is tainted, clouded. I’ll assume you agree with me and we’ll move on.

   I’ll go right to the specific points and tell you how to get fast-loading pages.

   First of all, let’s talk about logos. Backgrounds on Web pages, the icons you might put in there, buttons and so forth, these are all things that will slow down a page. We really are completely amazed when we see sites that have all these fancy buttons just to have them. They don’t serve any purpose. The same thing could be accomplished with pure text. And in the case of linking graphics to other pages, text links would work just fine also.

   So there’s just a lot of unnecessary distractions and things that cause the page to load slowly. Again, logos are number one. It’s nice to look professional. It doesn’t usually require a logo to be massive and crystal clear and take out the entire top left corner of your website.

You’ve heard it in the offline world. Everybody talks about it, but nobody cares about your logo as much as you do. It doesn’t do anything to sell your product.

So what benefit do we have to offer them? We need a great headline. That’s what we need. So if you’re going to have some logos in there, try to keep them under 6K. From testing we've found that’s about the best size. You can use a service like http://www.netmechanic.com or http://www.WebsiteGarage.com These are sites that will compact your graphics for you. http://gifLube.com is another one.