Tag: 7 minute articles

Speed Copy Secrets

October 23, 2008 • 40 Comments

As Dave Wooding said to me in an e-mail, "You must be doing something right."  Michel Fortin just promoted my Fast Food Copywriting product to his list which was awesome.  Terry Dean, Karl Barndt, Frank Kern, Glenn Turner, and David Deutsch all bought it from me!  How did that happen?

Heck, even Mark Joyner e-mailed me directly, and from his advice I changed my offer.  The original offer was $24.95 e-book and videos, with a before the sale OTO for a $97 product, and if they say yes to that, another OTO for a $247 product.

On Mark's advice, I made it a simple $24.95 sale but after the sale I hit them with a $217 upsell (upgrade to the $247 product), and if they say no to that, a $69.95 downsell (upgrade to the $97 product).

That changed the conversion rate from 2.5% to 5.9% on the front-end... thanks Mark!  And yes, the back-end is still converting (Cialdini Consistency).

What else have I been working on?  As soon as I got back from Affiliate Incubator, I bought Traffic Geyser and wrote 7 articles a day for two weeks.  99 articles, 99 PowerPoints made out of the articles, recorded into 99 videos with Camtasia.

Call-to-action at the beginning and end of the video, and my URL is the very first thing in the video description... very important.

If you remove the creativity and are super-motivated like I am when I write crappy sales letters that only convert at 5 percent, banging out an article in 7 minutes or a sales letter in an hour is no big deal.

I queued everything up so I post one ezinearticle and blast one video everyday on autopilot.  Sometimes I guest blog with a link to the YouTube, sometimes I'll copy a random ezinearticle to goarticles.

The results are hit or miss but it brings in just enough money to justify the one hour of writing and 30 minutes of video recording per day.  (One day, three different articles brought in three $19.95 sales I wouldn't have had otherwise.)  I'm just building backlinks for now.

That's what I've been up to this month, switching from 80% product creation and 20% marketing to 20% product creation and 80% marketing.

How much of your time is spent on product creation and how much on marketing?  What do you do for the marketing... videos, articles, PPC, forums?  Please share in the comments below. If I don't get 15 comments to this post (instead of the usual 10) I'm closing my Traffic Geyser membership and giving up video marketing altogether.

Affiliate Incubator Part 1

September 21, 2008 • 14 Comments

I'm attending the Affiliate Incubator seminar next week (Sept. 25th - 27th 2008) in Dallas, Texas. I'll probably learn lots of things about promoting stuff as an affiliate.

Affiliate marketing is pretty cool, you don't need to worry about product creation or customer support, you just send traffic to the vendor's page and then get your commission.

My own products sell the best to my list ($2000 to $4000 launches all the time) but I have been known to send $500 e-mails on a regular basis. Recently, I promoted the legendary Ben Prater's "iPhone Secrets Exposed" package.

That landed me 8 sales on a $397 product with 50% commission. You do the math... that's 1500 bucks from a couple of e-mails, probably 20 minutes of work writing the follow-ups. Those e-mails were so good that Ben incorporated them into his sales letter.

Let me empty out my brain with what I know about affiliate marketing already...

Affiliate Tactic #1: Have a List Already

It's simple, you can't expect any big profits unless you have a list of leads you've built yourself and more importantly, qualified buyers. Write up a quick 10 to 20 page report, record at least 20 minutes of videos and price it at $7 to get lots of buyers. Make sure to capture an e-mail address after the sale.

If you can get just 100 people to buy that $7 report, you can safely assume you'll score one affiliate sale... if you promote a complementary product to that list.

Affiliate Tactic #2: Think of Something They Didn't Think Of

I learned this one watching Todd Gross promote affiliate products. He promoted a product called "Floating Action Button" ... it's just what it sounds like, shows a hovering box that moves as you scroll. My Action PopUp script does the same thing.

Instead of giving people the usual sales pitch about popups, he showed how cool it was to place a YouTube video on the floating button, giving your sales pitch in the corner WHILE they read your sales page, and you urging them to click the order button.

All I see Big Jason Henderson do when he promotes affiliate products... records a video of himself (either screen capture or talking head) going over the benefits, then he watermarks his affiliate link to the bottom of the video and blasts that video out to YouTube, Revver, Vimeo, all the video sites.

When I promoted "iPhone Secrets Exposed" I just thought of what Ben left out of his sales letter...

E-Mail #1: You should be in a SPECIFIC profression... i.e. iPhone programmer instead of a regular programmer. No URL yet, just warming them up.

E-Mail #2: Code iPhone apps to get a recurring income on subscription fees... I just looked at Ben's bullet points and asked myself, "WHAT'S IN IT FOR ME when I create an iPhone application?"

E-Mail #3: Are iPhones an untapped resource? What would you do if you invented YouTube, MySpace, before anyone else. If you don't code an iPhone app is it like letting the next Facebook pass you by.

E-Mail #4: Statistics to blow them away. There are this many iPhone users, this much profit from the AppStore, this many applications (low competition).

That's it. I could have fired that off as one e-mail but I spaced it out into several.

This tip goes without saying: Don't promote the same launches as everyone else and don't use the samea cut-n-paste affiliate messages as everyone else.

Affiliate Tactic #3: Proper Redirects

Don't promote your naked affiliate link. Get a simple script to send traffic from a link like http://www.robertplank.com/recommends/some-affiliate-program so it's not totally obvious you're using an affiliate link.

Actually what I really prefer is, I register a .com domain and use that as a redirect. It's only 8 bucks, and I've got some really good ones. For example, Jason Fladlien's 7 Minute Article product is on a domain name called "InstantContentCreation.com" ... but I grabbed up 7MinuteArticles.com and redirected it to my affiliate URL.

I'm sure Affiliate Incubator will have a lot of newbie-oriented info like, promote recurring products... how to calculate the Clickbank refund rate or statistically decide if a product is worth promoting... how to make a squeeze page and a viral report. How to add your own crazy bonuses "Gary Ambrose" style.

But if I can find out just one thing I don't know, the trip will be worthwhile (just like everything).

What's your FAVORITE affiliate marketing tactic? I mean marketing AS an affiliate, not MANAGING affiliates... we'll get to that later.

I need ten comments on this post... add yours below... or I might stop creating products for good, and only promote affiliate offers.

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