Giving away the first two chapters of your book for free is a great way to bring readers in. If you already do that, good. Here's one more idea to add to it. I was working with a book publisher recently. She asked me a good question: how do you hand those chapters over? Her idea: you don't have to make people download a file. You can let them read the chapters right there on the page.. with buttons to buy the book mixed into the words. Both ways can work. But the more I thought about it, the read-on-the-page way fit what I see on these funnels. Think about your own Downloads folder for a second. It's full of files you meant to read. Guides. Reports. Sample chapters. They're still sitting there. A downloaded chapter can end up the same way. They sign up, the file saves, and the moment is gone. A sample mostly does its job while someone is actually reading it. That's when the book starts to feel like theirs already. People feel that way once they're reading it. Reading on the page takes away the "I'll read it later." They're in the book the second they land. Here's the part she had me picture. You're reading a chapter. A few pages in, a banner shows up.. right there in the words. It asks you to grab the full book and links to your funnel or Amazon. Then you keep reading. A few pages later, another one. It's like a little ad living inside the chapter. People get ready to buy at different spots, so the button is already there when they do. This matters for a book more than almost anything else you put out. The book is the front door to everything else you sell. The monthly stuff. The bigger offers. All of it. If no one reads the sample, none of that gets a turn. So if you already give the chapters away, you're on the right path. Try the read-on-the-page way too, and see how it does for you. Put the chapters on the page so people can read them right away. Mix a buy banner in every few pages, linked to your funnel or Amazon. Don't save it all for the very end.

We had a book funnel built for my buddy Steve Cassidy's launch. Free-plus-shipping, the whole thing mapped out. Days before launch, the plan changed. Route everything through Amazon instead, to build momentum on the algorithm before the public launch date. That meant scrapping the funnel and rebuilding it in a few days. Single page, sends people to Amazon, they come back after buying to unlock the digital playbook as their bonus. I didn't love losing the work we'd already done. But the goal was never "ship the funnel we planned." The goal was Steve's book doing well. So we rebuilt toward that instead of defending what we'd already built. Tuesday night I got this text from Steve: "We did it! Number one in two categories." #1 in Self-Employment. #1 in Small Business Sales & Selling. Top 10 in Small Business overall. He also told me I made it easy on him. Coming from a guy who spent years as a Navy EOD tech and built a defense company across 13 countries, that landed. If your plan changes on you close to a deadline, that's not the project falling apart. That's just what it looks like sometimes. Stay firm on the goal and flexible in the approach. Keep shipping funnels. 🚀 - James

DigitalOcean had a free-trial popup converting at a miserable 0.21%. They changed almost nothing about the offer. They changed the reason for it. The new popup: "Wait! It's our birthday, but you get the present. 1 month free cloud hosting. Code: HBD2CW." Opt-in rate jumped 10x. Then they got greedy and tried it for other occasions, Independence Day, Halloween, Christmas. Every single one pulled 10–15x the original rate. The lesson: the same offer feels completely different when there's a reason behind it. "Here's a discount" is noise. "Here's a discount because it's our anniversary" gives people permission to act now. A reason, even a flimsy one, beats no reason at all. What's the story behind your current offer? Or is it just sitting there, naked, with no excuse for existing today?

Haven Holidays sent emails within 24 hours of someone abandoning a cart, tailored to where they dropped off. The campaign returned 2,815% ROI, with much higher open and click rates than their normal emails. But here's the part most people get wrong, from a study of 200 brands: - Sent within 20 minutes of abandonment: 5% conversion - Within an hour: 4.5% - More than 24 hours later: just 2.6% Speed nearly doubles the result. The longer you wait, the colder the intent. Someone who abandoned 20 minutes ago is still at their desk thinking about it. Someone you email tomorrow has moved on with their life. If you've got any kind of cart or order form, the recovery email should fire in minutes, not days. Do you have an abandonment email at all? And if so, how long does it sit before sending?

Wistia analyzed 481,514 calls-to-action across 324,015 videos. Almost everyone (95.9%) puts the CTA at the very end. Here's what actually converted by placement: - Mid-roll: 16.95% - End of video: 10.98% - Pre-roll: 3.15% The words matter too. CTAs with "Signup" converted at 19.5%, "Free" at 12.2%. Image CTAs beat text CTAs (13% vs 10.6%). If you run a VSL or sales video and the only ask is in the last ten seconds, you're asking the people who already left to convert. The ones still watching at the halfway point are your hottest buyers, and you're staying silent. Drop a CTA in the middle, while attention is high. Look at your video's drop-off graph: the spot right before the big drop is where your CTA belongs.