One of the most useful and important tips I ever heard about running an Internet marketing campaign is:

“inspect what you expect.”

In other words…

… don’t assume the printer, the web designer, the merchant account service or any other aspect of your Internet marketing campaign will just automatically do as they are supposed to.

Don’t think someone won’t drop the ball or have a brain fart at the absolute worst time.

Inspect your Internet marketing system — every detail of it — before and during the launch.

Good advice isn’t it?

You’re dang right it is.

In fact, it’s so important… and so ultra critical… I completely ignored it recently and lost a bundle of money as a result.

Let me explain what I mean.

You see, so far just about all the ads I’ve written have paid out and are winners.

There have been a few flops here and there where I tried selling to a market I didn’t really understand.

But the majority have pulled and pulled well.

Except for this one ad my client and I had up for about three months.

Even though it was for a very rabid market that loves to buy… and even though I’m very familiar with that market… the ad didn’t pull even one single order in the three months it was up.

And I mean nothing.

Nada.

Zippo.

Of course, it could be I simply penned a crappy ad.

But even that didn’t explain zero sales.

Especially in this particular market, where even a crappy ad pulls at least some response.

But for some mysterious reason… no matter how much I tweaked the copy, no matter how low we cut the price… we couldn’t produce a single sale.

And this drove me absolutely crazy.

I became obsessed with making it work.

I revised it dozens of times.

Played around with it.

Let other copywriters and Internet marketing friends of mine read it and then revised it again.

And still no sales.

I was almost ready to write the entire thing off as a dud.

And then it happened.

A few weeks ago my client got an email from someone who wanted to buy the product.

He was a customer who kept trying to order… but said the order form wasn’t working. It wasn’t taking his credit card numbers. And the only price that appeared was the cost of shipping.

Doh!

Turns out there was a small glitch with the shopping cart software my client uses. And it wasn’t working properly.

Now, we’ll never know exactly how many sales that stupid little mistake cost us. But judging from the response we’re getting now — about 3% — I’m guessing we flushed at least $10,000 in sales down the toilet.

Obviously, if we’d simply followed the “inspect what you expect” mantra — this never would have happened. We would have noticed the software glitch and nipped it in the bud.

But you know what the real irony is?

Other than the fact nobody phoned their order in (which is another topic for another time)…this is actually a classic Internet marketing blunder routinely committed by seasoned gurus and amateurs alike all the time.

I’d heard about this sort of thing happening hundreds of times. It’s in almost every good marketing and copywriting book I’ve ever read. It’s happened to just about every serious marketer I’ve ever met.

In fact, our situation is a joke compared to the hair-raising screw ups involving multi-millions of dollars being flushed down the toilet because the marketer’s secretary gave the ad rep the wrong 800 number or something to that effect.

Now, you may be tempted to think, “no way will I ever make such a stupid mistake.”

And I hope you’re right.

But it’s a lot like not regularly backing up your computer’s hard drive.

If you get lazy and refuse to sweat the details (as I did in this case) you’ll eventually get nailed.

Anyway, the moral of the story is make sure you inspect what you expect every time.

It only takes a few minutes to check your order form, see what your ad looks like on multiple browsers, verify your third party merchant account service (if you use one) is standing by and not performing “routine maintenance”, and all the other boring, mundane things we love to let other people handle.

And yet… those few minutes can make all the difference at the end of the day.

A little while back I was doing a three-way call with a client and his web designer about how we should position the email opt-in form on one of his sales letters.

He didn’t want to go with a pop-up window, a hover ad or anything like that.

Nor did he really like the idea of having the page refresh or the “thank you for subscribing” page pop up over the sales letter, either.

Instead, he was looking to eliminate any and all potential distractions from the sales letter.

Long story short… the web guy asked why didn’t we just use what’s called an “iframe”?

“An ‘eye’ what?” I asked.

“An iframe”, he explained, “is basically a frame within the web page. A small ‘window’ on the page where you get a glimpse of a whole different page.”

And he suggested we simply put the sign-up form in an iframe.

That way, when someone fills out the opt-in email form and pushes “submit”… the page doesn’t refresh, shunt them off somewhere else or even so much as budge.

Only the iframe — the table your opt-in form is in — changes.

The rest of your page and copy stays exactly as is.

For more information on how this works, talk to your web designer or do a quick Internet search.

It’s a very simple and easy way to eliminate a potential distraction in your online sales letters.

If you would like to learn an almost fool proof way to get people anxiously and eagerly reading your ads, then this article will show you how.

It’s really no mystery anymore that people hate being sold.

We all love to buy, but none of us really likes to be sold.

I mean, think about it.

How many times do you see someone walking around bragging:

“There was no way I was going to let that salesman sell me the cheap model. I demanded he sell me the expensive one, that costs ten times as much!”

No, that doesn’t happen.

At least not very often.

And this is especially true in written sales pitches like in an email, on a website, or direct mail piece.

Which is why if you want to increase readership of your ads… you should try to disguise the fact you are “selling” anything at all in the first part of your ad.

There are a lot of ways to do this.

But one of the best ways is to start out by giving away something free in your ad and saying it right in the beginning.

For example, let’s say you sell health supplements for cats.

You can start your ad by saying something like this:

Free Book Reveals How To Extend Your Cat’s
Life By 5-10 Years

And then you start talking about how this free book will extend your cat’s life.

Then, after you’ve gotten the reader’s complete interest, and his sales shields are down, you segue into how the book is free…but only if they get a free “trial” bottle of your cat health vitamins.

Here’s a fictitious example of how this could be done:

Free Book Reveals How To Extend Your Cat’s
Life By 5-10 Years

Dear Friend,

My name is Bob Jones and I am a vet here in town. In the next few days I am, with your permission, going to send you a free book I have written called: “How To Extend Your Cat’s Life By 5-10 Years.”

Did you know there is actually a way to add up to a decade of healthy and natural life to your beloved cat?

It’s true.

There’s no magic to it, either.

You just need to add a certain herb (you can get at your local grocery store) to your cat’s food and you will extend his life and improve his health.

And in this book I am sending you I reveal exactly what this herb is, where to get it and how to get it for less than five cents a day.

However, there is one small catch.

I will only send you this book if you also let me send you a free trial bottle of my patented cat health supplement…

See how that works?

Try it with your next promotion.

Create a short report or small booklet and lead with giving it away in the beginning, segue into your actual pitch and then watch your response soar.