Robert Plank

Bottom line.  You need to have at least one product, preferably five, in any given niche.  I would prefer ten but let's not get carried away.

Even if you're an affiliate promoter... guess what, you have a bribe to get people to opt-in or even a bonus if people buy from your link: info-product.

If you are strictly a freelancer... the best possible way to get lots of people banging down your door to pay you money for services is to publish a product to PROVE you know what you're talking about: info-product.

If you're a public speaker it's just about REQUIRED that you have some kind of book before presenting on stage.

And even if you already have a product, or a few... more can't hurt, can they?

So allow me to share with you the first myth that keeps you without a product, so you and I can overcome it.

Myth #7: You Need To Be Authoritative In That Niche To Have A Book

False.  Dr. Phil (a 245 pound overweight man) sells weight loss products. Kim Cattrall (from Sex and the City) wrote a book on how to have endless orgasms and then divorced her husband because he wanted too much sex.  Take your pick.  You don't have to prove you can do something, or even that you follow that advice, only that you can get others to follow that advice.

I have a problem with personal and group coaching if you aren't the expert, but when that situation comes up, you can interview guest experts to host webinars for you or even write your book for you.  Plenty of people use pen names or partner with real experts in a niche.

Want infoproduct creation myth number six? Great... all you need to do is leave a comment below telling me you want it... do that right now.  I need 10 people to tell me they want it.

Today I'm asking you why the heck is your product (if you even have one) so freaking identical to everyone else's?

To be honest, most people think all they have to do to create a product is write some stuff in Microsoft Word, save as a PDF, and setup the thank you page and sales letter.

And guess what... they're right!

The good and bad news... most people stop there. Let's just say that's good news because when you put a tiny bit more effort into your product, you can rise above the rest of the crowd.

The first thing you can do is add a pre-sell funnel.  All you need to do is write a couple of articles based on the content of your e-book.  Flip to three random pages of that 10 or 20 page manual, think about what it describes, and write that thing it describes as a question.  Then answer it... there's your article.

If writing an article is hard for you, then pay somebody $10 per article to write a question that answers it.  Do that four times and you're only out 40 dollars.

Or even better, buy private label rights that allows you to turn the information into a free e-course (only if it's stated in the license) and setup your follow-up sequence in just a few minutes.

Don't even overthink it. Create a four-part follow-up sequence in Aweber, plus one additional follow-up asking people why they haven't purchased.  Create a quick PDF report using EzineArticles.  Use that PDF as a bribe to get people to opt-in on a squeeze page.

That way even if they don't purchase immediately, you can keep following up with them, automatically.

Speaking of private label rights, something else I do if I feel worried about getting sales... is buy a private label rights product in my niche, and tack it onto the offer as a bonus.  (We even discussed this in the PLR Copywriting class last night.)  Bam, you've just doubled the value of your product.

Now get this.  The easiest, fastest, and CHEAPEST way to enhance your product's value is to hold a webinar. I tried launching an e-class ONLY on webinars a few months ago, but the launch bombed.

Do you want to know why?  Because most people are CHICKEN about hosting their own webinars!

But the funny thing is, those people that actually overcame their fears and did it, admitted that once that actually tried it, it wasn't that hard.  And using the proper shortcuts, these people became affluent in webinar hosting in just a few short weeks... when otherwise it could have taken months or years.

You simply can't argue with 50 products created in 28 days... especially when 11 of those were made on the same day!

I'm thinking about hosting a new product creation class. With all the products I've launched, plus the fact that I've co-hosted a product creation class before, and even spoken about the subject live, makes me more qualified to teach it than just about anyone else.

Add to that the fact that my webinars get people to actually go out and DO stuff, and you quickly realize there's no one else who can teach you and make you do it like I can.

Would you guys have any interest in taking a product creation class from me?  Even if you've already created products, just to pick up the shortcuts (especially those I've picked up in the last six months), absorb new confidence and skills (like making webinars), and being accountable to take action and finally get that product out there?

Comment below with "yes" or "no"... "yes" meaning you'd join an 8-week product creation class if I offered it.

As your reward, I'll redirect you to a signup page where you can get on a free live webinar with me on Wednesday, July 1st, 2009 to find out how to make a product a day...

Traffic Bad Boys is a site Jason Fladlien and I launched during the first week of our PLR Copywriting class -- DURING the end of the first class.  It was pretty crazy, we showed our students how fast and easy it is to build a site consisting of private label rights material.

I don't usually read what other people say about me.  But I just read a bad review about Traffic Bad Boys, actually a bunch of bad reviews written by just one guy.  And I'm smiling and laughing about it.  You know why?  Because the only bad things he had to say about it were:

1. I was banned from YouTube, so I "must" be bad.  (Not a good assumption.)

2. Someone blogged about me a couple years ago calling me the next Mike Filsaime in a good way, that reviewer found it and tried to spin that as a bad thing.

3. The Traffic Bad Boys site contains master resale rights material, so it must be bad. (False... in the AM2.0 Platinum Google group full of $100K+ earners we recommend master resale rights products all the time.)

For that class, we took 7 products we had rights to, cut them up into pieces and dripped them out onto a membership site for 7 dollars a month.

The reviewer joined for one day, couldn't wait for the rest of the month or even the rest of the week, cancelled immediately and wrote a bad review about us... even though all he had to base it on was the first 20 pages of the material.

So What Does This All REALLY Mean?

It means you need a $7 product for two reasons: to get people on your list, and to get people OFF your list.

You can't always land a $97 or $497 or $997 sale immediately, you have to build trust.  Get them to say yes to something small and then build them up with upsells.

But when you price so low you're also attracting bad buyers... it's a fact of life.  When those people cancel, you can't take it personally, it's just part of the weeding out process.

You need to weed out those people complaining about having to pay an entire dollar for each product, complaining about having to wait for the rest of the material when they haven't even read what they already have.

(It would be stupid to put your best stuff into your free products and $7 products... save that for your high-end stuff.)

You can't pack the member's area with more stuff because then people will join and complain about being overwhelmed... been there, bought the t-shirt with the Daily Seminar membership.

The Solution!

If you're offering a $7 per month membership site, put $7 of content into it every month... no more, no less.  (That's exactly what we did.)  That sounds like common sense, but far too many people take bad customers personally and overcompensate.

If you were selling everything in that first month for a one time $7 payment, you would value-stack so that the information was already worth at least $50 or $100.  There's no need to further bloat that up to $200 or $300 of value every month just because it's recurring.

Your information and your advice needs to be expensive so people will take it seriously.  That's the real lesson you should take away from what happened with Traffic Bad Boys.

Do you find when you price higher you deal with better customers, yes or yes?  Leave me a comment below to share your thoughts with me.

Nothing for sale today.  If you're on my list you saw the PLR Copywriting 4-week e-course Jason and I are running.

I'm going to give you a peek at what happened inside the member's area at the end of the first class, just so you can see what happens when you combine proven step-by-step solutions with CHALLENGES (instead of homework) with accountability... the productivity level reaches a kind of critical mass:

Question: What was your favorite webinar series and why? What would you want to see on the inside if I offered a HUGE webinar course for you guys?  Answer in the form of a blog comment below.  I appreciate it.

Here's my video newsletter for June 2009:

1. I'm still banned from YouTube... and have send them some e-mails, filled out their online form, sent them a tweet and send a snail mail letter... any other ideas?

2. The AM2 Platinum retreat was awesome but I only joined for the networking. Make some products first, build a list, start making money, then go to physical seminars, and THEN join a club like AM2, in that order.

3. Add Contact (PHP form mail with your physical address listed on the page) and Privacy (use a legal form generator) pages in small text at the bottom of your pages to improve your Google quality score if you do any pay-per-click.

4. You really need to switch to Gmail if you're bogged down with e-mail management.  Heck, forward your existing mail to Gmail and try it out.  The secret is using the Archive function.  Read a message and archive or delete... or reply to a message and archive.  But don't let your inbox contain more than 30 messages at one time.

The big question to cap it all off: My next product is going to be huge, different than anything else I have put out before, higher priced than anything else I have put out before.  What do you think it is?  Comment with your guess below.  Leave me 10 comments and I'll drop the next hint on you.

Hey guys, I'm finally back from the Action Seminar which I co-hosted with Mary Wilhite and Jason Fladlien. It's been a long week. After hosting that event in Dallas for two days I hopped on a plane directly to Chicago for three days at the AM2 Platinum retreat.

I'm not allowed to talk about AM2 (non-disclosure agreement) and filling you with a bunch of takeaways from the Action Seminar wouldn't help you as much as a single point, so here it is. It's something Dale Maxwell, one of our students, put into words better than I could:

Don't ask ten cent questions! Ask $100 or $1000 questions.

If you can find the answer in a Google search, you shouldn't ask it.  I'll still answer if you ask it, but it's a way better use of your time and my time if you ask me the tough questions.  ("What's a blog?" is not a tough question.)

The first day of the Action Seminar was pretty fun... Jason and I both spoke twice, Mary Wilhite spoke, Marc Harty and Jeanette Cates spoke.

The second day was an all-day mastermind session. It was pretty cool when Jason dictated copy to David Burch (one of our old students). At one point we created a free report, squeeze page, and thank you page for Roderick Martin -- including a Flip video of him thanking people for opting in and asking to call his phone number for a free consultation.

Yes, we even uploaded that Flip video to YouTube right in front of everyone and watermarked it. It was pretty cool.

But the rest of the crowd didn't have anything specific to ask. They'd spend 5 to 10 minutes explaining every little detail of their business, and then ask, "What now?" Which was annoying, especially when Jason and I are internet marketers.

We spoke about product creation, time management, passion marketing, video creation, and e-mail marketing so why ask something completely unrelated to those things? I'd rather people asked questions in areas where we were experts so we didn't have to guess. I'm good (probably one of the best) at fast infoproduct creation, fast PHP programming, fast copywriting.

But offline marketing?  I won't touch it.  Nothing wrong with that... it's just not my area of expertise.

Anyway, that's me catching up. Do you ask ten cent questions or thousand dollar questions? Comment below and hit the submit button within the next 5 minutes.