Robert Plank

Reading time: 2 - 4 minutes

Let's say you went to the store and saw two parachutes, side by side... one looks okay and costs 50 bucks. The parachute next to it looks HALF as good and costs 25 dollars. Which one do you choose?

The "regular" $50 one, right?

Then you notice there's also a 100 dollar parachute on the shelf.  It comes with an extra emergency backup chute, a checklist for what you should check for before jumping out of an airplane, and a DVD with skydiving tutorials.  You also get one free skydiving lesson included... and one free issue of "Skydiving Magazine."  (Ok I'll admit, I've taken this analogy way too far.)

NOW which parachute would you go for... the regular one or the fancy one?

You might be able to get by with the regular parachute, but you'd feel a lot better if you had that checklist, the DVD, the magazine, and the lesson.

People will pay more for handholding.  Don't try to sell the smallest amount for the lowest price, try to sell the most USEFUL stuff for the highest price.

But not at first.  Put out a small product for a low price with a few features... if people buy that tells you it's worth your time to work on it... add value and increase the price.

That's exactly what I did with this week's launch of Time Management on Crack.  17 dollars JUST for the report.

After 150 people bought, I bumped the price to 27 dollars... and added videos with the same content as the book... so you get the same info with less work and in less time.

Another 150 people and the price is now 37 dollars... I added an additional three hours of video showing me writing a sales letter in one sitting, and gave a TON more details on productivity and articles.

When the price gets to 47 dollars, I'll throw in the recording of the 90 minute webinar where Jeanette Cates grilled me on everything time management.

Start with low ticket stuff... see if they buy... add more stuff and increase the price.  But aim for that high price.  A couple people missed the $17 offer and asked if they could still get that low price.  My response: tell me what one bonus I can add to this package to make it worth $27 for you.

It's so easy to compete based on price, but you're killing your profits.  Most people would have paid $100 for that $50 parachute you're selling... if you only included hand holding.

If you're worried about pricing too high, offer a barebones downsell.

p.s. You can still get Time Management on Crack for under $47... for now.

What do you guys think about selling based on value instead of price?

Reading time: 4 - 6 minutes

I can't believe I haven't given away this procedure on the blog before.  I think I've mentioned it in passing once or twice via comments, and explained it in the private Product University membership last month, but I'm sick of repeating myself, so...

Here is the formula to turn an audio product into a video product.  It requires Camtasia ($299 with 30 day free trial) and Microsoft PowerPoint (OpenOffice is free, or you can get the downloadable home edition of Office 2007 for only $80 on Amazon).

Let's pretend you have an audio product that's 27 minutes long.

1. Open up a blank PowerPoint and start playing the audio in your MP3 player.  (The default black and white theme will work fine for this.)

2. Fast forward to 1:00 (one minute) in the audio and start listening. Type in the main point of 1:00 to 1:59 as the headline of the slide, and type three quick bullet points of 1 to 6 words each.  (Pretend you're back in school and taking quick notes).

3. When the audio passes 2:00, skip to slide 2 by hitting ctrl+enter.  Type in your headline and three bullet points for 2:00 to 2:59 in this.

4. Repeat for the duration of the audio. The beauty of this is if you need to stop at say, 15 minutes, you can come back and you'll know exactly where you left off.  By the end of this, your 27 minute audio now has 27 slides.

5. Insert a slide in front of all the other slides in the PowerPoint.  Change its layout to title slide, and type in the name of the product and the author.

6. (Optional) Edit the master slide and insert your URL at the footer, that way your URL appears on all slides.

7. Select all slides.  In PowerPoint 2003, go to Slide Show... Slide Transition.  In PowerPoint 2007, there should be an Animation tab.  UNCHECK the "advance slide on mouse click" box, and click the "automatically after" box, then type in 01:00 for one minute.

8. Resize your screen to 640x480 resolution, fire up Camtasia Recorder and set it to capture WITHOUT sound, full screen, at 1 frame per second.

9. Start the slide show and hit record (once you get good at this you can actually do it in one click with the "Add-Ins" menu but let's not get ahead of ourselves).  Leave the computer, because if you click around on other windows, even if you have multiple monitors, it will mess up the slide show.  Don't take too long of a walk because you'll want to be there to hit Stop as soon as the slide show goes black.

10. Stop the slide show, save the camrec, open up Camtasia Studio to edit your recording and import both the camrec video and the MP3 audio.  Add a 2nd audio track and drag the MP3 in as the audio.

Congratulations, you've just turned your 27 minute audio into a 27 minute video, and it only took you 27 minutes to listen to the audio and about 2 minutes to get it into Camtasia Studio.

Now export it to an SWF 1 frame per second video if you want to show it on the web.  If you want a downloadable version, I prefer to export to WMV.  Camtasia 5 has a checkbox that will also export into an iPod version. Cool beans!

Guess what, you can also export the PowerPoint slides into PDFs as well.  You've just given yourself an excuse to charge $10 or $20 more for your product.

Don't even have an audio product? Read your book aloud, word for word.  Record it into Camtasia and export just the audio (I don't even bother with programs like Audacity).

This is how I make audio products.  I'll record text word for word into audio, then PowerPoint it to make it a video.

Most of the time I'll do it backwards, and write PowerPoints where 1 slide = 1 page, then record the PowerPoint with Camtasia running, capturing audio as I read each page aloud, and change the slide when I turn the page.

Then export the PowerPoints into PDF, camrecs into WMV, MP3 and iPod... $17 e-book becomes a $47 video product.

For the products Jason and I are creating for the Daily Seminar, most of the time we don't even bother with the text... who has time to write when you are recording a 20 to 60 minute seminar every day?  Just record Camtasia PowerPoints and export video plus audio plus slides. If people really want text, we'll transcribe them, but those costs really add up.

What are your thoughts?  Do you use something similar to my PowerPoint Camtasia method?  Do you have an even BETTER system than me? Please tell me to know, I'm dying to hear about it!

Reading time: 4 - 6 minutes

The other day I was on Clickbank requesting a price increase for my account. (So I can charge more for products.) Guess what? I discovered how you can sell physical products with Clickbank!

As you might know, Clickbank is a payment processor that you can use to handle payments. As far as I am concerned, PayPal is #1 and Clickbank #2. With PayPal you get paid instantly, but with Clickbank, you have access to 100,000+ affiliates to promote your stuff.

Clickbank handles all the affiliate payments and everything, and heck -- they even added support for recurring billing this year (membership sites) and an IPN so you can integrate it with a script.

The only problem? Clickbank only wants you to sell digital products. This is because they have a pretty buyer-centric refund policy and don't want to be like PayPal where it is a big issue to get the physical product back.

So with Clickbank you can have a membership site with affiliates, but no physical product delivery -- like Jim Edwards did with The Net Reporter. ($77 per month and in addition to access to the membership site, he mailed you a physical DVD video every month.)

Here's the loophole for selling physical products with Clickbank... I noticed the following in Clickbank's terms of service:

You may also offer shipped delivery of printed media (books, CD's, and DVD's) as a courtesy to qualified customers (e.g., US and Canada only), provided the shipped media is clearly complementary and not essential to the operation of the originally downloaded digital product.

After having a Clickbank account for 6 years, I never noticed that. What you have to do is provide your members with a hybrid delivery. (Coined by John Reese.) When someone buys this physical product from you, provide 100% of the content in downloadable form -- for instant gratification -- then ship the physical materials as bonuses, for added value.

That's what you should be doing with physical products in the first place and that's what I recommended to Steven Schwartzman when he was disappointed about the Five Minute Articles WSO. Sales picked up after he added the hybrid product delivery.

I am really resisting the push into physical products. I am looking at a gigantic map of how my upsells connect to one another (drawn in Visio). There are about 60 products in that map... not all of them are connected.

I showed that map to Steven Schwartzman and this is what he had to say:

In regards to the image...WOW!!!!!!!!!!!!

I have nothing else to say about that except wow. It's amazing to see how many products you have when it's displayed like that. You can create a course on making those maps.

I recently recorded 4.5 hours of Camtasia PowerPoints for Software Secrets Exposed. This means now, not only do I offer the book, I also offer six 45 minute videos and six audio CDs.

The audio CDs are just the audio from the videos but it means you can burn them and listen to them in your car or whatever.

Should I have released this as a physical product?

• Maybe set the price low at $17 just for the PDF.
• They click to order, and have the chance to get just the audios at $37.
• They click to order, and have the chance to get the audios plus the videos for $47.
• They click to order, and have the chance to get the package for $97 as a set of 3 DVDs plus 6 audio CDs mailed to them.

There are some really good fulfillment services like SwiftCD where all the shipping info is grabbed from PayPal, but yet another drawback is getting my customers on my follow-up list as well for updates.

Could you please comment below and let me know if I should have released this update as a physical product? Have you yourself released a physical product?

Is it even worth the hassle dealing with the shipping problems and refunds... especially since with Clickbank, you can't get those physical items back?

Reading time: 4 - 6 minutes

For 2008 I told myself I was going to treat my internet business more like a business. As in, put work into it every single day (even if it was just a little bit) instead of putting a ton of work into it every now and then (which is a hobby).

It wasn't a "New Year's Resolution." Those never work. I just kept telling myself every day that I was going to have a business instead of a hobby, and after several weeks, it finally stuck.

Building A Business Requires Personal Coaching.

My friend Steven Schwartzman (I've mentioned him before) is my consultant. I have joint ventured with him on projects for the past five years and flew to New York last summer to meet him and attend a Warrior luncheon.

I make more money than him but that's only because I put out more products. As far as internet marketing experience goes, he and I are equals.

Earlier this year he got back into internet marketing after a break for several months -- he was studying for the LSATs to get into law school. I've made it a point to call him every weekday to ask him what he accomplished that day, then tell him what I accomplished that day.

I've noticed a gigantic boost in productivity by doing this. If I have nothing to report I feel like I'm letting him down, and I think it has the same effect on him. We motivate each other pretty darn well this way.

So far in 2008, I've earned $30,247.38 just from PayPal sales alone. That's not counting my day job, that's not counting my Clickbank income, that's not counting my stock trading income (usually that last one loses me money... I hardly do that nowadays anyway).

That's 1,762 sales in the past 100 days. That's right, doing some simple math in your head will tell you: 17 sales and $302.47 per day.

I've launched 24 products since New Year's.

I'm telling you, you need someone like this. I'm not talking about instant messaging, that is a huge time waster. You need someone to actually call on the phone (not Skype, you should be away from the computer) at the end of the day and talk for 5-10 minutes maximum about what you both accomplished.

It needs to be someone far away, it needs to be someone who does the same things you do (marketing on the internet). It can't be someone you know, it can't be a real friend or a family member.

At one point Steven was very sick, on the couch, watching Jeopardy, but we randomly got the idea to get him to watch some internet marketing videos so at least he can accomplish something until he gets better. In the meantime he assured me he was less than a day away from finishing his special report.

As soon as he was all-better, I'm bugged him on the phone every day until it was finished.

I have been feeling a little bit down from these product re-launches, because I put a lot of work into videos for existing products, but each launch only gets me a few hundred dollars because most of my list already owns these products and I deliver free upgrades. (For brand new products, I am used to bringing in a couple thousand dollars in the first few days.)

However, Steven assured me that, in his words, "A few hundred dollars a day is nothing to shake a stick at." It's consistent income and though I have seen several $100-$150 days lately.

My combined income, taking into account PayPal fees, Clickbank, and day job income, equals $34,000 year to date or $136,000 per year. Profit from the past 12 days equals $275 per day on average... or $100,000 annualized.

I must be doing something right. Considering I made $90,000-ish last year INCLUDING day job income, I could be in for quite a boost if I keep doing what I'm doing all year round.

Sometimes it only takes a simple comment like "it's nothing to shake a stick at" to put everything in perspective.

You don't need to spend $2,000 a month on professional personal coaching unless you are making so much money that you need to get rid of that $2,000 for a nice tax write-off... yeah, I wish I'd thought of that before getting my bigass five-figure tax bill this month.

(For the rest of 2008 I have to pay more money per QUARTER in taxes than I made in INCOME for an entire year just a few years ago!)

You just need someone to talk to on the phone. Someone who won't steal your ideas and won't lead you on the wrong path. They can be your equal, it doesn't matter... you just need someone to TALK to.

Could you comment below and tell me if you have a business mentor? Are they paid or free? How often do you communicate? Has it helped you?

Reading time: 2 - 4 minutes

Eugene Humbert, cool guy that he is, sent me an e-mail the other day letting me know that my Camtasia videos were producing weird "chipmunk" sounds.

This only happens with recent (version 9) versions of the Adobe Flash player. There's an easy solution:

Download the Camtasia Audio Bug Fix.

(The zip file is located at the bottom of that page.)

TechSmith solved this in Camtasia 5.02.... but I still use Camtasia 4 because I want my videos to look the same. By the way, this is ADOBE's fault and not Camtasia's.

The cool thing about this tool is, you can drag a whole FOLDER containing your SWF files, and the tool will find the SWF files even if they are buried deep inside other folders.

Last night, I de-chipmunked 14 video products. It didn't take that long at all because I used the above method.If you want the technical explanation of why this had to be done, Flash 9 can't properly play MP3 in SWF files that is encoded at a non-standard bitrate (it only understands bitrates that are a multiple of 11.025 Hz). The audio fixer quickly re-encodes the MP3 audio stream in your Flash file.

Why was all this extra work for me a good thing? It enabled me to finish adding affiliate programs to ALL my infoproducts.

All my products now have the affiliate subdomain trick built-in, as well as solo ads, an affiliate page for quick copy and pasting, and a call-to-action in the final chapter explaining to readers how to join the affiliate program for the product.

Heck, I've even JV Plus enabled all those products on this blog.

Before I encountered this chipmunk emergency, I was lazily working away, putting up maybe 3 or 4 affiliate pages per day. That was a task that I told myself I'd finish FIRST before anything else. So, I had to hurry up and finish all the solo ads before I could begin de-chipmunking.

I whipped out Microsoft Excel, copy and pasted all the product links on this blog's sidebar, then made a column for each thing I had to do for the site (write the solo ad, link to the affiliate page, setup an upsell, write the call-to-action, update the PDF file, de-chipmunk) and I just plowed through it. Because I had to.

So, don't forget to de-chipmunk your Camtasia videos if you haven't already.

Reading time: 4 - 6 minutes

Ben Prater is a guy I have never exchanged words with, unfortunately. He is an expert Internet marketer and has a way of reducing refunds that is pretty damn effective.

He is similar to me because he sells infoproducts in the "make your own software" niche, but he focuses more on the managerial, engineering part of that niche than I do. I am a do-it-yourselfer, he is an idea guy.

I'll never forget his best product… called,
"Software Secrets Exposed."

His sales letter sells you the story of what you can do with his book – his friend at Microsoft who worked in a high tech office and went to the Ferrari factory himself to make sure they painted his six-figure car the exact shade of purple he wanted.

I bought his book in 2003, before a lot of people had thought to direct sales into autoresponders or even save those leads at all. But Ben had thought of that.

You buy from him and you are automatically added to a follow-up series that sends you an automated, personalized message every few days.

When you first purchased, you got the book. After 7 days he sent a 30-page bonus report with a sample blueprint (just like the ones he talks about how to make in his original book).

He sent out more bonus reports after 14, 30, 45, and 60 day periods. They were either bonus chapters that wouldn't have fit anywhere in the book, or interviews with others – which are even easier to make than reports!

He didn't always simply give away the bonus materials… sometimes he asked for something in return.

For example, in one follow-up he offered a report on a related subject – but to get the report, you needed to provide a testimonial for his original "Software Secrets Exposed" e-book. Look at that sales page, it overflows with glowing testimonials!

If you can spread out the bonus items like he does, you will cut down on refunds because those people who refund immediately won't get the bonus items. If you can string them along for long enough, they might pass up the refund period!

When information is cut up into pieces it has a greater "thud" factor. Five twenty page reports all with their own sales letters have a higher value than a big 100 page book, even if contains the exact same information.

Spreading that information out over time gives it even MORE value, because your customer is more likely to read the information given to them in pieces than trying to sift through a huge pile of stuff the day they purchase.

I'll admit, I don't have a follow-up series for every product -- that would take time away from creating new products -- but every now and then I choose one product randomly and spend a minute or two writing a follow-up for it.

It doesn't have to be anything super valuable. You could:

• Remind them to download the product. (7-day followup)
• Ask what they thought of the product... which you can then use as a testimonial. (14-day followup)
• Offer an affiliate link and a solo ad they can copy and paste and send to their list. (30-day followup)
• Send a special discount link to another one of your related products. (45-day followup)
• Give them a surprise bonus report. (60-day followup)

That's how you reduce refunds. Advertise these items in the sales letter as a 7-day bonus, 14-day bonus, and so on.

On a forum I called this strategy:
"Turning a one-time product into a short-term membership site."

If you give a refund, immediately zap them from the update list and block their IP address from your site.

Recently, I paid through the nose for the rights to Software Secrets Exposed, setup a web site and an affiliate program, and added the bonus reports as autoresponder follow-ups just like Ben did.

Do you have any advice on how to reduce refunds? I don't mean legal issues like disputing transactions with PayPal, but ways to turn refunds into a good thing. (In this case adding more long-term value to a product.)

Reading time: 4 - 7 minutes

Don't forget, it's okay to make mistakes. When you break into any niche you have to deal with a learning curve and the only way to learn the most important things in life is to make mistakes doing them.

A "professional newbie" is someone who never wises up, never figures out what they are good at, and doesn't belong in the niche they are in.

Are You a Professional Newbie?

There are people in the internet marketing niche, in the stock trading niche, and in the programming niche who lurk on message boards who have no idea what they are talking about, who post on blogs and have no idea what they are talking about.

In internet marketing, a professional newbie is someone who gets hyped up about AdSense, makes some sites for a few weeks and then gets bored. He gets hyped up by another guru about article marketing, writes some articles, but that doesn't make him any money so he moves onto the next thing.

The professional newbie tries Squidoo, blogging, Craigslist, eBay, Forex, AdWords, Clickbank, PLR, ELance, all only for a few months all with no results.

Oh look... a rock over there... oh wait... another rock over there.

Idiot professional newbies spend all their time "thrashing" from idea to idea without any focus. They don't accomplish anything besides losing money.

I read someone's blog in the stock trading niche who is a professional newbie and probably always will be. He follows the advice of random strangers who post comments on his blog and invests tens of thousands of dollars into some stock he has hardly even heard of, but was given "a tip" that it will make him a bunch of money.

Usually it blows up in his face.

Do you make this same mistake in your niche?

(That newbie whose blog I follow was ahead $200,000 at one point and is now almost $500,000 in debt.)

I see the same mistake in the software niche...

• Professional newbies switch from project to project.
• Professional newbies begin learning how to program, but they get bored and switch around to some other languages.
• Professional newbies want to make their products so perfect that they never get launched.
• Professional newbies want to make the most unique product there is... the only problem is... it's a stupid hair-brained idea and no one wants it.

I could go on forever. In every niche there you are going to deal with a LOT of noise. Moreso if the niche is in any way profitable, because that means others can prey on you -- they profit from your inexperience.

Don't be a professional newbie. Stick to one single project for a month, get off your butt and do some work.

If you have a niche you've always wanted to break into, spend 1-2 days writing a short report and create a sloppy sales page. Send some traffic to it and see if that path is worth pursuing.

Find out what niche you are good at and like.

The only way you are going to get anywhere is by working hard and working smart. You need both. If you work smart but not hard, you're a philosopher. If you work hard but not smart, you're a McDonald's employee.

DO SOMETHING! Stay focused. Don't even think about what your next product will be until the one you're working on now is launched and is selling.

One last thing. You need to know where you want to end up. Do you want to host seminars on your topic, do you want to produce an autoshipped monthly CD series? Do you want to do freelancing and then move up to high-end paid consulting? Or do you just want to sell off the rights to your products and bail out at some point?

It's like a map, you need to know your start point and your end point, and always be on a road that is getting you one step closer to that end point. Just one little step in the right direction.

You can't possibly be thinking about every single road you're going to take to that destination... but on the other hand you can't turn at every single street hoping it will lead you somewhere.

My friend Steven Schwartzman has this problem of taking action... so recently when he had a great idea for a niche to break into, I told him to make the small report, get it out there as sloppily and as quickly as possible, and see if it takes off.

I have been building my business just a little bit every day. I don't think I'm ever going to go full time in internet marketing but I want to build a bigass product funnel, get into physical products then maybe hit some seminars. I don't want to host seminars or speak at any.

The way for me to get there is with more video products, which is why I have been upgrading my e-books to video packages. So far this month I have released Simple JavaScript, Sales Page Tactics Volume 1 and Sales Page Tactics Volume 2 as video products.

I'm not going to try to break into any other niches at this time or pursue any weird projects right now like a membership site. I'm not going to go back to freelancing or put effort into any big joint ventures because that's not the direction I want to be headed towards... but that's just me personally.

What you want with your sites, your products and your niche is going to be way different than what I want.