Robert Plank

Early yesterday morning (about 24 hours ago) I released yet another PHP video series. This one is called Top Secret PHP.

I launched it using a nickel sale.

What's a nickel sale? Keep reading...

Just so you know what I'm talking about, it's like my other video infoproducts where I supply 7 PHP scripts, provide detailed step-by-step PDF instructions on how they were made, plus a 10-minute-ish video showing it in action, and how you can customize it to fit your site.

It has scripts to run some pretty unique special offers... like fast action bonuses, client-side one time offers, and upsell series.

The rest of the scripts and videos deal with affiliate marketing: how to stop affiliate vendors from stealing your keyword research, how to place pop-ups on other peoples' sites.

It even shows how to tweak your vendor's sales copy to make sometimes very necessary changes (like remove THEIR opt-in forms and ads from sales pages you risked your hard-earned advertising dollars to promote).

Because my most successful product launch (that $3,000 day last June when I announced Web Sites on Crack) was a nickel sale, I decided to go with what works.

A Nickel Sale is Where You Set the Price of Your Product At $0.05.

When someone buys, the price changes to $0.10 and the second buyer has to pay 10 cents for the same product.

Buyer number three has to pay $0.15. And so on.

You wouldn't think it adds up, but it does. I got Web Sites on Crack to run up to the $20 level, which means 400 buyers, so even though people were paying under a dollar at first, the last few people paid $20 for the exact same thing.

With 400 buyers, you average out to about $10 per person or $4000.

Even with just 200 buyers, that's $5 per person on average or $1000 in profit.

An added surprise bonus: That rush of early buyers provides the social proof for others to buy in quickly so THEY don't miss out before the price rises again. It feels like buying a rising stock in the stock market.

Gary Ambrose did this exact same thing with a program called "Nickelmania." I didn't hear about it until a year or so after he did it, after I began doing it.

The difference was with Gary's opp, he offered an affiliate program AND a physical DVD. That is even more ballsy. I'm only offering a downloadable product. If I don't make any money, that's no big deal. But a DVD costs about $5 to have autoshipped. If he gets less than 200 buyers, he loses money.

Then again Gary is all about list building. He is one of those guys who doesn't care about losing a little bit of money because... it's just like AdWords! He's paying for each lead, just like with AdWords you pay for each click to your site, and try to funnel it into a list.

His system is even better than AdWords, because he only pays per lead, not per click, and he's paying for a lead of someone who is willing to give money to him... now he can hit them with a backend product or market to them later down the line.

I've seen Russell Brunson have a site where he PAID affiliates $1 for each newletter sign-up they referred. He doesn't mind the initial loss because he's build a huge list of responsive people.

Even better: pre-qualify subscribers by making them buy something first. I recently saw a site that offered a 1000% commission affiliate program. What he did was charge people 10 cents to sign up to his newsletter, but paid affiliates $1 for each confirmed subscriber. It's the same idea... thinking of it in terms of pay-per-lead.

The moral of the story?
5 cents isn't that cheap, it isn't even a loss after you get a couple hundred sales in.

Here are my sales statistics for Top Secret PHP starting on midnight Thursday January 24th, 2008 and ending on 11:59 PM on that same Thursday...

Number of sales: 298
Profit: $2,179.60
Profit Per Customer: $7.31
Profit after PayPal fees: $2,019.75

Additional sidetracked sales: $124.38

Sure beats the hell out of that slow burning incremental product launch I did with PHP Uncensored, doesn't it? The Top Secret PHP launch just made in a day, what it took PHP Uncensored to two weeks to earn.

P.S. That dimesale / nickelsale script is a part of Sales Page Tactics Volume 3 if you were curious.

What's your opinion on this?

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I released the updated "PHP Uncensored" e-book and video package last night, complete with chapter 4.

Some of you were interested in my sales numbers for this launch, I'm going to give them to you. Keep in mind they aren't super great and I never put a lot of work into product launches.

Buyers at $10.00: 168 = $1,680.00
Buyers at $12.50: 28 = $350.00
Buyers at $15.00: 6 = $90.00

(Remember, we want to tally up profits -- not the number of sales.)

Total buyers: 202
Total sales: $2,120.00
After PayPal fees: $1,988.84

No advertising, no JVs, no affiliate programs, just a little bit of good old fashioned lazy forum and list marketing. That means zero expenses for me.

I'm only happy with about $3,000 from a single product launch. Remember that in June I made $3,000 in a single day. I keep telling myself that there are three more chapters to add so maybe things will pick up a bit.

My "Web Sites on Crack" and "PHP on Crack" products sold 405 copies each so I consider that the absolute highest number of buyers I am capable of attracting at this time.

But anyway, back to "PHP Uncensored"...

This latest script in there is a "Link Spy" and shows how to find out what pages on your web site are losing the most visitors.

You get a complete list of what pages on your site your visitors leave from... and which URL they end up going to!

If you can narrow down the links on your site that lose you the most traffic, you could:

• Edit the page and place an opt-in box right before that link to make sure you don't lose visitors permanently.
• Investigate the link and find out if the site you are linking to has an affiliate program you can join.
• Contact the owner of the other site and offer to setup a link exchange.

If an article or page on your site was really really popular... and you plugged that one leak... even one extra sale per week for a year would add up to a nice chunk of change.

Here is the URL to that product so you know what I'm talking about:
www.PHPUncensored.com

Remember that because I'm following that mini product launch plan outlined on my blog earlier this month, every time I add a new chapter, I give free upgrades to existing buyers and then increase the price for new buyers. So the lowest price to get in is right now.

Hopefully these tips have been helpful. What do you think?

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The entry about product creation that I was going to post today will have to wait until Monday. That's because I just launched a new PHP video package and it's called PHP Uncensored.

But there's a little bit of a twist to it. I'm following the mini-product launch formula we talked about earlier this week. Usually my PHP video packages contain: 7 scripts, 7 chapters of an e-book, and 7 videos. Retail price after all the specials are over: around $20-$30.

Video 1: How To Bully Your Web Visitors To Buy When You Show How Many Copies Of A Product Are Remaining! (5 minutes 44 seconds)

Shocking but clever Internet marketing technique exposed: Who ever thought to combine a countdown timer with a popup?

Video 2: Automatically Keep Your Headlines Current And Up To Date In A Way That Evokes Familiarity From Your Readers! (10 minutes 4 seconds)

Tune-up the existing headlines on your site by making sure they always refer to current (or upcoming) events -- your sales copy will never require maintenance!

Videos 3 through 7 are currently CENSORED!! You don't know what's coming, but I know what's coming, and I'm telling you these are some damn cool unique and really useful scripts in the pipeline.

With PHP Uncensored, you get the first 2 scripts, chapters, and videos for $10 because that's all I've made so far. Actually that's half true, if you are on my mailing list and read my e-mails I have had two full books written (complete with scripts) but I didn't make the videos.

In a couple of days I'm going to release the third chapter and bump up the price to $12.50. Then a few days later, I'll put out the fourth chapter and bump up the price to $15.00 ... and so on, $2.50 each time, until all 7 chapters are available.

I'm offering free upgrades with this. That means when I release chapter 3, chapter 4, chapter 5, and so on, you get all those updated versions as they come out. It's your choice... you can pay $10 now and get the same thing or wait a few days and pay as much as $22.50.

Here's that link one more time: http://www.phpuncensored.com ...

Please post your thoughts below...

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