Recent Updates
Fast Food Copywriting
Late last night I launched a special report called Fast Food Copywriting.
That product is something that started out as a blog COMMENT just a few days ago. I didn't even mean for it to be a complete blog post.
One of our discussions meandered into copywriting, and I typed up a quick response to quickly go over my personal formula for writing quick sales copy that's good enough to get the job done. Nothing fancy.
After the blog comment ended up being a couple of pages, I said to myself: "I'll just make this a blog post." I saved it to my drafts.
I came back to the draft later and edited it some more. Even when I said what I wanted to say with as few words as possible, it ended up being several pages long.
I moved it to a Word document, made the page margins as thin as I could and the font size as small (but still readable) as I could... and I thought, heck, maybe I should sell this thing as its own report.
The offer has been live for about 9 hours and sold 50 copies -- about 750 bucks. Not bad for a few hours of "smart" (not hard) work.
Update: After 48 hours I now have 104 sales
which comes to around $1400 after fees.
What does this tell me about infoproduct creation?
- The best products I have ever made were answers (solutions) to real live questions (problems). This does like a "duh" point but I know that the very best books and reports I made started out as replies on forums or blog posts... then got carried away... then I said, it would be criminal for this info to get buried in a forum after a couple of days.
- Keep your "sexy" information private and your boring information public. Perfect example: I gave away some WordPress SEO advice yesterday but saved the copywriting info for a paid report. Setting up blogs and sites are fun, but people get more excited about things that are going to make them money NOW and improve THEIR lives.
- Have a backend. I have always been kind of a crappy marketer when it came to marketing my e-books... but not in 2008! I made sure to plug-in an affiliate program just before launching. I embedded the affiliate code in the e-book so that the call-to-action at the end is for the reader to promote the book as an affiliate.
Since Fast Food Copywriting is my only copywriting product, I don't have any upsells to push into so we'll see how the perpetual affiliate program idea works out.
Speaking of upsells, I have been working on my product funnel and tweaked the sales letters for Black Hat PHP, Lightning PHP, Impact PHP and Push Button PHP so that they all on their own upsell to PHP in a Box, a package containing all those products in one. It's a pretty sweet setup.
Income so far for this month: From my PayPal daily sales report anyway... $9,807.46 $10,377.58 with 547 585 sales. After fees that's $9,300 $9,700. (I find it funny that the money I pay in PayPal fees is approaching the amount I pay for rent.)
Add Clickbank and day job income and I've broken $12,000 $12,500 for this month.
I have 8 Warrior Special Offers running at the moment.
If you want to get your hands on the special report and find out the step-by-step method I use to become a copywriting machine and pump out these cash-sucking sales letters... check out Fast Food Copywriting.
In the meantime, could you do me a favor and comment on this entry and tell me:
Are you giving away the farm by dishing out too much free information, or are you saving "the good stuff" for paying customers?
Have you ever written a forum reply, blog post, or free report and said to yourself... "I should charge for this!" Please, tell me the story of how it came to be and share the URL where the product is selling now.
WordPress Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
It looks like a lot of the people who comment here have their own WordPress blogs. I was recently asked by Lou Dalo:
What Do You Do to Make Your Blog Search-Engine Friendly?
If you are a marketer and you don't have even a simple blog, you are committing marketing suicide.
Reasons Why:
Product Launches, Name Recognition, Sales Momentum
Reason #1: Thanks to pinging, new blog posts get indexed in a matter of hours, not days. This means if you link from a blog post to a new product, that sales letter gets indexed quickly as well.
If you own a blog... try it! Make a post, then later in the day go to Google and type in the post title as a search phrase. I guarantee you, within 8 hours your blog post will be listed.
Reason #2: Many people will do research on a product and Google your name before they buy something. In 2004 I added Simple PHP Volume 1 into the eBookWholesaler membership site and got a flood of sales and newsletter opt-ins... even though there was no link to my site!
People Googled my name and found my site. If you have a blog and mention your products, they'll find your blog when looking for your products.
Reason #3: On your blog you have a list of all your products so people who have bought product #1 can find product #2 and product #3 and product #4. This means you get repeat sales.
Register YourName.com This Instant...
Before Someone Else Grabs It and Makes It Into A Porn Site!
I could go on and on with the reasons. If YourName.com is available, register it now and stick a simple WordPress blog on it today. I don't care if you don't have anything to put on it yet. Through all of 2007, RobertPlank.com contained nothing but my personal resume. When I was ready to write a blog, I finally did.
Who cares if your blog is brand new and only has one post on it? If you are building a list like you should be doing, it doesn't matter if you take 6 months to write another blog post because you can send a quick mailing to your list and they'll come right back.
Great, you know how important a blog is, you have a blog setup, now let's make a couple of tweaks to give you a huge advantage other the 99% of bloggers who post garbage...
There is a lot of free info about WordPress search engine optimization floating around, but some of the information is crap.
I took some of the best advice and several of my blog posts have jumped from page 2 in Google to page 1. One went from spot #5 to spot #1.
Here is EXACTLY what I did to my blog to make it search engine friendly:
SEO Tip #1: Permalinks
If you only make ONE change to your blog today, make this change.
By default, WordPress tries to link to your posts using a numeric ID which I just hate.
What you need to do is go to Options, Permalinks... then specify a Custom permalink structure with this value:
/%postname%/
They will give you special HTACCESS code to upload to your site if you haven't messed around with permalinks already.
Making that change in WordPress will make your posts look like:
http://www.example.com/your-post-title
Instead of:
http://www.example.com/?p=38
SEO Tip #2: Edit the TITLE Tag
My most effective SEO change by far was changing the code for the TITLE tag.
By default, WordPress sets your TITLE tag as: Blog Name » Post Title. You don't want that. That's what's going to appear in the search engine results! If you write a post called "SEO" you want the title to be just "SEO" ... not "Site Name » SEO."
Edit your header.php template and replace your TITLE tag with this:
<title>
<?php if (is_home()): ?>
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?>: <?php bloginfo('description') ?>
<?php elseif (is_category()): ?>
<?php wp_title(''); ?>: <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
<?php elseif (is_date()): ?>
<?php wp_title(''); ?>: <?php bloginfo('name'); ?>
<?php else: ?>
<?php wp_title(''); ?>
<?php endif; ?>
</title>
SEO Tip #3: Edit the META Tags
I added a meta tag inside the HEAD tag of the HTML code... again, in header.php... to prevent duplicate content penalties. This code:
<?php if ((is_home() || is_single() || is_page()) && (!is_paged())) {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="index,follow" />';
} else {
echo '<meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow" />';
}?>
... Will tell search engine robots to spider the front page, individual posts, categories, and so on... but STAY AWAY from pages where you can leave a comment... as well as categories. The contents of those pages are going to look almost exactly the same.
SEO Tip #4: Edit robots.txt
One last change I made to my blog was the robots.txt file. I told robots to stay out of the WordPress control panel and the template folders. This will make sure that the only search results for your site are REAL content pages, no junk pages.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /wp-admin
Disallow: /wp-includes
Disallow: /wp-content
Disallow: /tag
Disallow: /author
Disallow: /i/
Disallow: /f/
Disallow: /t/
Disallow: /wget/
Disallow: /httpd/
Disallow: /c/
Disallow: /j/
Disallow: /*/de/
Disallow: /*/ru/
Disallow: /*/nl/
Disallow: /*/zh/
Disallow: /*/ko/
Disallow: /*/ja/
Disallow: /*/pt/
Disallow: /*/it/
Disallow: /*/fr/
Disallow: /*/es/# Google Image
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Allow: /*# Google AdSense
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:
Allow: /*
You might want to take that last bit out if you use AdSense on your blog.
Thanks to Andy for pointing out that tips #3 and #4 can be very well managed using the meta robots plugin.
More WordPress Tips for Marketing Blogs
- Use a blog template that shows the title of the site inside the H1 tag, and the post title inside the H2 tag.
- Have your sidebar on the right side, not the left.
- Link to previous posts when possible to make sure all your pages get indexed.
- Put an opt-in form in place of where you would normally stick AdSense.
- Send an e-mail to your list when you make a blog post to get them to comment on it. See the 10-comment rule.
If you've made the above changes to your blog, go ahead and leave a comment with the URL to your blog that's now all SEO'd out.
Black Hat PHP
If you're wondering how the launch of Black Hat PHP went... it brought in 186 sales for the main product ($1,616.10) and 6 sales ($562.37) for the $97 upsell, for a total of 192 sales and $2,178.47. That's calculated after taking fees into account.
I priced this one slightly higher (start at 7 cents and increase by 10 cents) because I wanted to get more money out of it over a slower period of time.
I made almost exactly $2,400 in sales total yesterday.... that's from one day! If you're wondering how I'm doing for the entire month, I've brought in $8,241.26 in gross sales for February 2008 which is $7,837.90 after fees.
Factor my day job income after that and it means that even if I take the next week off, this month was yet another $10k month for me.
I can tell you right now that having the 10-comment rule on this blog has made that level of income much easier to attain than in 2007, because:
- I'm building a list -- I've always built a list but the blog is yet another list-building source.
- I'm more motivated to pump out new products and write new sales letters because if I don't, I feel like I'm letting REAL PEOPLE down.
- Having the blog posts available permanently, instead of temporarily when I send out a mailing to my list, means those blog posts can slowly bring in sales over time.
I can't tell you how important number three is. Before starting a blog, I noticed lots of $2000 weeks and lots of $500 weeks in my PayPal income reports. Now it is more like $1500 weeks every single week.
That's much more reliable income. When I first started making big sales on the internet, I'd have a couple of days during a launch when I would pull in $1000 or $2000 in a day, then no more money would come in for the rest of the month.
Check out Black Hat PHP if you missed the big launch. It's quickly approaching the $20 price range so act fast.
Also, can you comment below and tell me if you are making any efforts to stabilize your income, going for steady streams instead of short bursts?
- Are you looking into AdWords or some other form of paid advertising?
- Do you have a blog?
- Do you have an affiliate program that's promoted directly from your e-book?
- Do you offer upsells or one-time-offers... do you have a product funnel?
- Do you have a membership site?
The 10-Comment Rule
This blog has what I call "The 10-Comment Rule."
I Post a Blog Entry, But I Don't Post Another One
Until the Original Post Gets 10 Comments.
I have the ten-comment rule because I'm just like you and have been to loser forums with tons of posts and zero replies to all of them.
On a blog, there's less focus on the replies and more on the original post, but that "empty restaurant" effect is still there.
- Participation. If someone fills out a comment to a post of mine, they're no longer just surfing. They are now in interactive mode and are more likely to buy from me if I mention a product.
- Search Engine Food. Search engines love lots and lots of content, and with comments, your pages can become much longer than the original post... that means more keyword matches for you and more search engine listings.
- Intrigue. If you see lots of comments on posts you are more likely to read them, which means you spend more time on my site, which means you're more likely to see something you like.
Remember, your blogs are there to make you money. Update it and tell people about yourself, tell them what stuff you are working on and what products you have just put out. Try to work a call-to-action at the end of every blog post. Either you want to send them to a sales letter of yours, sign up to a mailing list or subscribe to an RSS feed.
If you are talking about someone else's blog or site, mention that in the BEGINNING of the post. Don't make that your final call to action (unless it's an affiliate link).
Don't forget to apply what you know about selling and direct response sales letters to content site and blogs:
- Try not to link out to too many sites. On the blogroll on the right side of the page, link only to your own products.
- Offsite linking includes "chicklets." Have one chicklet, i.e. "Digg this." But not: "Add to My Yahoo!" ... "Add to Reddit!" ... "Add to Bloglines" ... and so on. That's
- Build up a mailing list and send an e-mail to that list every time you make a new post.
- Stay away from AdSense. AdSense is for people too lazy to build a list and make a product. Believe me, that was me too at one point.
I researched how to make WordPress more optimized for search engines:
- I added meta tags to the header and made a robots.txt file to prevent duplicate content penalties.
- I changed the permalink configuration so the full URL of the post was actually revelant.
- I tweaked the template so there wouldn't be a bunch of extra text in the TITLE tag.
Got it? Your blog is just another part of your business, it's not "just for fun." It can be fun but it has a purpose:
- To present yourself as an authority figure in your niche. (BRAND YOURSELF.)
- To capture untamed search engine traffic and funnel it into a list or to your other products.
- To maintain a relationship with your list and past buyers. When you update them every once in a while, they remember who you are.
A minor side effect is that sometimes the conversation will meander off-topic and give you an idea for your next blog post.
Try your own 10-comment rule if you have a blog. My 10-comment rule works because I have a list of 10,000 subscribers (66% buyers) so you might have to make it a 5-comment rule if you have a smaller list.
Or, the ten comment rule might just mean that you can only post one blog per month. You can spend the rest of the month creating products, building up a list, and maybe advertising for your blog.
Seriously, what is the point of doing ANYTHING if no one is going to read it, or if they're going to just read it and lurk and not say anything about it?
Action PopUp
Is it possible to take an old outdated idea and put your own twist on it?
The thing is, I hate opt-in forms that take me off the current page. Luckily there has been a rise of Ajax-based and iframe-based subscription boxes in the last couple of years where you can fill out an opt-in form and you are NOT taken away from the page you are on.
In August of last year I first released Action PopUp.
Strategy #1: See If They Buy It In the First Place
I didn't know if it would sell well or not... the only real way to find out is to test it with a version 1.0 and see if people buy!
I am not a fan of releasing a free report, or offering nothing but a newsletter in your niche... just make a simple product, price it accordingly (a low price if it's a simple early version of your product) and see if people are willing to pay money for it!
There's really no other way to know for sure.
I launched on August 15th, 2007. It was a dimesale, the price was $7.99 plus a 2 cent price increase with each sale. The launch lasted for two weeks, totaling 242 sales at $2,504 profit ($2,348.36 after PayPal fees).
$2500 for two days of work? I definitely consider that a success! It was something people actually wanted to buy (instead of just saying they would buy it -- beware of this).
Strategy #2: Feature Creep
Because it was a new source of income, I knew I would spend the time to develop it more.
I slowly added new features and released them for free to my existing buyers. This is how you should roll out all your products: software OR information products.
I've developed the heck out of this idea and it's now at version 1.5 with a price of $13.31.
Strategy #3: Eating Your Own Dog Food
I added an option to make it work directly on a page, instead of as a pop-up... which is how I use it on this blog. When someone reads a post, they have a chance to subscribe to my newsletter for updates. Once they do, the subscription box disappears.
Action PopUp personalizes any web page (including this blog) after you fill out the subscription form... and remembers it for future visits.
You might have noticed it already... for example, on one of my posts, I start with this sentence:
"Don't forget, it's okay to make mistakes."
If you are reading the actual entry (not just on the front page)... after you fill out the newsletter box... let's say your name was Steven... the blog entry now reads:
"Steven, it's okay to make mistakes."
The more I used it on my own sites, I found I kept adding little "tweaks" in the script to get it to do what I want... these tweaks eventually became advertised features.
I added a one-time-offer countdown, link capture functionality, a delay-onload pop-up... only when I needed them for my sites.
Have you heard of the phrase, "Eating your own dog food?" It means if you use your own products, they will kick ass. Dog food tastes like crap, but if you were a dog food company and all you had to eat was your own dog food, you would tweak it to make sure it tastes great.
Action PopUp was something I actually used on my sites, so with all the unintentional self-testing I performed, I weeded most of the bugs, added features that people like me would actually use, and made it as easy to install as possible.
It's because of those three simple strategies that I am able to consistently pump out products.
Are You A Professional Newbie?
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.
Simple JavaScript
A week ago I made a very subtle change to my blog. You probably didn't even notice it, I bet. I moved the link on the right side for "Simple JavaScript" from the e-books to the video infoproducts category.
That wasn't a mistake.
I went back and recorded the videos for it. So, do you have any old e-books that you can update for the year 2008 and record some quick videos for?
They don't need to be super great. All I have is an out of date copy of Camtasia 4 and a USB headset. I open my PDF e-book to the beginning of the chapter, read the title and the first couple of paragraphs, then get to work, actually performing the steps the book tells me to, step by step.
I am very liberal with the pause button. I read part of the book and then do exactly as the book says, explaining what I'm doing as I'm doing it. Sometimes I'll ad-lib some comment, or go on a rant, or notice something I didn't notice when I wrote the instructions -- but did notice when I actually performed them. (Yet another reason why videos are such a valuable part of any infoproduct.)
People are lazy. If they can watch something instead of reading something, they'll be more interested in it.
My videos aren't award winning or clever. They really aren't that great. But they're good enough -- remember "it doesn't have to look good, just be good?"
I wasn't even decent in my earliest videos. In the winter of 2005 (I think) I recorded about 20 hours of PHP videos that just stunk. I don't even have them anymore. In retrospect I probably should have at least sold away the rights to them.
But I recorded the videos with the intention of selling them. You shouldn't record videos just for the purpose of wasting time and keeping yourself from building your business.
Video takes practice just the same as it takes practice to write well. It probably took an additional 3 or 4 video infoproducts to get it right. Now I don't mumble, I project my voice as well as I can and I speak slowly enough in the videos that I don't trip over my own words or click my mouse around too much like a babbling idiot.
My videos used to take 25 takes on average to get right, now I get through them in one take. Okay, I'll admit that every now and then I will screw up and have to record a second take.
- You can record videos for your old infoproducts and double their perceived value.
- You can avoid what Willie Crawford calls "The $20 E-Book Syndrome."
- You can create products that include audio, video, physical materials or DVDs that sell for $97 instead of $27... that require only 10% more work for you to make.
No one cares if you sound stupid as long as they understand you and you have something interesting to say. If you "get excited about your topic," that's no big deal.
I find that if I try to record a bunch of videos in a row, I get tired and just try to plow through them. They end up feeling substandard and rushed... not good. If you sound rushed and eager to finish the video, you don't sound like you're excited about your topic.
Instead, record a 10 minute video and then do something physical for 10 minutes (hey, let's not get dirty now).
You need to recharge your batteries.
- Record a 10 minute video then get in your car and drive around the block for 10 minutes.
- Record another 10 minute video then go have dinner.
- Record another 10 minute video, then mow the lawn.
- Record yet another 10 minute video, then buy groceries.
Even if you could only set aside time to record one video per day, you could convert your old boring e-books to exciting video information products. That's what I'm going to do this month.
I haven't blogged all week because I didn't want to talk myself out of doing this, but I have three more old e-books that are ready to be converted into video products. I have them all recorded and uploaded as of last night, I just have to work on the sales letters for them, one at a time.
I'll be re-launching Sales Page Tactics Volume 1 with video within the hour -- it's probably already out by the time you read this.
Do you have plans to record just one video per day to breathe new life into an old product? Comment on this entry below and tell me what you are working on.
[HELPDESKLINK]
How To Break Into Any Niche Part 2: Relationship Building
Once you get in the habit of setting up a list for every product you create, the way to get people to remember you is by showing your personality.
I build relationships through forum marketing.
- You could post special offers every now and then by giving visitors of a certain forum a huge discount compared to the general public. I do this with WSOs.
- You could add video responses to posts every now and then and send traffic there so people see your face instead of the words you type. I did this with a YouTube video but I'm not sure if I'm going to post to YouTube on a regular basis because I felt like I was talking about myself too much.
- You could do a low tech link exchange. If someone posts a comment on your blog with their URL, visit their blog and leave a thoughtful comment with your URL.
Use your real name. Any time you join a forum, use your real first and last name. If you plan on pumping out lots of small products you are going to have lots of small web sites and almost never one big web site. The exception could be if you register YourName.com and stick a blog on there with a link to all your products.
Find a forum in your niche that ranks high on the search engines, and make that the only forum you visit for a month. I don't care if there is some forum you are addicted to and have to check every 5 minutes. Take a vacation from that forum and build a reputation on that forum.
I want you to make 50 posts over time on this new forum. They need to be real quality replies that use your expertise on the subject. They need to be answers that could only have come from you.
Never make a "me too" post. Never mention your web site in any reply. Don't start any new topics, just reply to existing ones. Many forums have a link to find posts with no responses... you can reply to these but stay away from any more than a month old.
Once you have these 50 posts, edit your forum profile and add a signature with a link to your web site. Many message boards will require a certain number of posts before you can add a signature anyway.
Only put one link there. Make the text on the link a headline, not just the name of your site. Don't make the text any fancy size or colors, just center if it possible.
Then leave the forum and forget about it. Search engines like Google will pick it up. Now if someone is looking for the solution to one of those specific problems you solved on the forum, they'll find that thread and if you were helpful, might click your signature link and end up on your site. This is in addition to all the members of the forum who visit it on a regular basis.
I have done this with nearly a dozen message boards in my niche. What got me started doing this was checking my referrer logs. Your referrer logs in your control panel will tell you what sites send traffic your way. So someone might ask for help in getting a freebie script of mine customized, or ask if a product I offer is really legit. I register on the forum using my real name, answer the question, then poke around a little while after.
I have even signed up to a $60/month private forum to build relationships based on my referrer logs... but that's just because I'm crazy.
I consider using referrer logs to decide which forums to hit a better indicator than Google search results, because you're already certain traffic is going to flow in your direction.
Top Secret PHP: 300 Sales in 24 Hours
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.
PHP Uncensored Version 3
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.
How To Break Into Any Niche Part 1: Funnel Everything Into A List
Any time you offer anything, you need to create a sublist for it. If you have a paid product, create a sublist to put customers into.
If you offer a freebie report, create a sublist for it and require your visitors to opt-in so you can send the download link via e-mail. Don't ask for an e-mail address after they get the product, this works about as poorly as if you sold someone a book and then asked them to pay for it after they're done reading it.
These all need to go to the SAME autoresponder (so you can broadcast a product launch to everyone) but have segmented sublists so you can deliver updates only to some existing buyers, or offer special deals to certain lists.
Do you want to know everything I know about list building?
- Turning existing customers into subscribers gathers the most responsive subscribers.
- Requiring an opt-in in exchange for a free product gathers much less responsive subscribers.
- Trading free information (a newsletter) for an e-mail address gathers even less responsive subscribers.
- Getting subscribers from pay-per-click traffic, co-ops and traffic exchanges gathers subscribers not worth marketing to.
Here is how I broke into the PHP niche: I created a newsletter and offered a free 30-page PDF report in exchange for signing up. This is my "main" sublist. I found some old articles of mine and filled up an autoresponder series with 6 months of follow-ups (1 or 2 messages per week). Most of the time -- especially at the beginning -- I would offer lots of free advice and information. A few weeks into the seriesI mention some of my freebie products to get them on more of my lists. Then I mention some more of my paid products.
Notice how I say "mention." I don't say I switch from articles to promoting my products. I talk about something and then say, "Here is how you solve that problem: (my URL)" or, "If you are interested in that topic, here is more information about it: (my URL)."
Blend content with sales. Too many people try to sell too early or try a hard sell after piling on lots of free info.
About filling up an autoresponder, I tend to do one per week for six months for the main newsletter. For the product sublists, I will space out messages at about one per month.
- First I would ask what they thought of the product, and sent them to a feedback form so I could actually get their response.
- In the next message I would offer a surprise bonus for being a loyal subscriber.
- At some point I would send them to a feedback form again asking for a testimonial and telling them to make sure to include their name and web site URL so they could get some free promotion from my site. (It's always about what's in it for them.)
You don't need to fill up every sublist with an autoresponder sequence because you're going to be pushing your product launches to all sublists every now and then. You also need to remember that many people will be subscribed to more than one of your sublists -- and who wants 5 e-mails a day from the same person? Not me.
You do need people to remember who you are and that's what we'll deal with next: relationship building.
Financial Goals
What do you do with the leftover internet marketing money you have laying around?
The easy answer is, reinvest it back into your business. That doesn't work for me because I very rarely do any outsourcing or advertising.
Okay, so what about financial goals? I already own a car, there are no specific places I want to travel.
I want a house. Actually I want a condo... I don't want to have to deal with keeping up a yard or mowing the lawn or any of that stuff.
With a 30-year fixed mortgage at 8%, I could get a $100,000 loan for equal to the same rent I pay now, living in a 2-story townhouse, with no roommates. Okay great you say, what homes in California sell for that much?
There are condos down the street slightly larger than my apartment... PLUS a garage... that sold for $250k this summer... that are now $160k. If I can put $50k down, my monthly mortgage payment on that thing would be close enough to the rent I'm paying now for me to be happy.
So how have I been doing? Since buying my car with all cash in June (I should have had it financed... but that's another story) I added $20k over time into a stock brokerage account.
With a little bit of work and a LOT of aggravation I built that up into $30k by December. I learned a lot along the way. I avoided so many of the usual stock trading newbie mistakes.
It was way too emotionally taxing to gain $1000 in the morning on some days only for the gains for the day to go back down to $0 by the end of the day. I would check several times daily, sometimes every 5 minutes.
What I learned quickly is that I was creating another job for myself. It wasn't even a fun job. Either I gained some money and started worrying about losing it, or I lost money and worried about how I was going to get it back.
I was a freaking full-time gambler and I didn't even realize it. So where do you stick your leftover money?
- Figure out a way to reinvest it back into your business. You need to find some way.
- Put it in a savings account and slightly beat inflation.
- Put it in a CD for a 4% yearly return.
- Invest it in an index fund or money market account for a 5% return.
I no longer daytrade.
Whatever you do, don't create extra work for yourself. Don't create an extra job. Your time is way more important than any amount of money.
What are your financial goals? (Seriously, post here and share them with me.)
What do you do specifically to reinvest your profits back into your business?
Would you still pursue internet marketing and create products for fun if you had all the money in the world?
Practice
Previously when I was talking about product creation I said the three ways to get infoproducts produced quickly are: don't make it look good, get excited about the topic, and practice.
This last Sunday (January 13th, 2008) I took my girlfriend to the Arco Arena stadium in Sacramento and attended an open-to-the-public Sacramento Kings basketball practice session.
(Don't I look oh-so-entertained?)
Everyone benefits from practice -- not just professional sports players. You benefit from practice every day of your life, from driving a car to brushing your teeth, to writing that e-book and recording video.
Practice means you get used to a routine and can focus your creativity on things that really matter.
You automate the hard part -- getting the ideas down on a page -- and can think about cool homework assignments to add to your books, better headlines, or fun ways to market the product to your list.
My older sister graduated from college a few years ago with a Bachelor of Arts in Communications and a minor in Journalism. She had to write a lot of papers. When she still lived with our parents, I would visit sometimes and see her working on a paper at the computer.
I noticed a few things about her at the computer:
- Sometimes she would "warm up" for a paper by quickwriting. She would open up a blank Word document and start typing anything that came to mind just to get her into the rhythm for a few minutes, then start on the actual paper.
- She kept a blog for fun. This was a private blog and obviously I never read it, but she would write pages and pages on that thing. Keeping a blog gets you used to writing.
- She would wait until the last minute to write the paper. Usually the night before. She was a great student but was unable to work on a paper ahead of time... her brain wasn't trained for it. Her brain was trained to write under pressure with a time constraint. If you ask me that's the best way to write because it means you get the most work done in the least amount of time.
The books I write -- you can check any of them out on the sidebar of this blog -- are filled with dumb little jokes and puns. Most of the time I don't realize I've written them until they're already typed out. Because I'm not really thinking about what I'm typing, the final result is funnier, more story-like, and more interesting.
Even ignoring all the creative benefits of practice, when you make a routine, the process is easier and repeatable. This doesn't just apply to the creation of your product -- it applies to the promotion of it too.
Once my product is finished, I'm so used to writing the sales letter, writing the ad, posting the WSO, sending an e-mail out to my list... that I get a weird unsettling feeling if I don't do all that stuff right away.
I use my own PHP scripts to setup these sites quickly, for example, the scripts I offer at www.SalesPageTactics.com to do things like add a contact form, make my site more interactive, or setup a countdown timer to increase urgency.
When you get used to releasing smaller imperfect products over and over, you will cut down on your launch time with each release and have time for more "fun."
You'll get more excited and as a result have a more creative finished product with lots of flow.
Most importantly, you'll actually have something out there selling and making a little bit of money so you can move on to creating the next product and setting up a new income stream.
Get Excited About Your Topic
You can write down a lot of information at a time by getting excited about your topic. It's easy to feel sorry for yourself and think back to high school when you had to write some stupid 5 page essay and it was a struggle just to finish a paragraph. It's easy to give up and say you're "not a writer."
Ask yourself:
- Have you ever stayed up all night talking with a best friend or significant other?
- Have you kept a diary?
- Have you had a phone conversation that lasted longer than an hour?
- Have you described every little detail of some amazing movie you really liked?
I bet your answer is YES to all of these questions.
Why is it hard to write a term paper but easy to write a blog or post a zillion MySpace comments? Because a term paper is "work" and blogging is "fun." If you are in a niche that also happens to be your favorite hobby, writing gets a lot easier.
When I write a book, it takes me around two hours for a 5-10 page article. If it's a book on PHP then this includes the time to write the PHP script. If the book includes video, it takes me about 15 minutes to record the demonstration video for each chapter. I almost always get the videos recorded in one take... that's just because of practice. I'm a horrible public speaker and always will be, but I show that I'm excited about the topic and know what I'm talking about.
The same thing goes with writing. Have you seen my writing? I'm sloppy, I don't use fancy language and I try to put as few sentences possible into paragraphs.
I wouldn't have it any other way. If you learn to write the same way you speak, your writing will have a strong voice and you will be able to write everything quickly.
I try to write with 5% or less passive sentences.
I try to write at a 4th or 5th grade reading level.
I feel guilty writing sentences longer than 7 words.
The downside is that everything you write kind of smells like a first draft, but then again if you go back and edit your writing, you won't find anything particularly horrible, plus your writing will be packed with more ideas than the average writer.
Getting Excited = Less Work + Stronger Voice + Higher Idea-to-Paragraph Ratio.
- Instead of writing a big long paragraph explaining a series of ideas, make a bullet-point list of 3-4 items.
- Bold the important words but don't get carried away.
- Never say more than you have to.
Every now and then I like to read a little bit about copywriting. Copywriting doesn't interest me all that much, but I want to write in a way that keeps attention to the very end, and has a clear call-to-action at the end.
Headlines, stories, mysteries, cliffhangers, lists... these are much more interesting than topic sentence... concrete detail... concluding sentence... and then onto the next boring paragraph.
You need to be passionate about your topic. If you are excited about it then it will show and get your readers / customers / prospects excited about what you have to say.
It Doesn’t Have to Look Good, Just Be Good
I only have three tips for fast infoproduct creation:
- Don't make it look good.
- Get excited about your topic.
- Practice.
John Williams made an excellent point to last Wednesday's blog post... which was about writing a small report and adding onto it later, releasing free upgrades to existing customers while increasing the price to new buyers as the size of the infoproduct went up. John said that I left out the part about doing the actual work, writing the e-book itself.
It has never taken me longer than 7 working days to create an infoproduct. By "infoproduct" I mean a 100 to 150 page e-book. A few years ago I created a package where I sold 3 e-books in one, that was a one month project.
One week to write each of the three e-books and I spent the final week writing a bunch of articles to promote the book so I could post one article to article sites every day or so.Your product doesn't have to look super great and fancy. It doesn't even have to look okay.
I heard a story once about a guy who ordered a DVD from a web site about how to play the guitar. The DVD was homemade, burned on a store-bought DVD-R with the title of the DVD handwritten with a sharpie marker on the disc.
The buyer popped the DVD into his DVD player. There was no menu, the video just started up and was a low quality camcorder video of a guy warming up on his guitar. The camerawoman (his wife) was fiddling with the focus and zoom and asking if it was recording.
Edit: Paydex pointed out that the story was from Russell Brunson about some weightlifting DVDs he ordered - thanks - it's been bugging me for years where that story came from.
The creator of the product didn't bother to edit any of this out. Heck, maybe he didn't even know how!
It didn't matter. The buyer was more than happy with the lessons the DVD had to offer. The presentation doesn't matter as much as you think. Ken Evoy heavily tested graphics versus no graphics on his sales letters... guess what... graphics hardly made any difference.
In fact, fancy graphics and Flash can hurt your sales letter conversion rates if they are too large and distract readers from your headline and sales copy. Just present your information in a simple and readable way.
Would you rather create a product that has a nice looking box with crappy content, or a crappy box with great content?
Please, do everyone a favor and get your product out there even if it isn't 100% polished.
PHP Uncensored
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 ...
Is It Possible to Make $5000 Per Month Writing Articles?
If you have big huge grandiose plans for your product launch, it's never going to get launched.
Here is what I would do instead...
Write a simple report. It doesn't have to be big, just 10 to 20 pages. Write a quick one-page sales letter for it because... it's only a report, right? Then launch it, price it at $7 or $10.
Limit the special offer to just 10 buyers. After 10 sales, snap it shut and close the offer. Now you have $100 in your pocket for writing this report... great, right? But it's not the big huge product launch you hoped for.
That same afternoon, write the next chapter in the e-book. E-mail it out to all your buyers for free (if you were really evil you could charge $1 for the upgrade... but I'd rather not have to try and juggle multiple versions of the same book). Then post another special offer with the upgrade book for $11... again, limiting it to 10 buyers.
These will be 10 new buyers you can add to your list. (Make sure you are funneling all these sales into a product update list... otherwise this strategy is totally useless.) Repeat the process. That afternoon, write another chapter, add a couple bullet points to the sales letter, mail out the free upgrade and then post the offer for $12.
If you do this until you have a 50-page report (let's say 10 chapters in addition to the original report)... that's:
$100 + $110 + $120 + $130 + $140 + $150 + $160 + $170 + $180 + $190 + $200...
Which equals: $1,650. But more importantly, it equals 110 proven buyers, and you can expect a good number of those to buy from you again if you come out with similar reports for that same niche in the future.
If you could write just one "article" (I like to call my chapters "articles" ... it makes them easier to write) per day for a month, that means you launched three reports and accumulated 330 buyers (some duplicates... let's say 200) for a profit of $5000.
You don't even have to write every single day. If you were ambitious and could pump out 5 articles in one day, you could take the rest of the week off... aside from 10 minutes a day posting the special offer and dealing with customer support.
Continue this for six months, and you don't have to do these incremental launches anymore... your list will be big enough that you can write a report, launch it, send an e-mail, and take orders.
June 2007 was my best month and I didn't do any sort of AdWords, joint ventures, article marketing, social networking, nothing. I made a product, posted on a forum, then e-mailed my list of 8000 people (mostly previous buyers... because they are the most responsive!)
If you are the kind of person interested in totals, I only launched 3 e-books that month... 7 chapters, each chapter had a video, they were about 50 page reports with 60-90 minutes of video. The book part took a week of writing one article-chapter per day and a grand total of two hours making the videos.
On June 19th, 2007, I made 362 sales totalling $3,058.72 ($2,850.02 after fees). The total PayPal sales for that whole month and the three products I launched was 978 sales totalling $11,420.30... $10,541.05 after fees and a couple refunds. That plus my Clickbank accounts and day job income totalled right about $15,000 income for one month... not bad for a 22 year old! (I was 22 in June... now I am 23.)
