How to Lose Your Belly and Thighs

By Craig Ballantyne

If you want to lose belly fat, you should do lots of crunches. And if you want to tone your thighs, you should reach for your ThighMaster. Right?

Wrong on both counts.

Instead, you should do a form of short-burst exercise that I've been using with clients since 1998 - long before the average trainer jumped on the bandwagon.

In one study, Australian researchers from the University of New South Wales put three groups of women through a 15-week fat-loss exercise program. One group was a control group. Another group did three sessions of intervals per week (20 minutes per workout). And the third group did three sessions of long, slow, boring cardio (40 minutes per workout).

Forty-five women were in the study - and it is important to note that they were not all overweight. On average, they had a healthy body mass index of only 23.22 (well below the cut-off of 25 that signals overweight).

At the end of the 15 weeks, only the interval-training group showed significant weight loss and a decrease in body fat and trunk fat. The interval-training group also had a significant loss of fat from their legs. And the more overweight a subject was, the better the interval-training program worked for her.

Oh, and did I mention that the slow, boring cardio workouts did NOT result in a significant loss of body fat? Something we've been saying here at ETR for a long time now...

So if you want to burn your belly fat and lose a few inches from your thighs, get started on a short, 20-minute interval-training program done three times per week. That's all you need.

[Ed. Note: If you are new to exercise but want to lose weight, start with a beginner bodyweight-training program for 2-6 weeks, such as the one in Craig's Turbulence Training manual. You will also get specific step-by-step instructions on how to do intervals at any fitness level.]

"The success combination in business is: Do what you do better... and do more of what you do."
- David Joseph Schwartz

A Traveling Salesman Finally Arrives at Home

By David Cross

For as long as I can remember, there's been a fundamental problem with running pretty much any business. Finally, we've figured out the solution.

In the old days, it was known as the "traveling salesman problem." You see, a salesman needs to visit a number of geographically disparate cities. The problem - known in mathematics as a problem of combinatorial optimization - is how to visit all of the locations in the least amount of time.

The same problem applies to baking a cake. How do you combine flour, eggs, sugar, and butter in the right combination to make a light, moist, delicious cake?

But this problem extends beyond traveling salespeople and cake baking. Every businessperson faces the same challenge every day. Namely, how do you combine the resources you have at your disposal to produce the best outcome?

The traveling salesman problem may still have mathematicians scratching their heads. But there's now a solution - which I'll get to in a minute - for similar problems facing online businesses.

Let's use pay-per-click (PPC) advertising as an example. How do you combine headline and content and offer at an optimal cost to convert the highest number of qualified prospects into paying customers or newsletter subscribers?

A problem like this can seem nearly impossible to solve. There are so many elements to consider that you can quickly come up with thousands of possible combinations. And that makes it unlikely that you'll be able to calculate the single combination of elements that will produce the best result.

So you take a chance, pick one of the possible permutations, and say, "We'll do it this way." Let's face it - you have to do that, or it would take forever to make a decision and get on with your business.

But "this way" may not be the best way. A different combination of elements could produce a better result. The only way to find out is to test a new combination. And then another one... and another one.

Baking a Better Cake

What you need is a way to test a number of possible combinations simultaneously. If you could test several different combinations of offer, headline, and content for your PPC ad, you could come to a pretty definite conclusion that one is truly better than the others.

Now, this is actually possible. It's known as "multivariate testing." And it can be used for any aspect of online business where there is a measurable goal.

We've started to use this approach at Early to Rise and other Agora businesses, and have seen remarkable results. Specifically, we've used multivariate testing to improve a number of our landing pages for PPC campaigns. (The landing page is the page a person arrives at after clicking on a PPC ad.) To our surprise, we were able to improve many of our existing campaigns by at least 24 percent.

On one landing page where people sign up for an e-mail newsletter, for example, we increased sign-ups by 57 percent by testing different combinations of headlines, copy, and the sign-up form.

On a shopping cart checkout page, we found that only 2.9 percent of people who started the checkout actually completed it. This was costing millions of dollars in lost sales annually. We tested various content, the placement of security seals, etc., and the result was a 375 percent increase in the number of people completing the checkout process.

And a client of mine who offers a free report on living and buying property in Ecuador increased the number of people signing up for it by 29 percent. He did so simply by testing the placement of elements on his sign-up page. He's now bringing in about 3,000 additional e-mail names a year... without spending any extra money.

How to Get Started

A number of companies offer software that can help you develop multivariate tests. These include Google, Verster, and Sitespect. You can also find "behavioral targeting" systems, such as Omniture's "Touch Clarity," that adapt site content based on site visitor actions.

At ETR, we chose Google's Website Optimizer tool. It's quick and simple to use, it integrates well with our existing websites, and it does the math for you to show what is working and what isn't. Plus, it's free. You can also find a good online support group for it, and a number of tutorials and learning resources.

If you're unfamiliar with testing, or need a brush up, I recommend that you read some of the classic direct-marketing books. Ogilvy on Advertising will give you a good understanding of why and how to approach testing, and what to test. Other classics include Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins (available free online), and Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene M. Schwarz.

One of the first things you might want to test is your PPC landing pages. For instance, you could test two variations of a headline. Or you could test the content of a page by breaking a paragraph into benefit-driven bullet points.

Google's tool guides you through the process, and calculates all the numbers. Depending on the amount of traffic your landing page gets, you get an indication of what is working within a few days. For example, you might start to see that a certain headline on your PPC ad is starting to get more orders... or that including a certain price in the ad gets more people to click through to your landing page.

Over time, a more accurate picture begins to emerge of which combination of individual elements produces the best overall result.

Of course, you could do the statistical analysis yourself to see how the variations you're testing are performing. But it would mean a huge expenditure of time and energy. Since you have a business to run, using Google or some other multivariate testing software is a much better option.

A Winning Combination

In the multivariate tests I've conducted, the "worst" improvement I've ever seen was 24 percent. And I know of reputable marketers who've had improvements approaching 400 percent.

What kind of results can you expect? I believe you can reasonably expect an improvement of between 20 percent and 60 percent on any campaign you are running today.

I first started doing business online 20 years ago. In my experience, multivariate testing is the most powerful tool that has emerged since then for Internet marketers. I encourage you to yoke this approach to your online business without delay.

[Ed. Note: David Cross is Senior Internet Consultant for Agora Inc.]

Let's Talk About... Talking

By Judith Strauss

I picked up the phone and Miss Blake, the school nurse, was on the line. "Mrs. Strauss," she said, "I'm sorry to have to tell you this, but your daughter fell on the playground and hit her head."

"Where is she? Is she in your office? Should I come and get her?"

"Oh, no. Oh, no. I'm sorry... she's gone."

It was a heart-stopping moment. And though it happened decades ago, I'll never forget the way I felt. Did I hear what I thought I heard?

"Gone?" I repeated.

"Yes, she's gone. She's fine. She went back to class."

She's fine! Well, why didn't Miss Blake say that up front?

What can we learn from this?

Being able to speak well is a basic communication skill. Along with being able to write well, as Michael Masterson has said many times, it's necessary for success in business.

Choosing your words carefully is especially important if you're giving information over the phone. In person, you can judge the effect your words are having. And if, for example, you see a look of panic in the other person's eyes when you say something like "She's gone," you can quickly adjust and explain what you meant. But you can't do that if you're not face to face.

So think before you pick up the phone. And even if you're shunted onto voice mail, you can be sure your intended message will come across.

[Ed. Note: One of the best ways to improve your speaking is by understanding more about the words you choose. The bigger your vocabulary, the easier it is to choose the most appropriate word for any situation.]

It's Fun to Know: Flirting for College Credit

Hoping to boost a sagging birthrate - and concerned that its declining population could hurt economic growth - the government of Singapore has put together a very different type of college course. In it, students learn the arts of flirting, relationships, dating, love song analysis, and online chatting. The new course, which filled up so quickly that additional classes had to be added, is one component of the city-state's efforts to convince young people to get married and have children.

(Source: Reuters)

Word to the Wise: Disparate

"Disparate" (DIS-per-it) - from the Latin for "separate" - means fundamentally distinct or different.

Example (as used by David Cross today): "A salesman needs to visit a number of geographically disparate cities." __________________________________________________
These articles appear courtesy of Early to Rise [Issue #2360, 05-20-08], the Internet's most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com/.