My Sales Stopped And I Don’t Know Why

Just over 2 years ago I approached the guys in my mastermind group with a crazy idea:

What if we recorded our weekly calls—where we dig into our businesses, hash out ideas, celebrate our victories, conduct brutal postmortems on our failures—what if we put all that out as a podcast for the whole world to see?

Those calls became the Entreprogrammers Podcast.

The USP of the Entreprogrammers is:

“We show what it’s really like to start and run a business. Everyone else gives you the shiny happy happy joy joy version. But the reality is, sometimes you fail HARD. Come watch us fail and succeed in public.”

Well, I take that same approach here.

Rather than project the image of a teflon copywriting Superman, I’d rather be upfront about what’s working for me—and what isn’t.

And the truth is, right now I feel like I’m in a dark ally with my back against a wall… and nasty gang of knife-welding thugs is closing in.

I’m talking about this wicked sales slump we’re seeing at Simple Programmer.

I’ve spent the last 4 months building out funnels to sell our two main products, “How to Market Yourself as a Software Developer” and “10 Steps to Learn Anything Quickly.”

It was paying off big time—sales climbed each month, and I’ve been very happy with the conversion numbers we’ve been seeing on the email courses and sales pages.

Since John and I partnered up, monthly revenue from product sales has increased by 3-5X.

And then May happened.

As I write this, we’re on day 9 of a serious drought.

To give you an idea, instead of making 3-5 sales per day like clockwork, our dashboard shows 3 sales all WEEK.

On Monday I spent the morning ripping apart our funnels and looking for anything that could possibly be broken.

My floor-to-ceiling audit turned up a few minor things—the images on one of our sales pages were all jacked up, and there’s a minor glitch in one of my email workflows that throws our tracking off a bit.

But mostly, everything looks pretty normal.

Traffic to the sales pages is down a bit, maybe 20%, but there are some good reasons for that.

Maddeningly, visitors are still clicking the Add to Cart buttons, but for some unknown reason THEY’RE JUST NOT BUYING.

We even tested our checkout process to make sure payments weren’t failing for some odd reason.

It’s baffling. What am I to make of all this?

Well, when I was in karate as a teenager, my sensei used to tell us that earning your blackbelt doesn’t mean you’re a master—all it means is that you’re a SERIOUS STUDENT.

I’ve dedicated the last several years of my life to studying copywriting and email marketing, and when I look back I can see that I’ve certainly come a long way.

But even blackbelts sometimes get the snot beat out of them when they find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Right now it doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot I can do about this slump—other than wait it out and trust that the machinery I’ve built is sound, and at some point it’s going to cough and sputter and then roar back to life.

Today though I have more emails to write. We’re partnering up with a guy named Dan Martell to promote his new software startup program.

And John’s given me some killer stories to work with that I know our list is gonna love.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go put one foot in front of the other for a while.

I’ll keep you posted on how all this turns out!

P.S. There is one other thing I plan to do. I’m calling in the big guns from Perry Marshall’s Mastermind Forum.

This is a private community of “blackbelt marketers” I belong to. The guys and gals in this forum have been through it all—and I’m going to ask them what I might be overlooking here.

Membership in the group is open to people in Perry’s Mastermind Club. It’s not cheap, but if you’re serious about becoming a better marketer, I HIGHLY recommend it.

Details here.

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