Been to any of the big “Internet Marketing” launch sales pages — you know, the ones with a sales video at the top (very possibly being the ONLY thing on the page) — lately?

If so, you’ve probably noticed how they like to “hold you hostage”, making you sit through most of their presentation before they give you the link to purchase the product.

I hate those things.

I usually know already if I’m going to purchase the product or not, and I don’t have time to watch these guys wax eloquent about their newfangled toy. Grrrr!

Usually I just look in their source code to find the hidden “Add to Cart” link. If they’re onto that kind of thing and use some kind of black-ops encryption, I often leave the page. The product will be back in some form sooner or later, right?

BUT . . .

I’m a techie and not like most people — apparently most will wait for the darn thing to show itself.  (In truth, I suspect they probably leave the room for 30 minutes to watch some syndicated rerun…)

AND . . .

I recently received an email from Brad Fallon, where he says some testing by Perry Belcher (Google “The Belcher button” if you’re not familiar with him) shows that the sell-through rate of one of these video sales pages is 157% BETTER when they hide the order button until some point in the presentation where the call to action is made.

That makes sense I guess . . . it means people have to listen to all the “benefits” of the product before they see the price. If they saw the price ahead of time, many would just leave, figuring there’s no way the price could be justified (after all, we’re usually talking about price points of $997 or $1997).

So even though I hate it when I encounter these things myself, I may have to concede they’re a good idea — like popups a few years ago, no doubt. But they should test the stick rate when they reveal how long the presentation is vs. when they don’t. I like to at least know how many minutes I can spend doing something else while they yammer on and on . . .

ANYWAY, I had a client a few days ago that wanted to hide his order button until some point in his video presentation, BUT he wanted to set a cookie so that if people came back to the page later, they could see the order button right away and not have to sit through the presentation again.

So I whipped up some simple Javascript code to do just that, and I’m giving it to you right now. You can download the sample page here:

http://www.paulgalloway.com/utilities/hidden_order_link.html

If you view that page, you’ll see this line become visible after 2 minutes:

* * * Paste All Your Time-Delayed Content Here * * *

If you load the page, leave, and come back, you’ll see it immediately.

To see how it works, just view the source code.

You can take this page and edit it however you want — just leave the javascript code intact (there’s some at the top and some at the bottom) and be sure to put your “delayed” content inside the “hiddencontent” div tags, where the above line is now.

Let me know what you think!

Best,

Paul

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 30th, 2010 at 10:07 pm and is filed under Business Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.