Site: www.VinceDelMonteFitness.com

Target Audience: Skinny guys who want to build muscle

Traffic: I get 200-400 unique visitors a day

Conversion: 2-5 book sales ($37 product) since lauch 4 months ago

Personal Goals: Currently, my site pays for my mortage each month. I would like to double my revenue to live expense free ($3000 a month). I am 26 years old and would like to do this in the next 2 years and than create more sites.

From what I know, my conversion is 'normal'. IMO, it should be way higher.

Feel free to do what you guys do best and critique away. Thanks in advance!

Your headline could be much stronger, it isn't hitting any emotional buttons -- you're just telling them the basic facts, which are important, but you should talk about those further down.

To grab them at the beginning and keep them reading, you need to identify the deepest, gut-level emotional reasons that your customers want to bulk up. You touch on that briefly further down -- to be attractive enough to turn heads, to get laid more often (whether you imply that explicitly or implicitly), to win athletic competitions, for self-defense purposes, or whatever.

You need to put that kind of stuff in your headline. You could also move the personal stuff, about your own transformation, further up and feature it more prominently -- that gives both human interest and credibility to your product.

Ken S.

Thanks a million Ken. I will work on that.

I would love to hear more critiques of my site...thanks in advance.

Goto my library and follow Rule #1.

Then reduce one of the headlines to a sub-head.

Then replace "you" with OTHER testimonials on top of the fold.
Maybe two or three small pics.

Then market to your list. There are maybe 100 - 2000 products that could compliment the information you've already sold. The conversion on your list is much higher than from the search engines.

I agree fully with Ken. Your opening needs to be more emotional and your headline rambles and is non-specific. The headline also gets a bit starved for attention because of the text in your header graphic.

The body copy is quite good in it's content but I think it needs a bit of editing to make it more concise, even the testimonials. Also the body copy has some basic flaws in it's structure -- some of it is in the wrong place.

People buy because of emotion and then justify it with intellectual reasons why. You have your 'reasons why' copy before the emotional story about how you were a room mate with 4 muscular guys whilst you were skinny. I would swap these around as a story is more engaging to the reader and should be close to the top. Every skinny "hardgainer" would relate to this story so it doesn't violate the 'What's In It For Me Rule'.

Speaking of 'skinny hardgainers', I would put the word 'skinny' in front of 'hardgainer' throughout most of the copy. When offering benefits to these type of bodybuilders you should always appeal to the hidden reasons they train -- not just the obvious ones. Instead of "Do you want to gain muscle?" you should ask something like "Do you want your buddies to stop calling you string bean?" or something similar.

People want your product because of their self esteem issues...not because they want to gain muscle. (I know, I've been training for 20 years)

Apart from that I think it's pretty good copy that says everything it has to.

Thanks to everyone who has helped so far.

Here are the changes I made:
1. Headline
2. Moved hyper links to the bottom
3. Black background
4. Established credibility at the front of the story instead of in the middle
5. Testimonials more strategically placed.

I am in the process of adding some audio...

...obviously time will show by testing but what else would you guys suggest? First impressions of my updated site?

Thanks in advance
How To Build Muscle And Gain Weight Quickly

Your conversion numbers aren't bad for that market.

You can spend the next few months tweaking your copy over and over and over...

-or-

You can create a more expensive back-end product and start making big money!

Here's the advantages:

1) Your back-end product can be much, much more expensive (more profits for you)
2) Since you're only going to pitch this to existing customers, your conversion rate will be much, much higher (more profits for you plus zero ad costs!)

That's my two cents...
-

Here's a few ideas...

1. The headline is weak.

Maybe something more along the lines of...


"How This Secret Explosive Muscle Building Formula
Turned A Scrawny 149 Pound Weakling
Into A 190 Pound Muscled Chick Magnet..."

Now you can discover the secret muscle building formula that won Vince DelMonte the 2005 Canadian Fitness Male Model Championships AND had him featured in the highly respected international magazine Maximum Fitness.

An explosive, unique approach to build your body into rock hard muscle in six months or less proven to work even if you've got "skinny genes" or you've tried every supplement and program on the market.

"Who Else Wants A Body Of Rock Hard Muscle...etc etc.



2. Have you tested using an optin landing page instead of a sales letter to capture email addreses.


3. Instead of the free report...
The Top 20 Ways To Screw Up In The Gym -
Side Step These Suicide Training Errors

Try calling it a FREE Email Course (Normally $2 20 Ways to screw up in the gym.

And send out a series of at least 7 (as many as 20) emails each leading to the day's lesson online.

Each lesson links to the sales letter for your product.

Changing the way you follow up with autoresponders can make the biggest difference to your response rate both for this product and for any other product you promote to your list in the future.


4. This one is simple. Get a little more white space (another 5-10 pixels between the copy and the side borders.


5. If you're offering "Six Months Of Free Online Email Coaching".

You might want to create a membership site, give your buyers 1 month free membership when they buy the ebook then start charging them monthly.

Even if it's just $10 a month and only 1/4 of your buyers stay as members you do the math on what that does to your income.


Hope something here helps.

Kindest regards,
Andrew Cavanagh

FREE Audio Online Copywriting Course

Wow...that's another great headline. I'm just starting to test one I had with FrankSherrills input so I will keep this one on file.

Out of curiosity...what percentage of people should be staying at my site for longer than 5 seconds?

No. Should I? I'm still trying to figure out if a static opt in box is better than a drop box and vice versa...

I actually do have an extenesive three month followup system that includes lots of content and a few soft offers thrown in.

Are you saying it's too 'bunched'?

Gottcha. I thought of this but do not even have 1000 customers yet so I would like to increase my following first but I think this is a powerful idea I will implement one day.

Love to live and live to love
Vince

Vince,

Id like to point out some issues, mostly design.
I'll go through the problems as I see them...

Get a new domain that describes the product.
Maybe NoNonsenseBodybuilding.com or something.
The domain is the very first headline.

Break your site into a few tables so it appears faster.
You could be losing a huge percentage of slow connection
users.

Get Rid of the copy in the header graphic.
You don't want sentences in a header graphic.
It will decrease conversion.
Just keep the name of your product and/or a tag line.

Your Headline is to wide.
Its too long
It is to hard to read.
It doesn't make sense.
It breaks into 2 parts making
it even harder to read.

Try something like:
---------
"Discover How A 149 Pound Weakling Packed
On 49 Pounds Of Pure Muscle In Just 6 Months"

Now he wants to teach you exactly blah blach
----------


Get rid of the horizontal red line.
Your stopping people from getting into the copy.
Try adding a drop cap and a head photo to draw
people into the copy.

Your font is to large. I would try 11.
Decrease your paragraph width.
You also need white space between your table border
and your text.
Otherwise you'll lose readership.

Get rid of some of the underlining.
The more you underline the less sensitive people
will become to it.

Add a stronger headline to each testimonial.
Decrease the size of the testimonial photos.

I see lots of issues with just general layout.
You need to give the eyes more white space
to rest.
You also need to make sections stand out by
not repeating the same old red black yellow
combination.

I would also work on better eBook covers.

I would bring more attention to your guarantee.
Maybe put it in a johnson box.
Maybe put it in handwriting.

Put your order form in a dashed box.
At least move away from the same
old red border cream filled box.

Don't use a red order link. Links should
be BLUE.
Restate all the products you are giving
away and there value in the order form.

Increase your price. I think try $39.95
and even $47 or $49
You have enough copy and value boosters
to help you increase the price.

There is more specific things that need changing.
But overall you need to improve readability, flow
professionalism and add just a few more marketing
tricks.
Overall the copy is very good.

I'm actually looking for a bodybuilding site to cross
promote with a few sites I have coming out.
So I may give you an email in a few weeks time.

Cheers
Matt