Dan Kennedy tells the story of one of his clients who ran an introduction agency for divorced American men to meet foreign brides. (This was during the pre-internet days.)
Dan persuaded his client to raise his price from $395 to $3,995. (Not a typo – he multiplied his price by 10.)
Would you like to guess what happened to sales?
Believe it or not, they stayed THE SAME. But of course the owner made a LOT more money – ten times as much, to be exact.
Most marketers look at what their competition is charging, and they charge about the same. But what they don’t realize is their competitors probably did the same thing.
There’s a pizza place in a major city that has probably 100 competitors. Yet this pizza place outsells all of them, and does it without offering coupons or special deals, either.
How do they do it? Positioning. They claim to be a ‘gourmet’ establishment, and they charge more than any of their competitors.
Sometimes you just need to establish yourself as the premium option to set yourself apart. Other times you might need to add something to your product or service, such as personal involvement, to make it exclusive.
If you’re competing on price alone, you’re never going to do well. But if you can reposition your offer so that you can charge more – maybe even twice as much or five times as much – then you become the gold standard that people want.
Are you stuck for ideas? Maybe you’re not sure what niche you want to go into next, or you’ve got the niche but you don’t know what your next product should be. Here are 10 ideas to get you started…
1. Use Your Job Experience. Do you have a particular skill, expertise or career experience that people would pay to learn more about? Maybe you’ve managed and led corporate teams to accomplish extraordinary things. Or maybe you were the best chef in the city. Whatever your job experience, there might be people out there who would gladly pay to benefit from it.
2. Teach Something. If there is a topic you want to know more about, there is no faster way to become an expert than to teach it. You’ll find you learn 10 times faster when you’re teaching others, and you can do the teaching right over the Internet via webinar, podcasts or even by email. Once you’ve finished teaching your course, turn your outline and content into an info product, and add the recordings to it for an easy $97 or $197 product.
3. Take Courses. If you’re looking for fresh ideas, take a course in your niche and use it as a jumping off point to create your own product.
4. Use Your Life Experience. Did you successfully get your children through the terrible 2’s or the dreaded teenage years? Do you have some great advice to offer other parents? Then you’ve got the makings of a product. Did you lose weight? Did you get in shape? Did you go from deep debt to deep pockets? Life experience can be used to create hot selling products, and because you’ve lived the information, it’s really easy to impart it to others.
5. Write About a Process. Perhaps you built an electrical business from the ground up, or you bought a business and turned it from a losing proposition into a money maker. Or maybe you perfected a process for turning iron into gold. Whatever the process, there is a good chance others are more than happy to learn from your mistakes and take advantage of the many shortcuts you can show them.
6. Write About Your Hobby. If you’ve got a hobby you love, odds are there are others who love it as well. Do you collect baseball cards? Do you paint? Do you collect old books? Whatever it is, find a way to use your knowledge to help others with the same interest.
7. Compile Anecdotes or Stories. Choose a common theme, and then compile stories that follow that theme. Think “Chicken Soup for the Soul” and you’ll know what I mean. If you’re using other people’s stories, be sure to get permission. This can be a super fast way to create a product or a book; simply write the intro, choose a catchy title, and compile the stories.
8. Find a Need and Fill It. Ask your readers and customers what they want to know, and create a product that fills that need. For example, one lawyer kept hearing from his business clients that they wished they had an easy reference for business law basics so they wouldn’t have to call the lawyer with every question they had. He wrote the product and sold thousands of copies.
9. Narrow Your Niche. Maybe you’ve already got a topic for your next product, but there are too many competitors selling the same topic. Narrow the focus of your topic so that your angle is different from all the other products. For example, you want to write a book on growing roses, but there are hundreds of books out there already on that topic. Narrow your focus to growing roses on a patio (for apartment dwellers) or growing roses in harsh northern climates and you’ve probably got a winner.
10. Keep Your Eyes Open and Your Brain Active. Watch for things that spark your interest and ask lots of questions and you’ll find topics everywhere – you just need to learn to spot them. For example, when you’re having a conversation or listening to the radio, ask yourself “Where is the product in this?” You’ll be surprised by the variety of answers you get – oftentimes they’re things you normally never would have thought of.
You spend an hour writing a great email and no one clicks the link. Or you create an ad of some sort (banner, Adwords, blurb for your website, etc.) and no one clicks. Now what?
Here are 13 ways to make your ads and your emails generate more click throughs…
1. Ask for the click. Tell the reader to “click here to continue” or “click here to get the details.”
2. Offer something for free on the other side. If they know they’re going to get useful information for free, rather than simply hitting a sales letter, they’re more likely to click. (You can, of course, include great info right inside your sales letter.)
3. Make it easy to visualize what they’ll see. When someone goes into a restaurant for the very first time, they may experience a bit of trepidation because they don’t know what to expect. But when they’ve been there before, they’re much more comfortable because they already know what they’ll see, what the place is like and so forth.
Ads and emails act as the doorways to your restaurant, or in this case the page you want your prospects to go to. The more you can help them visualize what’s on the other side of that door and look forward to experiencing it, the more likely they are to click your link.
4. Describe what’s on the other side of the click. ‘Blind clicks’ (those ads that don’t give you a clue what’s on the other side of the click) don’t do as well as ads and emails that make it quite clear what the reader can expect on the next page.
5. Display a picture of the benefit of clicking. Are you going to show them the secret to roses the size of dinner plates? Show them a photo of exactly that.
6. If you are offering a freebie on the other side (such as an ebook for joining your list) make sure the freebie has a great title that both entices and implies real value. “Free Dating eBook” won’t cut it – “22 Surprisingly Easy Ways to Get Dates With Gorgeous Women” will.
7. If appropriate and your email is in html, try placing a ‘coupon’ within the email. Or try placing a coupon border around the ad. These dashed lines attract attention and imply savings, thereby stimulating response.
8. Talk about the value and benefits of what’s on the other side of the click.
9. Put a benefit in your ad’s headline or email’s subject line. “How to solve your low conversion problem.”
10. Ask a provocative question, such as “Are you tired of fighting with your spouse?”
11. Ask an informational type of question. People want to know the answer to questions, so ask them something, such as “How do you put the love back into your marriage?”
12. Be direct. If you’ve got a great offer for them, don’t beat around the bush, just come straight out of the gate with it. “12 miniature roses for just $32, shipping included.”
13. Give them useful information. For example, your subject line might be, “7 Ways to Eradicate Mold.” Then inside your email you give them the first 6, with the seventh one being your link to your product. If it’s an ad, then the link goes to the list of 7, with the seventh one linking to your product.
You already know that adding bonuses to an offer can increase your sales. But did you also know that the wrong bonuses can actually DECREASE your sales? That’s because it muddles the offer and confuses the customer.
Here’s the 4-part test I use that almost guarantees I choose the right bonuses every time:
1. Does the bonus have a high perceived value? Or a value the prospect cannot determine? Answer yes to either one and it passes the first test. For example: If you’re selling investment advice, then offering a video of insider’s investment tips from the author of the product can have a very high perceived value, while offering an investor’s dictionary (information that can be found with a quick Google search) would have a very low perceived value.
Another example is offering an ebook that currently sells for $97, versus one that sells for $5. Be sure to show them the actual page where you are selling the $97 ebook, and also make sure no one else is selling that same ebook elsewhere for less.
2. Is the bonus unique? Offering a special ebook written by you is unique, so long as you haven’t sold the resale rights. Offering a resale rights product available all over the Internet is not unique. TIP: You can refashion a PLR product into your own unique product – with a unique title and cover – so even though the info is not entirely unique, it does appear as though it is. Is this ethical? I’ll let you decide.
3. Is the bonus relevant to the product being offered? If you’re selling a coffee maker, then a coffee bonus is relevant. Same thing if you’re selling coffee and you give away a free coffee maker (one company made a fortune doing exactly this.)
At a loss as to what to offer? Look at your main offer and then ask, “What’s missing?” It might be a set of instructional videos, or a way to double the effect of the main product. Or perhaps it’s personal coaching, or a webinar to answer questions and help the users get the most out of the product.
4. Is the bonus desirable? The more people want your bonus, the greater the number of prospects who will purchase your offer – sometimes just to get the bonus. For example, if you’re a well-known copywriter, you can offer to polish one of their sales letters as a bonus when they purchase your $997 course on how to write sales copy.
Apply these bonus hacking tips when you create your next product, and you’ll sell more!
To double your revenue, we’re going to presuppose that you first of all have revenue from something you’re selling, be it your own products, resale rights products, affiliates, etc.
Let’s say right now you’re selling a $17 ebook and video course. You might be paying for your traffic or getting it in other ways, it doesn’t matter at this point.
Now watch carefully – this is a two step process. Mind you, you could simply do step 1 and ignore step 2 and it will increase your revenue. But we want to DOUBLE your revenue or better, so I highly recommend doing both.
Step 1: Build up your backend. That is, offer upsells and one time offers on all of your deals. This step alone can greatly increase your revenue, and this doesn’t have to be your own products. Go buy resell rights to products related to your $17 deal and offer those.
Now tweak your sales funnel to maximize that backend.
You want it producing as many sales as possible, and simple tweaks can sometimes result in startling increases in your conversion rates.
Step 2: Use some of your increased revenue to purchase more traffic. These days you probably want to avoid Google Ads because they’re heavily into slapping and banning, but there are plenty of other places you can advertise, such as Facebook, Bing, etc.
What’s that? You’ve never paid for advertising and don’t know where to start? Like anything new, there is a learning curve. Spend an hour a day on it and within a year you will be a bonafide expert.
Start out slowly, spending maybe $10 at a time, and work your way up. Remember, because you’ve added an entire backend to your sales system, you are already bringing in a lot more revenue than you were. By leveraging this money into yet MORE traffic, you can make more money still.
Frankly, if you’re already selling anything online consistently, focusing on these 2 simple things (improving your back-end upsell to provide more value for your customers, and expanding your advertising to reach more customers for your product that is already selling) is the only thing you need to focus on to double your income, or possibly more…
There is so much misinformation out there on article marketing, I want to try to set the record straight. Granted, some of this misinformation has been repeated so many times that you may be incredulous by what I’m about to tell you. Then again, you might be one of the savvy ones who see through the nonsense of article spinners and the like.
First myth: If you post an article on your website and again on Ezine Articles (or any other article directory) then you’ve got to significantly rewrite it so that it’s not duplicate content, right?
Wrong.
So long as it is ORIGINAL content, as in it’s your own content (whether you wrote it or hired someone to write it) you can post the exact same article on your own website and again on the article directories. That’s because Ezine Articles doesn’t care if the article has already been published — as long as it is credited to the original author.
And as far as I know, this holds true for every article directory. If there’s a directory out there demanding unique content, then they don’t know what they’re doing. It would be like asking the Beatles for a unique version of Yellow Submarine before a radio station would play it. It’s just plain crazy.
Second myth: You should publish your article to the ezine directory first, and once it’s accepted then you should publish it to your own website.
Rubbish.
Why would you give your own original content to an article directory before your own website?
If you’re thinking it somehow helps with SEO, it doesn’t. If you’re thinking they won’t take it if it’s already on your website, see above.
You publish it to your own site first to make your site the authority site and to give your site the link juice.
Your main goal in publishing articles to article directories isn’t SEO and it isn’t getting traffic from the directory. It’s to get relevant authority sites to pick up and publish your content, thus giving you valuable backlinks and yes, targeted traffic.
Third myth: “But if other websites are picking up my article, isn’t that duplicate content?”
No. Before the Internet, when the Associated Press would write an article, that article could be picked up by hundreds of different newspapers, with each paper printing the exact same article and byline.
Enter the Internet. Just like the AP, news sites generate content that is then picked up by hundreds of different websites. Each website posts the same identical article with the same byline. It’s called syndication, and it’s perfectly fine. You will NOT be penalized in any way for it, and it can provide valuable backlinks and targeted traffic to your website.
How does Google perceive syndicated content? When a particular article appears on multiple websites, Google perceives it as being POPULAR and adds SEO weight to it, depending on how many instances it discovers. And if it finds your content on high PR and authority sites, it gives it even more weight.
So with those 3 myths officially debunked, stop being held hostage by fake news and get to work on getting your own article content published, circulated and syndicated online!
Do you want to close more sales on your website? Then you need to answer more objections. If you were selling vacuum cleaners door to door, you’d find that prospects have questions they need answered before they will buy. Those questions are actually objections, and a skilled salesman will welcome them and answer them in such a way that the customer is more than satisfied with the answers.
Of course on a website we don’t have a star salesperson closing prospects, so we’ve got to rely on content to do it for us. Usually this is in the form of a sales letter, but the typical sales letter is rather lengthy. This is good, in that they cover the main objections and do a good job of explaining the benefits. But if a customer has a particular question, making them scroll through this long sales letter to find the answer may actually lose you the sale.
Imagine a customer on the brink of making the purchase. They just have one question, something that will be the deciding factor on whether they whip out the credit card or close the page. They’re busy, and they want the answer now. And no, they don’t want to scroll all the way through your sales letter 2 or 3 times searching for the information.
Solution? A Frequently Asked Questions section. That’s right. Adding an F.A.Q. to your sales process can increase your sales – sometimes dramatically. And it doesn’t have to be on your sales page. Installing a prominent F.A.Q. link to the top and bottom of the page is effective. So is having a F.A.Q. section either within the sales letter itself or off to the side of the page.
What should be in your F.A.Q.? Two things: First, all of the information a typical customer needs to make a decision. This includes what’s included in the offer, the major benefits, the price and guarantee, what they can expect, time frame to get results, etc.
Second, your F.A.Q. should include all of the questions you repeatedly get from prospects. These might be things you wouldn’t think they would ask, but they do, such as, “Does this work outside of the U.S.? Do I need to purchase anything else to make this work?” Etc.
Think of your F.A.Q. as a living, growing thing. Any time you think of a question that should be added, do it. Any time someone asks you a good question, add it. Typically, the better your F.A.Q., the more sales you will make.
I received an email the other day from a young man who has created six different products in four different niches – and sold a total of 37 copies. Not 37 copies of each – 37 copies all together. One of his products didn’t sell a single copy.
Should he quit? Most people would say he’s obviously in the wrong line of work and should do something else. I say that’s incorrect, and here’s why:
Anyone with the perseverance to continue creating products even though he’s not making sales is going to eventually be successful. Obviously he’s not afraid of failure – if he were, he would have stopped after the first product. And he’s got the drive and determination to keep going, even when everyone around him tells him to quit. Heck, even his sales are telling him to quit, yet when he emailed me he said he was working on his seventh product, and by the sound of it I think he’s got a winner this time.
There was another fellow by the name of Eddie who wanted to be a jockey, something fierce. When he was 15 years old he traveled to Kentucky and went to work at galloping horses for $15 a week. But his boss told him that he was not good enough to ever be a jockey, so Eddie hid his tears, told his boss goodbye, and headed to California.
There he found a job with horse trainer Clarence Davison, who let Eddie ride in a race. Result? Eddie lost. He lost his next race, too. And his next.
In fact Eddie kept racing and losing for eight straight months, and after every race Clarence would sit down with Eddie and go over every mistake. Eddie kept persevering until two hundred and fifty losses later, he quit. That is, Eddie quit losing. A month before his sixteenth birthday, Eddie won his first race.
He steadily improved under Clarence’s guidance, but then two years later he cracked his skull, fractured two ribs and punctured his lung after falling off a horse in Chicago. Time to quit, right?
Not Eddie. Four years later he captured his first Kentucky Derby win. Then ten years after he was told he would never be good enough to become a jockey, he captured the U.S. Triple Crown. He went on to become the only jockey to win the U.S. Triple Crown more than once, and during his racing career he rode in 24,092 races, won 4,779 victories and placed in the top three 11,888 times. Not bad for someone “not good enough.”
Eddie Arcaco was known as the “Master” by his peers. Is it any wonder? Yet he could very easily have quit anytime during those first 250 losses and we never would have heard of him.
You have to remember that about 70 percent of the horses running don’t want to win. Horses are like people. Everybody doesn’t have the aggressiveness or ambition to knock himself out to become a success. – Eddie Arcaca
Do you have the ambition and perseverance to be a success? I think you do.
Do you enjoy speaking and explaining things? Do you have a topic you’re knowledgeable about, even passionate about that others want to know more about?
And do you know someone who can intelligently talk with you about that topic? Then you can make fantastic money by speaking. Here’s how…
First, choose your topic. Use the same criteria you would use for creating any kind of info product – are people willing to pay for this info? Next, find a partner, preferably someone just as knowledgeable about the topic as you, or someone who has complimentary information and knowledge to share.
Next, write an outline of what you will cover. Make sure the two of you agree on what will be covered and that you’re not leaving anything out. Now talk on the phone and record the conversations using your conferencing service of your choice. It might take you one or several calls to cover everything. Really more calls are better, since the product you’re creating will have a higher perceived value.
Now get transcripts of the calls made, and sell the entire package as one product. You can do this from start to finish, including transcripts and sales letters, in 7 to 10 days. Result? You’ll have a product you can sell for months and years to come. Split the profits with your partner, promote to both of your lists, place it on ClickBank, sell it through forums, etc. I know people who’ve cleared $50,000 to $100,000 on a product like this. Splitting the profits with your partner, you would walk away with $25,000 to $50,000. Not bad for spending a few hours on the phone.
The shortcut you probably don’t want to take: Yes, you can do this by yourself. Sure, you get to keep 100% of the profits after affiliate commissions. The problem? Your product will almost certainly not be half as good as it would be if you had a partner who knew as much about your topic as you do.
First, there is a synergy and energy that develops between two people having a conversation that you just don’t get talking to yourself. Second, your partner is bound to have information and stories you don’t have. Third, one person lecturing can be – let’s face it – boring. Fourth, a partner with their own list will double initial sales and help you to spread the word with affiliates, creating momentum from the first day you launch.
Can you make a recorded product by yourself? Absolutely, and some people have been very successful doing just that. But everything else being equal, you’re almost always better off partnering with someone else.
Tips for making the calls/recordings: Keep the energy high and the umms, errs and ahhs to an absolute minimum. Have fun, smile, laugh and joke when appropriate, and give great, timely, usable information that will truly make a difference for your listeners. Your value is to quicken their learning curve so be sure to do this to the very best of your ability, and not only will you make money once, but some of these customers will be eager to buy future products you develop in the future as well!
Six years after starting a blog called the Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington sold the website for 315 million dollars. But 3 years before the deal was done, Arianna shared her secrets to creating a successful blog at the MarketingProfs event. Little did they know at the time just how successful her blog would become!
Here are 3 points she said marketers should keep in mind when creating and growing their own blogs, along with my elaboration:
1. “Make it easy for your contributors to contribute.”
You’ll notice when you visit the Huffington Post there isn’t just one writer, there are hundreds of writers. In fact, any celebrity can share their thoughts in a blog post if they do it “transparently and honestly.” How can you adapt this method to your blog? Allow anyone known (and perhaps even unknown but up and coming) in your industry to make blog posts, and make it easy. If they want to phone it in, email it in or use any other method (snail mail?) then let them. So long as it fits into your blog’s guidelines, publish it.
2. “Have a clear point of view.”
Forget keeping everyone happy by covering every point of view. Instead, choose your angle and stick with it. It’s clear to all where the Huffington Post stands, and it should be just as clear to your readers where your own blog lies in the spectrum of opinion. Find the truth in each story from your point of view and your visitors will have a clear idea of what you stand for.
3. “Provide a safe environment.”
It’s not going to be easy to get new contributors if they’re afraid they’re going to get attacked each time they make a post. That’s why the Huffington Post employs a team of comment “pre-moderators” who approve or reject comments. Thus no personal attacks are allowed, and disagreements are kept on a civil and intelligent level.
If success leaves clues and you consider selling a blog for $315 million to be successful, what can these blogging guidelines do for you? Put them into practice and let’s find out!
