Archive for December, 2008
Recession?
What are you working on this week? I'm cranking out a bunch of content for a new membership site...
Lots of marketers the past couple of months are using the economic recession as a hook to sell their stuff. "This system will help you profit in a recession..." I'm sure you're tired of it. You can't have a Unique Selling Proposition if it's not unique!
It's not just the internet marketing niche either. I got this e-mail from Experts Exchange (a programming forum) a few weeks ago:
"If you had invested in the S&P 500 just before Thanksgiving 2007, and cashed out just before Thanksgiving 2008, you would have lost 41% of your money."
Boo-frickin-hoo. I lost $30k in cash to the stock market the first month of this year. The value of my home has dropped $137,000 in the past 5 months on a city block where at least 30% of the homes were in foreclosure when I moved in.
One of my relatives was laid off this month, and you know what he immediately did? He didn't feel sorry for himself -- he started looking for another job. He has a savings account that will last him a little while and doesn't have a ton of debt that will eat him alive.
Another friend of mine just bought a brand new car and a house for his wife and kid, neither of them are college educated, they work "average" jobs and they can actually afford the payments.
For my business partner and I, 2008 was our most profitable year ever. I just made close to $5000 selling a 7-pack of PHP scripts, and another $4000 before that selling a 23-page PDF report, using minimal outside advertising. It was almost 100% in-house e-mail marketing. He is close to $100k in income for the year.
We both bought homes this year, and we're both taking our girlfriends to Hawaii for New Years at the end of December.
I don't have to tell you about how there are more cars on the road, more people in lines at stores and in the movies now than ever...
The whole point of a "recession" is to weed out the weak businesses. You can either watch the news way too often, believe the world is going to end tomorrow, and let it depress and demotivate you. OR you can realize that there are people out there giving up (just because they hear bad news) and you can get ahead of them.
You might have already read the story below. It's "The Man Who Sold Hot Dogs!"
There was a man who lived by the side of the road and sold hot dogs.
He was hard of hearing so he had no radio. He had trouble with his eyes so he read no newspapers. But he sold good hot dogs.
He put up signs on the highway, stood on the side of the road and cried, "Buy a hot dog, mister?" People bought. He increased his meat and bun orders. He bought a bigger stove to take care of his trade.
He finally got his son home from college to help him out. But then something happened. His son said, "Father, haven't you been listening to the radio? Reading the newspapers?
"There's a big depression. The European situation is terrible. The domestic situation is worse."
The father thought, "My son's been to college, he reads the papers and he listens to the radio, and he ought to know." He cut down on his meat and bun orders, took down his advertising signs, and no longer bothered to stand out on the highway to sell his hot dogs.
His hot dog sales fell almost overnight. "You're right, son..." The father said to the boy. "We certainly are in the middle of a great depression."
D'oh!!
Do you belong to any clubs or memberships to network and get more ideas, do you know what you want in 2009 and do you know what you have to do to get it? Heck, what can you do differently in the next three weeks that hasn't worked for you this year?
Please comment below, and let me know what you are working on for the remainder of this year. And guys, PLEASE don't turn this into a political or economic discussion. The whole point is that politics and economics won't affect your business unless you let it. Your bad attitude will KILL YOU if you let it.
Hypnotic PHP
I just launched Hypnotic PHP on Thursday, so how did it do? $3,308 in 24 hours... and $4,574 in 48 hours, that's how it did!
Out of the 962 people who actually clicked through my e-mail, 211 bought. That's a 21.9% conversion rate on my untested, half assed full of typos sales letter that I wrote in a few hours.
From those $17 purchasers: 141 of them accepted my $7 upsell containing 7 more videos and scripts (Urgency Tactics) ... 66% conversion rate there.
So the grand total was 352 sales for a total of $4,574... $4,320.56 after fees, but the number of sidetracked sales of other products, made up for those PayPal fees.
So why the heck didn't I do a dimesale or anything like that for this launch?
You don't ALWAYS need to repeat the same freaking exact process when you launch a product!
I used to have people complain about my dimesales (because they couldn't get in at a low price fast enough), this time I had people complain about the LACK of a dimesale (because he's used to getting in at a low price).
I haven't given up dimesales, but the effort that goes into pre-selling my list a few days ahead of time is a lot more valuable than doing all the steps to make sure my dimesale works correctly.
You don't ALWAYS need a dimesale offer, just some kind of scarcity. Mine was really low-key... you get in now for $17, but after 48 hours it's $27. No countdown timer, no ticker counting the number of sales... just a simple offer.
If you were on my list you got the Email Marketing on Crack videos that explained it...
- Day 1: Tell your list something's going on sale at such and such date and time.
- Day 2: Explain the biggest benefit. (48 hour notice)
- Day 3: List out the rest of the benefits. (24 hour notice)
- Day 4: Tell them you launched it. (3 minute notice)
- Day 5: Tell them it's the last chance to get in before you close the doors or raise the price
That's it! It's not rocket science. I only started applying this after people told me the dimesales didn't give them time to read the sales letter.
But when I replaced the dimesale with standard scarcity, I still made the same amount of money with less customers -- which means less support.
I know some of you guys might cry and say, "Yeah right, you couldn't have done that without your big mailing list..." How do you think I built that mailing list up in the first place? Product launches on forums to build my list.
One final tip about pre-selling your list: Have the product ready to go before you start pre-selling it. I see lots of guys promote first and then end up having to push the launch date back.
But me, I used those few extra days to whip up an irresistible upsell offer (the extra $7 videos and scripts). 90 minutes of work netted me an extra $707 on that promo. 🙂
