I feel almost silly writing an article on this topic, because I can sum it up in one sentence:
Write about your own personal experiences in story form.
That’s it! People love stories – especially true ones – that show you overcame an obstacle, solved a problem, created something positive and so forth.
So if you’re writing a blog post about how to increase traffic, use your own examples of what you did, how you did it, and the results. If you can flavor it with storytelling skills that keep your reader riveted, so much the better.
And who better to show you how to tell a story than professional stand up comics? These guys and gals live and die by the story – they either get it right or they’re booed off the stage, and being booed is not funny or fun.
The steps to great storytelling according to comedians?
Be Brief (don’t ramble – get to the point)
Give Details (the useful ones – don’t bog the story down with useless stuff)
Use Story Twists (surprise is a wonderful thing)
Work the Crowd (or in this case, your readers)
Act Out The Characters (difficult to do in a blog, but I’ve always thought lending your own personality or character to your writing is extremely important)
Practice (write often – the more you write, the better you’ll get)
End on the Biggest Laugh (or point if you’re a blogger)
Get the details on how comedians tell great stories here:
Half of Facebook’s more than 2.2 BILLION active users are on Facebook in any 24 hour period. In addition, the average U.S. Facebook user spends nearly 6 hours a month browsing this social network.
In other words, if your business isn’t on Facebook yet, maybe it should be. And one of the first questions I invariably receive from newcomers concerning Facebook is, “What should I post to get people interested in my business?” Here are some ideas:
Showcase your customers. If you’ve got photos, videos or emails from happy customers using your products, go ahead and show them. Just remember, you’re not bragging about your product, you’re showing what your customers are doing with your product. Keep the difference in mind when choosing and framing content and you can’t go wrong.
Instead of showing a testimonial from Jimmy telling how great your product is, show Jimmy using or enjoying your product, or show the direct results Jimmy achieved with your product. For example, if you teach your customers how to restore classic cars, show Jimmy with before and after shots of his car.
Use humor. Don’t make yourself or your business overly serious on Facebook. Instead, use light-hearted humor whenever possible. This isn’t necessarily telling jokes – most times it’s simply taking a poke at yourself or your day, showing something in a humorous light, being witty or simply sharing that silly thing that happened to you a few minutes ago.
Post funny videos, especially if they’re relevant to your business. And don’t just grab videos from YouTube – make your own quick videos when you feel inspired.
Give them content. Facebook isn’t necessarily the place to offer long winded diatribes about anything. But it is a great place to share cool content – especially the “How-to” variety and the entertainment variety. And it doesn’t all need to originate with you – use curated content to round out your own and keep people engaged.
Let them inside. That is, show off your staff (if you have one) or your family or the inner workings of your business. Engage them by pulling back the curtain and showing what they normally wouldn’t get to see. For example, if you’re a one person business working out of your home, show them your office, your view, and your little dog that keeps you company. If your business has oodles of employees, post pictures of your in-office celebrations such as birthdays, as well as the antics that go on and so forth. By giving them a peak behind the curtain, your friends and fans feel very much included and part of the group. You’re no longer just a business, you’re part of their circle.
Ask questions. Nothing engages other people like asking them their opinion on something, even if it’s as silly as, “What’s better: Baseball or Football, and why?” Posts with questions get the conversation rolling, especially when it’s an easy question to answer. And be sure to respond to the answers you receive.
Use these Facebook “attention getters” to quickly begin bringing more people your way.
Here’s a ridiculously easy business you can run from Facebook using Facebook groups. It won’t take you much time, and it can net you a tidy little profit each month.
Better still, you can create as many of these as you like. Grow them big enough, and you might make far more than $1,000 a month, too.
Plus, you can either do it yourself, or outsource the work – it’s up to you.
Here’s how it works:
First, create a private Facebook group. This is going to be a free group, and you can do it for any niche where money is spent.
For example, if you’re in the IM niche, you might title your group something like:
Shortcut copywriting techniques for non-copywriters
Easy and fast SEO for non-SEO people
Latest and hottest ways to get tons of traffic to your offer
Techniques for doubling and tripling your conversions
Simple methods for building massive emails lists fast
Etc.
You can populate your groups with free WSO’s, from Facebook itself, as bonuses to other people’s products and so forth. You’re offering a tremendous benefit for free, so it’s not going to be difficult to get members to your groups.
You might even limit the number of members you take, since that will make it seem much more exclusive and valuable.
For content you’re going to do one or more of the following:
Write your own content
Hire outsourcers to write the content for you
Get guests to write your content for free
Use high quality PLR. Not junk, just the good stuff
Whatever content you use, be sure to break it down into brief daily posts.
All you need is short snippets of content, because the members will do the rest of the work for you. They’ll ask questions, respond to questions, give opinions and so forth.
Your group will take on a life of its own, which is terrific. You want to encourage as much interaction as possible to keep people coming back time and time again.
So now the big question is… How do you monetize this?
There are three ways:
First, promote your own products. You’ve got to do this in a very soft, non-pushy way. Done right, you’ll make plenty of sales without turning anyone off.
For example, you might answer someone’s question, then refer them to your product for even more info.
Second, promote other people’s products (affiliate products) using the same method.
Third, if you don’t want to sell products or you want to make even more money, you can sell advertising on the timeline.
If you think about it, you’ve got a highly targeted group of people who are super focused on this one area of interest.
Basically, you have a terrific prospect list of active, interested people.
Whether you are selling your own products, affiliate products or advertising, you’re going to make money.
Let’s talk more about getting advertisers. These advertisers would LOVE to convert your members to their deal.
Limit your ads to just one per day, and call them the “Sponsor of the Day.”
Of course, advertisers can book as many days as they like.
Post the ad in the morning and keep it as the pinned post for the rest of the day.
Charge maybe $50 to display the ad for a day, which compares favorably to solo ads.
If you sell all 30 days of the month, you’ve made $1,500.
Only allow that one ad per day, and don’t let your members post affiliate links.
How do you find advertisers? Many times your best source will be from within the group itself. You can also let your email list know about the opportunity, and you can offer your ad slots to anyone who is in your niche and has a product to sell.
I recommend starting one group and learning the in’s and out’s of running this type of business. You’ll need to invest perhaps 15 minutes each morning for adding content and answering questions, and then check back 3 or 4 times during the day.
Once you get a good feel for what you’re doing, expand to related niches and even branch out to completely unrelated niches, too.
And of course you can outsource the entire process.
While you’re not going to make a fortune from just one group, several groups can yield you a full-time income.
Perhaps one of the easiest ways to make good money online is by doing webinars.
Here’s how it works in a nutshell: You choose a date and topic for your webinar, promote it, give great information on the webinar and then promote a product at the end. It’s like one big informational sales letter, in that you begin by giving away a great deal of awesome info, and you close by offering them even more information or a service or membership they can use to implement what they’ve just learned.
If you either have a skill that others want to learn, or you can interview an expert who has the skill (or information) people want to learn, then you can do a webinar.
Here are the steps to ensure your webinars generate income…
1. Make the webinar an experience. There is so much I can say about this, but it might all boil down to the following: Do NOT be boring. As you put your webinar together, think about your customers and what they want to learn and experience. Make it interesting, exciting and fun. Plan to show major enthusiasm for your topic, and to answer questions. Remember, they can leave the webinar any time they like, so make sure it’s worth staying for.
2. Provide great tools. If you’re partnering or using affiliates, provide great blog posts and emails so they can drive as much traffic as possible to your opt-in page. And provide a good variety – you don’t want every affiliate sending out the same email, since they begin to look like spam. Instead, consider helping each affiliate to write a unique email tailored exclusively for their list.
3. Spend time on your registration page. This is the page you and your partners or affiliates will be sending traffic to, and it’s do or die. Prospects decide whether or not to sign up for your webinar based upon what’s on the page, so spend a little time fine tuning it to produce the most sign-ups possible.
4. In creating the slides for your webinar, try to have a new slide every minute or two with one or more important points on it. This keeps the webinar moving and interesting.
5. You can do the webinar by yourself or with a partner. The nice thing about having a partner is you can have a give and take of information, adding in bits that the other might overlook. Of course whoever the expert is will do most of the talking, but the second person can ask questions and add a different dynamic to the call.
6. Promote the webinar. Begin promoting no more than a week in advance because frankly, people have short memories. And as the webinar gets closer, promote it more often with increased urgency.
7. Send reminders. The day before the webinar is the time to send the first reminder, preferably in the early evening. Send the second on the morning of the webinar, and the third reminder 30 minutes before it begins. “Did you forget?” Is a great subject line for the last minute email you send out. Also remind them that there are far more people signed up than there are open webinar slots (assuming this is true, which it usually is.) Suggest they get on the webinar early to ensure they get a “seat.”
8. Start the webinar on time. Don’t wait for stragglers, you’ll just irritate those who bothered to show up on time.
9. Give some of your best stuff. Seriously, you want to majorly over deliver, because the more you give, the more your listeners will want to know. If you hold everything back then not only do you run out of things to talk about – your listeners also wonder if you know anything at all.
10. Be a tease. Seriously, while you’re delivering great content you will also be inserting teasers here and there for the pitch that comes at the end. For example, you’re telling them how to do “a, b and c,” and of course they’ll need “d, e and f” which you don’t have time to cover here but you’ll give them a chance to learn all about it at the end of the presentation. For example: Your webinar is on traffic, so you teach several basic methods on the call and allude to the many advanced techniques they can also use – when they know how.
11. Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about your audience. If your webinar system allows questions to be typed in (such as GoToWebinar) then the person who isn’t doing the talking can keep track of the questions and make sure they get answered. Great trick: Imagine you are a new listener hearing you for the first time. What do you want to know? What isn’t clear? What questions might you have? Always keep your listeners in mind, and even periodically check in with them to see if they’re following what you’re teaching.
12. Make your offer deliciously irresistible. The entire webinar should flow nicely into the offer you’re making, and the offer itself should be as irresistible as possible. Pile on the benefits, make it clear what this will allow them to accomplish, and back it with a super strong guarantee. Place the URL of the order page on the screen and tell them exactly what will happen when they order.
13. Give a bonus to the first “x” number who grab your offer. This is a great way to get them off the fence and moving fast. Depending on the price point and the number of listeners, limit your special bonus to the first 10 to 50 people who sign up.
14. Stay on to answer questions and give order updates. If one person has a question there’s a good chance others have the same question. Plus you can be there in case they have a problem ordering. And as the orders come in, update the listeners on how many of the bonuses are already gone. This provides proof that others are buying and they should as well. You might even close out the webinar by letting them know you’re confident the bonuses will sell out this evening.
15. Follow-up. Send an email thanking them for attending and reminding them of the URL to order if they haven’t already.
16. Post the replay online for a few days and inform all those who did not attend to listen to it before you take it down.
It’s fairly common to make several thousand dollars from one webinar, depending of course on your offer and your listeners.
What if you don’t have a product to promote? Then you’ve got a couple of options:
1. Choose an affiliate product and ask the product owner to do the webinar with you, splitting the profit between the two of you.
2. Make your product a series of teaching webinars. These are additional webinars that they pay to attend to learn the rest of what it is you’re teaching. Record them and get transcriptions, and now you’ve got a product you can sell on future webinars.
So, are webinars for you?… If so, these tips will help you get started on the right track!
I see new marketers all the time who have a goal of $100,000 per year or even a million dollars per year. And how are they getting their traffic? They’re happily submitting articles, writing blog posts and commenting in forums and blogs.
Now, if your goal is to earn an extra $1,000-$2,000 per month, then these methods are great. But if you want to earn far more, you’ll want to change the way you get traffic.
No one that I know of is making large sums of money using only these methods. Instead, they are doing either SEO, PPC, Facebook Ads, or creating their own products and affiliate programs.
Or they have a HUGE list. But how do you get a huge, responsive list? Generally by using SEO, PPC or some kind of advertising.
So the real questions to think about when it comes to not only traffic but also any issue regarding your business is:
A) What is your goal?
B) Is what you’re doing going to get you to that goal this year?
And if it’s not – look for another method.
I will say there are of course always exceptions to the rule. If you’re really good at a particular marketing strategy like blogging, or direct sales using Facebook chats and other social networking engagements AND you sell products that can pay you high commissions, it IS possible to build a 6 or 7 figure income with free marketing.
But for the average person, paid advertising can be a faster path to the higher income tiers. Either way, choose a strategy that works within your current budget and commit to learning how to execute that strategy at the highest level possible if you are in the online marketing game to make a serious and life-changing income.
Success is great, but failure is EASIER! Come on… I know you can do it. Here’s how:
1. Be filled with doubt. Cultivate it at every step, looking for reasons why you will fail, why your business plan won’t work, why effort is fruitless and hopeless. People who are successful want that success, they dream about it, breathe it, live it in their minds over and over before it happens in real life. When successful people feel doubt trying to creep in, they stamp it out faster than a cockroach in their kitchen. No wonder why they succeed. If you’re going to fail and fail big, you’ve got to be sure you’re filled with self-doubt from the time you get up until you fall asleep at night.
Whatever you do, do not listen to or read positive messages, do not become enthusiastic, and try your best not to be happy. Just sit in the corner quietly with your milk and a giant box of cookies (or your beer and burritos) and don’t come out of that corner until you’ve convinced yourself that you’re a big fat failure who will never succeed at anything. Remember, negative self-talk is crucial to your failure. If you let positive self-talk creep in, you may accidentally succeed, and then where would you be?
2. Be a vacillating slick willy. Don’t stick to one plan. Do NOT make any decisions. Do not move in one direction – move in all directions at once. Buy every ebook and program out there on how to be successful online, and then don’t even read them. If you do read them, bounce from one to the next without doing anything. Change your mind every week on your course of action. When you’ve mastered this, begin changing your mind every day. Aim to change your mind hourly, because this is the pinnacle of failure.
Here’s the monkey mind chatter to strive for: “Should you do this or do that or do this and that or that other thing or what about this hey I could do the thing over there but whoa, what’s this? Maybe I should do this – what do you think?”
Go ahead and second, third, fourth and fifth guess yourself silly and until your mind is numb and all you can do is veg out in front of the TV. Above all else, do NOT make one plan and stick to it – that’s the kiss of success and you do not want that.
3. Turn your obstacles into failures. Those stupid successful people are always taking their obstacles and turning them into triumphs. When their new website isn’t cutting it, what do they do? Fix it until it’s making sales, or start over and find a way to make it successful. That’s crazy! And it’s also more work, and who needs that? If you should accidentally actually DO something like build a new website, hope that it just sits there and gets moldy. That way you can heave a big sigh and say that “you tried” as you drown your sorrows in hops at the local pub.
Above all else, when you run into an obstacle do NOT take a step back and decide on your best course of action – this often leads to success. Do not decide that if this way didn’t work, there must be a better way. And do not tell yourself that you just found one way that doesn’t work, and you’re that much closer to finding a way that does work. Instead, throw up your hands, say that Internet Marketing doesn’t work because it’s all just a big scam, and give up.
4. Reinvent the wheel. If there is already a proven method for accomplishing something, ignore that method and go invent a new one. For example, there are all sorts of ways to successfully drive targeted traffic to websites, and these methods are used everyday by millions of online marketers. Do NOT use these methods! Instead, invent an entirely new method. This will take up lots of your time and probably lots of your money, too.
Plus the odds of it working are miniscule to none, so you’re almost guaranteed to fail. See how easy it is to avoid success? Simply thumb your nose at anything that’s proven to work and strike out to find an entirely new method to fail. (I have this traffic idea, by the way, which involves 3 dairy cows, a radial antennae and a photo of a Topeka Taco Stand – I’ll let you know how it works out.)
5. Indulge in plenty of delusions of grandeur. Your product is going to be the biggest thing since the iPod only it’s going to be BIGGER because even the tribesmen of the rainforest will be buying this up faster than blow darts and you’re going to get so much free publicity that Oprah is going to do a 1 hour prime time special just on you and your product and cripes, even your own MOTHER will love it, and she hates everything!
Whew. In your quest for Internet marketing failure, feeding these festering frenzied fantastic feats of glory will take up a major share of your time. After all, if you’re daydreaming you’re not working. You’re also not looking at the real world issues of whether or not there is actually a demand for your new discount concrete billy bob beer and crumpet party statues. One of the fastest ways to fail is to devise a product no one but you desires – and then spend your time daydreaming about the fortune you’re about to make.
Besides, this is all about failure. What are you dreaming about making fortunes anyway?
6. Be careless. Sure your ghostwriter just submitted the new product to you – just go ahead and launch it without reading it, right? Of course! How else are you going to miss the glaring error on page 42, or the fact that she omitted the entire key section people are dying to read?
Look, if you attend to details and make sure everything is in order prior to launch, you might actually be successful. So when your programmer sends you that new software, don’t check it, don’t click any links and do not test it. Just assume it’s good enough and start selling – you may do enough damage to your reputation to ensure future failure on a permanent basis.
7. Be lazy. Go watch TV, stay in bed, play video games, whatever. Just do NOT go to work on your business because you might actually accomplish something. Pity all those successful people who spend hours upon hours working on their business – no wonder why they are confined to making money, getting accolades and being successful. If they only knew how easy it is to fail they would just stop accomplishing stuff.
8. Be sick. That’s right – how can you succeed if you’re sick all the time, right? So go ahead and eat that junk food. Stay up all night. Drink until you puke. And above all, do NOT exercise. Exercise is shown to increase your health in a thousand and one different ways, including making you THINK better.
And if you’re thinking better, you’re probably realizing this entire article has been utterly ridiculous – after all, you already know how to fail. Everyone knows that. And while it does take some effort to fail, it’s well worth it. How else can you lay on your deathbed one day, wishing you’d achieved your goals instead of being a doubt-filled, vacillating, failure seeking, wheel reinventing, delusional, careless, lazy, sick, almost-was Internet marketer?
Yes, there is a #9 – and that’s to go do the OPPOSITE of all the opposites I just wrote about. Success isn’t hard – you just need to get busy NOT doing all the things we’ve just covered here.
Over and over we hear how to succeed, how to achieve our goals and dreams, and so forth. And yet, somehow most people are falling far short of those goals and dreams…
Now why is that? Perhaps it’s time to do the opposite. In a famous episode of Seinfeld, George Costanza was a perennial loser who one day decided to do the opposite of what he would normally do in every facet of his life. Result? Success!
Another example is contrarian investing – that is, going against conventional wisdom to buy when others are selling and selling when everyone else is buying – has been known to build fortunes. And this holds true for not only investments, but also in real estate.
Another example of the opposite working: Over and over we’ve been told to do affirmations to improve our outlook and our outcome. Result? If we do them a million, billion, gazillion times, they absolutely do work. But who wants to repeat the same phrases over and over 50 times a day? Not me.
Now I hear that if we simply rephrase our affirmation as a question, we only need to say it a few times here and there for it to work. So instead of saying, “I’m a success. I’m a success. I’m a SUCCESS!” we now ask ourselves, “Why am I so successful?”
Go ahead and try it and see if it doesn’t feel different than simply telling yourself you’re a success. Powerful, isn’t it? That’s because by asking the question, you are telling yourself to find all the reasons why you are successful. In other words, rather than just hearing words over and over, you are now actively participating in the process, and putting your subconscious mind to work helping you find the answers. What a difference!
I was going to write an article tomorrow on how to be successful, but I think I’ll scratch that. Instead, I’m going to write about how NOT to be successful, and we’ll see what happens. My tongue is firmly planted in my cheek as I write this, so let’s have some fun!
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment where I share with you “9 Ways to Be Certain You’ll Fail in Internet Marketing”… Be sure NOT to come back tomorrow to check it out, ok! 😉
You don’t have your own product yet and you want to make some money promoting affiliate products. But if you promote affiliate products via email, there is a better than even chance that you are making at least one of these mistakes and it’s costing you money. Imagine if every time you promote a product, you make more money with no more effort because you stop making these mistakes – wouldn’t that be worth exploring?
1. Promoting A Product Without Knowing Much About It
Just because other people are promoting a product doesn’t necessarily mean that you should, too. If you don’t know what it is that you’re selling, it makes sense that you’re going to do a lousy job of promoting it. “Hey, buy this product because other people are buying it so it must be good.” What kind of a recommendation is that?
That’s why you want to either get a review copy from the merchant prior to launch, or buy the product yourself. Then spend time actually using the product. Pick out 3 to 5 things you love about it and highlight these in your promotion.
BONUS:
By reviewing the product prior to promoting it, you’ll discover if it’s something you want to stake your reputation on. After all, if you recommend a shoddy product, your list isn’t going to be happy and your reputation will take a hit. Promote enough shoddy products and you’ll need to change your name and build a new list.
2. Using The Same Promo Copy Everyone Else Is Using
It’s the day of the big launch and you copy and paste the same email a hundred other affiliates are sending to their lists – do you really think your readers aren’t on some of these other lists as well? When they see you’re just a cookie cutter of everyone else, they’re going to recognize your emails as junk and hit the delete button. Even if they are interested in the product, they’re going to find someone else to purchase it from who’s already used the product and can give them the insider’s perspective on what to expect.
When you write your own emails, you stand completely apart from the crowd. While the cookie cutter emails are being ignored, yours are getting read and receiving clicks. Write your own promotional emails with your own unique personality and slant, with sincerity and belief in what you are saying, and you will outperform other affiliates with lists larger than your own.
3. Not Adding Value
Always think of what you can add to the product to produce more value. For example, you can add a product of your own as a bonus, or do a coaching call for everyone who purchases. You might start a mastermind group to help the buyers implement what they learn in the course, or even create a new product to give them as a bonus (which you can then sell to others.)
Always think about how you can add value. Many times it can be as simple as adding a 10 page report or 5 minute video on how to do something step-by-step that is called for in the product. And be sure the value you add is directly related to the product you are promoting. If the product is how to grow magnificent roses, then a report on the best places to buy rose fertilizer would be perfect, while a video on how to plant asparagus wouldn’t make a lot of sense.
4. Sending Nothing But Affiliate Offers
If you want your emails to get open and read, you’re going to want to mix a good share of content in with your promotional emails. No one likes to be sold to over and over again, yet everyone enjoys getting news, how-to’s and insider advice from a trusted friend. Be the friend, and make sure at least 2/3rds of your emails contain great info. This will build a relationship between you and your readers and also get your promo emails open and read.
5. Hard Selling Instead Of Pre-Selling
As an affiliate, your job isn’t to sell the product – that’s the sales page’s job. Your job is to get your readers warmed up to the idea of what the product can do for them, so that 2 things happen: First, they click the link in your email that leads to the sales page. Remember, you’re selling the click, not the product. And second, when they click that link they are interested, eager and possibly even excited to discover more.
6. Not Being Memorable
We touched on this earlier when we spoke of delivering lots of value to your list in the form of content. When you’re known for delivering value, your emails are much more likely to be opened and read. But just having great content isn’t always enough to make you stand apart from the crowd. You also need a hook: Something that makes you memorable to your readers so that each time they see an email from you, they remember exactly who you are and why they should open the email.
If you’re like most marketers, you probably assume you already stand out because you know how different you are from other marketers – but do your readers know this? From the day they join your list, you should in some way differentiate yourself. It could be by using a nickname, such as Mr./Mrs. Overdeliverer. Or it could with your own brand.
If you have another profession, you can use that as your hook. One fellow I know was a school teacher and he still refers to himself that way even though it’s been years since he stepped inside a classroom. Another marketer is known as being unorthodox (to say the least) and yet another is known for his hair and his barefoot running. These are all hooks or associations that make them stand apart in their subscriber’s minds from all the other marketers sending them emails.
Employ some of these hard-fought lessons in your own marketing, and you’ll save yourself years of trial and error, and quickly get on the fast-track to higher profits in your affiliate marketing business.
Every time you turn around, there’s another guru offering a high ticket item that will save the day and put a fortune in your pocket – but will it? The thing about selling information to Internet marketers on how to market is that they are effectively creating their own competition – training others to do what it is that’s making them rich.
Now, if you were going to train YOUR competition to compete against you and try to take away your business – would you tell them everything? No way. For that matter, would you be tempted to tell them things that were – shall we say – not exactly true? Possibly. Here are 4 common myths the “experts” would love for you to keep believing…
1. Long sales copy always out pulls short sales copy. Not true – if you’re selling a low ticket item ($5 to $30) then short copy will often out pull long copy – especially if you state the price UP FRONT rather than trying to hide it at the bottom. If you’re selling more expensive products, then long copy does out pull short copy.
2. Video sells more than written copy. Not true – split testing of squeeze pages shows that the pages without video nearly always out pull the ones with video. Moreover, sales pages with just video and no copy tend to not do as well as sales pages with copy and no video. And a combination of the two really needs to be split-tested, because it could easily go either way. Don’t assume video sells – depending on the product and the video itself, it can hurt as much as you think it might help.
3. You should split test everything. Yes, as we just mentioned split testing is great – but only so long as it doesn’t slow you down. When you’re just getting started, the last thing you need is to delay your actions until you’ve split tested everything down to a science. Better to roll out that sales page today and begin making sales now than to wait until it’s perfect. Do split test, but don’t make it a priority. Taking action, rolling out new products and building your list should be your priorities. Get the money coming in and then focus on improving your systems.
4. Affiliate marketing is the way to go. Think about this – do you want to compete with a hundred or a thousand other affiliates to sell a product – or do you want to sell your own unique product that no one else on the planet can offer? By creating your own products, not only do you eliminate the competition, but you also build a relationship with your customers who come to know you, trust you and love your products. And once this happens, then you can sell them all the affiliate products you like.
Never be afraid to question anything anybody tells you – including me. And always look at the possible motives that might lie behind a word of advice. As my grandfather used to say, “Follow the money!” If someone is teaching you how to compete with them, odds are they’re not only omitting key information – they may also be leading you astray.
You purchase a product for $9 and you can’t wait to download it and see what’s inside.
But instead of a download link on the next page, what do you get?
A @#$%& upsell!
Okay, admittedly the upsell looks pretty darn good. And it will make your life easier, too. So you spend the $29 and get the upsell.
Now to go to the download page…
What the ___?! It’s ANOTHER upsell!
This one is $200. Which is a shame, because it looks so enticing. If only it were cheaper…
…you click on the ‘no thanks’ link.
And on the next page you see the same upsell minus the live coaching for only $49, so you grab it!
Finally you’re on the download page and you cannot wait to open up all your goodies and get started.
What just happened?
Did the product seller bamboozle you into buying more products than you really wanted?
Did he annoy you with all the upsells?
Or did the seller provide you with additional opportunities to get the benefits you want, or solve your problem?
You’re probably saying yes to all three questions, and that’s okay.
When upselling is done properly, the seller is truly providing the customer with additional, faster or easier ways to get the benefits they seek.
For example, they might sell a book on how to do something.
Then they offer software that does that thing for you.
Then they offer a done-for-you solution where you don’t have to lift a finger.
And you might be thinking that it would be nice if the seller were to tell you about these options up front.
Good point. However, if the seller told you about Product A, Product B, Product C and Product D, and if the seller further told you that you could get a combination of (A and B) or of (A and C) or of (B and D) or of (A, B and D) and so forth, here’s what would happen:
You would get confused, and rightly so. The more options you have, the less likely you will choose any of them.
And if you don’t choose any of them, then you’re not going to solve your problem or get the benefit you seek.
In reality, the seller is doing the buyer a favor by only showing one option at a time.
By only revealing one product at a time, the decision making process is greatly simplified and looks like a simple series of yes and no decisions.
You get through the checkout process FASTER this way and go on your merry way. If faced with all the possibilities at once, you would likely put the decision off until you forgot all about it.
When You’re the Seller
“The probability of selling to a new prospect is 5 – 20%. The probability of selling to an existing customer is 60 – 70%.” – Marketing Metrics
Now then, let’s look at it from the seller’s point of view. After all, this is a marketing newsletter and our primary goal is to make sales.
You make a low end offer to your customers. Maybe it’s a $9 ebook, or a $14 piece of software, or whatever.
You are offering your least expensive product that will 100% deliver on its promise, regardless of whether or not your customers buy anything else from you.
But you don’t stop there – you also offer them additional help, knowledge or tools to get the job done. They don’t need these things if they’re willing to put in the time and work themselves.
But if they want faster results, less work, personal help or an easier solution, then they are free to buy exactly that in your upsells.
They can say ‘yes’ or they can say ‘no,’ it’s totally up to them and you are twisting no one’s arm.
Of course, you are encouraging them to take those upsells. And not just because you’ll make more money, but also because you know they will be happier in the long run with the better solution.
If your goal is to truly have happy customers, then it’s time to stop thinking that $9 e-books are going to do it.
Yes, for some of your customers a $9 ebook is all they want.
But for a surprisingly large number of customers, they want more. They want better, easier and faster. And they want help, too.
And if you don’t offer them what they want, then they will go elsewhere to get it.
Buyer’s High
Let’s get down to the nitty gritty.
The reality is, the hardest thing you will do online is get a new customer. To get that customer you’ve got to have a combination of some or all of the following: A web presence, a good reputation, products, sales pages, blogs, social media, affiliates, a list and so forth.
You work hard to get that customer. And what’s the easiest way to increase your revenue? It’s not to get new customers, but instead to sell more to your current customers.
And perhaps the best way to do this is through upsells.
You gain their trust with that first small sale. They say, “Yes!” I’m willing to take a chance with you, here’s my money.”
They are now on a buyer’s high. They feel good. They’ve already made a small commitment to you, which is the PERFECT time to ask for a bigger commitment in the form of a bigger purchase.
Yet time and again I see marketers who refuse to offer upsells.
Maybe they feel like it is somehow deceptive or manipulative to make additional offers after a sale is made.
Not true. Your initial offer is a stand alone, complete product that needs no other product to work. The upsells simply enhance the buyer’s experience.
Most companies do upselling in one form or another. These are companies that rely on their bottom lines to pay thousands of workers and keep hundreds of stores open.
“Would you like fries with that?”
“Would you like the extended warranty?”
“Would you like the deluxe options package on your new car?”
“Would you like someone to deliver your new furnace and install it for you?”
“Would you like our annual service contract that ensures your furnace and air conditioning are always in tip top shape and working when you need them?”
“Congrats on your new pet – would you like the cage, food, dishes, toys, bedding and litter your new pet needs?”
And so forth.
If you’ve got reservations about offering upsells, I’d like to suggest you ditch them once and for all.
Crunching Numbers
Let’s say you’ve got a $9 product and you’re selling 5% of people who hit your sales page.
1000 visitors result in 50 sales of $9 each, or $450.
That sound you hear is me yawning.
But you add an upsell for $47, and 30% of your buyers take the upsell. That’s another $705 in your pocket.
You’ve now more than DOUBLED your profits, simply by adding that upsell.
But wait, there’s more…
You offer a coaching program. Because you’re fairly new to coaching, you decide to make it affordable – $299 per month for 3 months.
And you offer the coaching to all of your buyers, not just the ones who took the first upsell.
Result? Only one person takes the offer. But $299 per month times 3 months is $897.
Now instead of making $450, you’ve earned a total of $2,052 on those 1,000 visitors.
It takes the EXACT same effort to drive 1,000 visitors to your sales funnel, regardless of whether or not you have upsells in place.
But the difference in results with upsells can be staggering – in this example you’re earning literally four times the money for the exact same traffic-driving effort.
Yes, you have to put those upsells in place.
Yes, you’ll have to fulfill the coaching duties with a phone call each week.
But still… you can now duplicate this feat every time you drive another 1,000 visitors to your site.
And of course you don’t have to offer coaching, because you can make your upsells anything you want.
Coaching, however, is something you should consider. It is highly lucrative and your students usually become your very best customers for life, as well as your best testimonials and social media evangelists.
Attracting Top Affiliates
Keeping in mind the numbers we just used in our example, let me ask you this:
If you were an affiliate, which funnel would you want to promote – the one where you get 50% of $450?
Or the one where you get 50% of $2,052?
If you want to attract affiliates, and especially if you want to attract TOP affiliates, you must have one or more upsells in place.
Otherwise you will never be able to compete with the other product owners who have upsells.
The Self-Liquidating Offer
Using our example above, let’s say that you’re not using affiliates.
Instead, you’re buying traffic to send to your funnel.
It costs you roughly $500 to send 1,000 highly targeted prospects to your sales funnel.
This means that without the upsells, you are losing $50 each time you send 1,000 visitors to your website. You better find a cheaper source of targeted traffic, work on improving your conversion rate, or both.
But if you have the upsells in place, then every time you spend $500, you make $1,552.
Tell me this: How many times will you spend $500 if it makes you a profit of $1,552?
Every day, right?
And even every hour if there is enough traffic to be bought.
When you have upsells in place, you can purchase high quality traffic and still make money.
You don’t need to rely on affiliates for your income. You simply turn on the traffic faucet and watch the profits pour in. THIS is how internet fortunes are made.
No, it’s not sexy. It’s not glamorous. But it sure does work.
“But I don’t have additional products to offer as upsells.”
No problem – offer coaching. If you know your topic well enough to create a product, then I guarantee you also know it well enough to coach someone.
Yes, the first time or two is scary, until you realize that coaching simply means helping the person get the results they want.
You are helping them – via phone, skype or email – to do something that you already know how to do.
How simple is that?
Another possibility for your upsell is to offer a ‘done-for-you’ solution.
For example, if you’re selling software, then you can install the software for them. If you’re teaching them how to do something, you can do it for them, and so forth.
Another option is to offer a related affiliate product that compliments your front-end offer.
For example, if your front-end offer is on how to drive traffic, your upsells could be additional traffic generation methods, how to increase the conversions you get on that traffic, a software that helps to drive traffic and so forth.
The point is this: Offer… SOMETHING as your upsell.
Mind you, I’m not saying to offer just ANYTHING. It’s got to be in alignment with your front end offer and it’s got to be useful, wanted and high quality.
Remember, your reputation is at stake.
If you offer junk for your upsell, customers will get angry. And if customers get angry, affiliates will be upset with you and won’t promote for you again.
12 Upselling Tips for Maximum Profits
1: If you can’t figure out what to upsell, consider cross-selling.
With upselling you’re generally offering something directly in line with the initial offer. With cross-selling, you’re offering something in the same niche, but not exactly related.
For example, if you’re selling a product on how to build your own WordPress site, an upsell would be to build the site for them.
A cross-sell might be to offer a product on how to get paid to build WordPress sites for other people, or how to drive traffic to your new site.
2: Don’t be pushy.
Make it clear that all they have to do is click the “no thanks” link to continue on without buying the upsell.
3: Test upsells.
Some will work far better than others, but you won’t know which ones are the best until you test.
4: Use stats and testimonials.
If 94% of your customers are thrilled they bought the upsell, let your new customers know.
If you have testimonials for your upsells, use them.
If you don’t have any stats or testimonials, poll your customers and get some.
5: Use urgency.
Do something with your upsell that makes your customers fear losing out on the deal.
For example, maybe you offer them a special price that is good only while they are on that page.
Or perhaps it’s a product that is only available to buyers of the front-end product.
6: Use ‘fear of missing out.’
If you can show that your customers get far better results when they buy the upgrade, don’t be afraid to say so.
Your new customers will fear missing out on the ease and massive benefits of the upsell if you play this right.
7: Use a countdown timer.
This is a timer that counts down how long they have to decide to take the upsell.
Usually you want to give them 10 minutes, unless your upsell page is particularly long or short.
Test using the countdown timer against not using it. Odds are it will improve conversions, but you won’t know for sure until you test.
8: Offer a bonus to the upsell.
Make the bonus highly relevant with a high perceived value, and it will likely increase sales dramatically.
Test one bonus against another, and using a bonus versus having no bonus on the upsell page(s).
9: High perceived value versus cost.
If your upsells look like they’re worth a great deal more than they cost, your conversions will skyrocket.
For example, I bought the rights to a 2 year old $499 course for $300.
I used that course as an upsell, stressing that several thousand people paid $499 for the course, but today, for the next ten minutes, they could grab it for just $37. It sold like gangbusters.
10: Offer a second chance via email.
Assuming you’re not using a countdown timer on your upsell(s), offer a second chance to get the upsell via email.
Let them know the second chance expires in “X” number of hours.
11: Don’t forget down selling.
If your new customer doesn’t take the $99 version, follow up with a $49 version.
You’ll be surprised how many of the down sells you sell.
12: Get sophisticated.
If they don’t take upsell #1, you send them to down sell #1.
But if they do buy upsell #1, then you send them to upsell #2, and so forth.
Bottom Line
Upsells aren’t sexy. They don’t always have a terrific reputation. They will annoy a small percentage of your customers. But…
They can turn a money losing business into a money generating powerhouse.
Imagine never having to worry about attracting affiliates again, because you can buy all the traffic you want.
Imagine deciding you want to make more money today, so you simply buy more traffic.
Imagine having an online machine generating cash for you, 24/7.
Frankly, I don’t know why any marketer wouldn’t have upsells in their sales funnel.
And cross-sells and down-sells, too. It just makes good business sense.
