I was reading Apple’s earning report today (impressive yawn!) and the end of their press release prompted me to start thinking about elevator pitches again. So, what is an elevator pitch firstly? And secondly how do you create one?

An elevator pitch is:

• “A short summary used to quickly and simply define a product, service, or organization and its value proposition. The name “elevator pitch” reflects the idea that it should be possible to deliver the summary in the time span of an elevator ride, or approximately thirty seconds to two minutes.”

We’ve all watched those cheesy but strangely addictive infomercials (i’ll speak for you here). Well, these guys are incredible “elevator pitch” guys. Take the Shamwow master “elevator” pitch (enjoy the video if you like). He gets over the usefulness, price and what his product does in a quick compelling way – we end up believing we NEED an-ultra-absorbant-micro-fiber-cloth-made-in-Germany-that-dries-the-countertops-and-the-dog-in-under-2-seconds whether we actually do or not (i bought a set after all).

Your elevator pitch should do the same thing for your business or product without the cheesy obnoxious delivery.

Here’s how apple explain their business in a few words – the spoken elevator pitch would be more suited to verbal delivery but the content would be similar:

• “Apple designs Macs, the best personal computers in the world, along with OS X, iLife, iWork and professional software. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store. Apple has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced iPad 2 which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices”.

(it’s just missing a closing statement  … “and we make a crap load of money doing it”.)

Now we’ve answered “what is an elevator pitch?”, here’s a couple good tools for helping you to craft your pitch.

This video walks you through the basics of creating an elevator and works well at focusing you on what to say:

Madlibs for Pitching from Founder Showcase on Vimeo.

The second tool, from the Harvard Business Review, takes a more formal approach but is useful as well (click the image and it will run on their website):

 
 
And a something to finish with…

See how your purchasing power falls each year. You need $1.28 now to buy the same thing that cost $1 in 2,000.

Try yourself here

Demand Media executives say their websites are content-driven to attract visitors by showing up in multiword search-engine queries. The more words that are typed into a search engine, the more specific the search will be. This is called “the long tail”^[22] search. Demand Media attempts to get visitors to its websites with these long-tail searches. It then tries to retain visitors with related content and social media tools. Their social media platforms get 3 billion interactions per month for clients with already well established brands.^[23] Demand Media commissions specific website content that it then distributes to its own websites and others where they have advertising revenue sharing agreements.^[24] As of 2008 Demand Media owned 135,000 videos and 340,000 articles. It is the largest contributor to YouTube, uploading between 10,000 and 20,000 new videos per month, and gets about 1.5 million page views per day on YouTube.^[25]

Content is generated via a process in which Demand Media uses algorithms to generate titles, then posts the titles to a screened pool of free-lance writers or video creators. The list of available titles is always >100,000. Typically, writers can claim up to ten titles and then have a week to submit the articles. Format and length are dictated by guidelines. Submitted articles go to an editor (also a freelancer) who can either clean it up or request a rewrite. After writers submit a revised article it is either accepted or rejected. Payment via PayPal is twice a week.

Demand Media’s acquisition of Pluck.com in 2008 gave it the means to provide specialized content and social media platforms to any website.^[15] The content comes with advertising attached. The website owners get free content for their sites and split the advertising revenue with Demand Media. This hybrid Internet publishing model has been referred to as Curated Social Content.^[26] It is a combination of Enterprise Generated Media, such as newspapers, and consumer-generated media, such as blogs.

More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_Media

I recently set up a pilot program for my company (OpenStudy) with MIT OpenCourseware (just voted one of the Top 50 Websites of 2010 by Time Magazine) and i was able to increase my ‘call-to-action’ by 18%.

In this case, my call to action was to get students interested in joining a study group when taking an MIT online lectures to sign up for OpenStudy.

Historically, our ‘sign-up’ button at OpenStudy read, “Sign Up For OpenStudy”. I wanted to see if i could increase the conversion rate of people visiting the web page to learn about the service, so i setup a simple A/B test using a service called Unbounce.com.

Test A has the word ‘Free’ on the sign up button displayed on the web page and Page B did not have the word free on the button. Everything else on the page was the same. 50% of traffic was channeled to Test A and 50% to Page B.

Button A:

Button B:

The difference in results were significant:

• Conversion rate (i.e. call to action = to sign up)  42% vs 34%.

• HAVING THE WORD ‘FREE’ IMPROVES SIGN UP BY 18%