Archive for January, 2015

Templatize It: Where is Your Sales Letter and Information Product?

If you take longer than three days to go from having an idea for an information product to having a buy button online, then you're doing it wrong. I want to ask this to you today, but you don't have to answer it:

If you HAD to put that info-product online within the next three days…
if you absolutely had to, were required by law,
faced death and the loss of your family if you didn't…
you'd find a way, wouldn't you?

REAL Information Products (Most Info-Marketers Miss This)

Let me explain an information product: people have always and will always want to discover how to play golf or learn the guitar…

But they don't want to walk into a music shop and have someone pitch to them, they're afraid of looking foolish, they don't want to pay hundreds of dollars a week to a guitar teacher… they don't want to a commit to a community college class or have a family member teach them…

They need you to give them a "package" usually of pre-recorded videos that get them from point A to point B. You're cutting through the "academic" crap and actually SHOWING the simple way (you actually explain a part of guitar playing and then play it on-camera).

Because you're ROCKETING towards the goal of them being able to play these three popular songs on guitar, you can avoid the long tedious "intros" or fanfare about the history of the guitar. You just get right to it. Get right to your system.

Fear of Launching

It frustrates me when I meet someone at an offline event, for example, and then I "run into" them a couple years later on a forum or Facebook group and I see that they're still not making money yet…

I don't have to tell you why this is:

Reason #1: no real sense of urgency: this person has another stream of income so there's no real motivation to make any money online

Reason #2: fear: it's as simple as that. I remember having my first information product (a collection of PHP scripts like a calendar plugin, quiz plugin, basic email autoresponder, etc.) ready to go and WAITING for a week. I asked this person and that person if I should put it out now, or wait longer? What if it was a flop? Shouldn't I add more bonuses? Was the price right?

In reality, I was asking around for the answer I wanted all along. I was hoping someone would tell me: don't put that product out yet, wait 6 months until this happens, or spend 3 months adding these bonuses so you can double your sales. Yeah right.

Let's say you had that guitar course. What's the harm in buying up what's called "private label rights" (just do a Google search) about guitar? Someone's already recorded videos doing what you want to teach, that you can buy for $20 or so.

After it's COMPLETE and selling, you can go back and decide if you're unhappy with the existing videos. Maybe you want to change the course to recommend the ONE specific guitar for beginners? And provide your Amazon affiliate link and also get them to buy a specific tool to make learning the chords easier -- or perhaps you mail this to them as part of the course…

Do you get it? Get something simple online (as simple as possible), focus on making sales NOW and improve later. It'll never be perfect, just improve incrementally.

"Lack of time is actually lack of priorities."
-- Timothy Ferriss

Reason #3: confusion: that all sounds great, but how the heck do I buy these resale rights? How do I record video? What do I use to host my site or my files?

24-Month Shortcut: Use PayPal to Take Payments

What about taking payments? Seriously, I've seen way too many people LOSE OUT on their internet marketing success, or have it delayed by TWO YEARS or longer just because they were confused about how to take online payments. I can't use PayPal… they don't have a 1-click upsell and they don't let me take offline credit cards! Maybe I should use Stripe, InfusionSoft, Ontraport?

Question: do you have a 1-click upsell ready to go? No you don't… that's something you can add later and it's not going to make or break your initial product sales…

I understand… you "might want" to take direct credit cards someday. But how about you forget about that for today and cross that bridge when you come to it?

The answer: use PayPal. Just do it! Not because it "has the most bells and whistles" but because you'll have something up and running today.

Income Machine System

As far as hosting your site, our Income Machine shows you how to register a domain name with NameCheap, get a Baby Account with HostGator, point your domain to your web hosting, now someone can type in Example.com (get a dot-com and not a .net or a .biz or anything like that) and end up on your (blank) website.

"Great things are done by a series of small things brought together."
-- Vincent Van Gogh

What do you put on that website? WordPress, so that you don't have to learn HTML coding or how to upload files, and then our Paper Template so you can have one of those "piece of paper" looking sales letters…

With Paper Template, you can click one button and create a sales letter (pre-written, just fill in the blanks and delete what you don't need). Click another button to create a simple download page (hidden from your navigation and the search engines).

If this all seems confusing, it doesn't have to be… inside our Income Machine course, we give you a clone that you can stick on your site so you have SOMETHING setup that you can edit…

At this point you have a "template" of a sales letter (the front page of your site or the .com) and a "template" of a download page (one single page). Now what???

Step 1 of 3: Resale Rights & Download Page

As I said before, resale rights are a great starting point for your product because it means you can setup something for now and improve later. You can pay somebody a one-time fee (usually $10-$20) and in exchange, get the rights to place their videos and sales letter on your own site, keep all of the money, and make any changes you want including putting your name on it, rename the product, edit it as much as you want.

I know what you're thinking. Resale rights, only 20 dollars, it must be crap. A lot of resale rights are low-quality, especially things like written articles, but in my experience, PLR video is usually decent. Sometimes you get stuck with a bad PowerPoint-based product, but most of the time the videos show them actually taking some action.

For 20 bucks they'll give you a large 400 MB sized zip file with videos. Download, right click and unzip, verify that you're allowed to sell them and do what you want with them. Then re-zip JUST the video files. They're usually MP4 or AVI files. In Windows, select the files you want, right click, Send To, Compressed Folder.

What do you do with that zip file? WordPress has a way for you to upload SMALL files such as images, but for a larger download, you can use your web host's cPanel File Manager to upload right into what's called your WordPress "upload" folder. You don't need to install any software to upload files to your site.

Then you can browse to the Download Page on your WordPress site and link to that zip file for someone to download. As a bonus (if you know how to do this) you can upload the MP4 files individually to your YouTube account and set them to "unlisted" so they aren't public but you can place them right there on your download page.

Step 2 of 3: Sales Letter & Payment Button

You have a way for someone to claim and get their download, now let's create a way for someone to pay you money and get access to that download. (It's a lot easier by going backwards in this way.)

PayPal allows you to create a "buy now" button (we also show this inside our Income Machine course) where you basically tell PayPal: I want to sell a product with this name (what people see on the checkout page and on their payment receipt), for this price (i.e. $7.00 one-time), and send them to this specific URL only if they pay. This is your download page.

Once you've created the button (hosted at PayPal), they give you a special link or button you can place on your page. Guess what? If you had nothing else but a "piece of paper" template with nothing on it other than that button, you still have something for sale!

If you have five minutes of free time, stick a headline at the top of the page. Paper Template has dozens of headlines built in (I've distilled all of the various headlines that make sense on the Internet down to just a few). We are the only sales letter plugin out there with a built-in swipe file.

If you have five more minutes, add ten bullet points under the headline giving people just ten good reasons to buy your course on guitar, or ten things they'd walk away with after completing your paid course.

Step 3 of 3: Membership Site & Email Sequence

Notice I deliberately left out the "fanciness" that comes later. You have two choices: either try to ten things in "parallel" (at the same time), get tripped up, eek along and have ten things at 10%, ten things at 20%, ten things at 30%... or do it in "series" (one after another). Knock out your download page. Knock out your payment button. Knock out that basic sales letter.

THEN you can add in fancier stuff later. An easy example is your membership site. Create a separate WordPress installation in your "members" folder, create a SINGLE PAGE download area, and create your new payment button and switch it out onto the sales page. (Income Machine includes our Member Genius membership plugin.)

Keep in mind this is a membership site where people only pay ONE TIME and only get access to ONE PAGE. The only improvement is that they now create an account to login and get back to that single download if they need it. If you want to add a 2nd page, other levels such as an upsell. That comes later.

Most people are setting things up in the wrong order. They create the "nice-to-haves" first instead of the "must-haves." They create their opt-in page first, their email autoresponder sequence, then they get tired and don't actually create something to sell. Complete things that make money first!

Templatize It!

What makes money: sending paid traffic to that sales letter, breaking even on the ad cost, and building a list of buyers. Joint ventures and affiliate traffic. Building your list. Mailing offers to your list.

"The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now."
-- Chinese Proverb

What good is the best information product in the world if no one actually buys it to see it? Get it online, get it selling, and when you're looking to improve that product… instead of throwing out the whole product to start over, think about this instead:

What step-by-step checklist or template can you give someone to make better sense out of those existing PLR videos?

No one cares about how many years you've studied guitar, how many hours the videos are (in fact, if you say there are 100 hours of videos, it talks me OUT OF buying), or how many pages are in the transcript.

They don't even care about "work" or "learning." They care about getting the result they paid money for, while having the most fun, doing the least amount of work, and getting it in the shortest amount of time!

That means your guitar course can have an additional checklist that says… buy this specific guitar, buy these strings, buy this pick, buy this equipment. Master these finger positions. Show you can properly mark time in this way. Play the background part for these five very simple songs. Play these five simple guitar solos.

Give people some easy tasks to check off. You can create any kind of checklist or fill-in-the-blank component in your membership site using our WP Notepad plugin.

If you can get rights to a piece of software or app that helps people to play the guitar, or recycle your early profits into outsourcing such a thing, that's another component you can use to improve your offer. Add in a 30-minute video Skype consultation (using TimeTrade to schedule the appointments) keeping in mind that only 10% of your customers will take you up on it, you'll record it and add it to a section of the member's area, and it's something you probably would have done for free anyway!

"There is only one way to avoid criticism: do nothing, say nothing and be nothing."
-- Elbert Hubbard

The easiest way to start making passive income is with an information product. The quickest and simplest way to sell that kind of product is with a piece of paper looking web page such as Paper Template.

My question to you today is:
Where is your sales letter?

Be sure to post a URL below with a page of yours that has a WORKING buy button.

I'm curious and I'll be checking it out soon. Thanks.