Product Launches
Action Comments Now Supports GoToWebinar!
Check this out... you can now paste your GoToWebinar invitation link into Action Comments!
Click to Play Video (Action Comments Supports GoToWebinar!)
That means your blog commenters can tick one checkbox under your comment form and get subscribed to your webinar.
Awesome new feature!
I own almost everything you produce Robert. I love the ability to be able to automatically add people to my list.
J.R. Jackson, JRJackson.com
Super Robert,
That's pretty innovative man. You're a brilliant marketer.
Jason Parker, ProIMer.com
Traffic Bad Boys
Traffic Bad Boys is a site Jason Fladlien and I launched during the first week of our PLR Copywriting class -- DURING the end of the first class. It was pretty crazy, we showed our students how fast and easy it is to build a site consisting of private label rights material.
I don't usually read what other people say about me. But I just read a bad review about Traffic Bad Boys, actually a bunch of bad reviews written by just one guy. And I'm smiling and laughing about it. You know why? Because the only bad things he had to say about it were:
1. I was banned from YouTube, so I "must" be bad. (Not a good assumption.)
2. Someone blogged about me a couple years ago calling me the next Mike Filsaime in a good way, that reviewer found it and tried to spin that as a bad thing.
3. The Traffic Bad Boys site contains master resale rights material, so it must be bad. (False... in the AM2.0 Platinum Google group full of $100K+ earners we recommend master resale rights products all the time.)
For that class, we took 7 products we had rights to, cut them up into pieces and dripped them out onto a membership site for 7 dollars a month.
The reviewer joined for one day, couldn't wait for the rest of the month or even the rest of the week, cancelled immediately and wrote a bad review about us... even though all he had to base it on was the first 20 pages of the material.
So What Does This All REALLY Mean?
It means you need a $7 product for two reasons: to get people on your list, and to get people OFF your list.
You can't always land a $97 or $497 or $997 sale immediately, you have to build trust. Get them to say yes to something small and then build them up with upsells.
But when you price so low you're also attracting bad buyers... it's a fact of life. When those people cancel, you can't take it personally, it's just part of the weeding out process.
You need to weed out those people complaining about having to pay an entire dollar for each product, complaining about having to wait for the rest of the material when they haven't even read what they already have.
(It would be stupid to put your best stuff into your free products and $7 products... save that for your high-end stuff.)
You can't pack the member's area with more stuff because then people will join and complain about being overwhelmed... been there, bought the t-shirt with the Daily Seminar membership.
The Solution!
If you're offering a $7 per month membership site, put $7 of content into it every month... no more, no less. (That's exactly what we did.) That sounds like common sense, but far too many people take bad customers personally and overcompensate.
If you were selling everything in that first month for a one time $7 payment, you would value-stack so that the information was already worth at least $50 or $100. There's no need to further bloat that up to $200 or $300 of value every month just because it's recurring.
Your information and your advice needs to be expensive so people will take it seriously. That's the real lesson you should take away from what happened with Traffic Bad Boys.
Do you find when you price higher you deal with better customers, yes or yes? Leave me a comment below to share your thoughts with me.
$30,000 in 28 Days?
My question to you today is: What's your goal for next month, as in how much money do you plan on making?
Is it consistent with your previous months?
In 2008 I logged several $10,000 months and several $15,000 months. But I've only broken above the $20K per month glass ceiling once or twice... so when we were in Hawaii, I said to Jason, "Let's make sure that in February 2009, we both make at least $30,000 profit that month."
Do you think I'll fail or do you think I'll succeed?
I don't want to reveal too much, but here's what my personal plan is:
- Co-host two e-classes, one at the beginning and one at the end of that month.
- Launch one new product per week.
- Launch one new resale rights offer per week.
- Re-launch one existing product per week.
I've never been that great at pay-per-click, joint ventures, recruiting affiliates or any of that good stuff, so the above plan will have to do.
I already have product #1 for the month finished, now I'm busting my butt to get a bunch of trivial stuff out of the way, so it dosen't take up my time during the $30K Month. Here's what I have to get out of the way in the next 48 hours:
- Record the rest of my weekly Daily Seminar videos... through the end of December 2009. (I only have content scheduled up to September 2009).
- Solve all the issues people are having with Action PopUp conflicting with other plugins. (Don't want to be overwhelmed with customer support next month.)
- Get Daily Seminar listed for sale on SitePoint. (I don't want to have to wait until March to put it up for sale.)
So, will I meet my goal? $30k per month is just $1071 per day. What is your goal for next month? Comment below and please be honest. No one will make fun of you if it's only $3k or $1k or $300...
What Membership Software Do You Use?
Do you run a membership site?
What software, plugins, and payment processors do you use for it?
I just setup a real recurring membership site. No more of this password protected blog stuff. I used aMember and WordPress, with Clickbank as the payment processor.
I was really surprised how many plugins are available for this stuff now. Even a year or two ago, you had to modify code and do custom scripting... "duct taping" the scripts together. Now you just install some plugins.
Pretty freaking cool!
I used a blog because I wanted to stockpile a bunch of content up. aMember has the most support (I'm a member of Membership Academy so that helps.)
And Clickbank? If you read my Membership Sites on Crack report, you'd know why I chose Clickbank. Affiliates (60% commission on a recurring product) plus the escape plan. If I can get enough content piled into that membership site so that I have a year's worth of content in advance, you better believe I'm selling it off.
Do you run a membership site? What software do you use to run it? Membergate, aMember, Visiongate? What processor... PayPal, Authorize.net, Clickbank, PayDotCom, 1ShoppingCart? How do you like it?
Please, show off the sales letter to your membership site as well since those can be tricky...
Hypnotic PHP
I just launched Hypnotic PHP on Thursday, so how did it do? $3,308 in 24 hours... and $4,574 in 48 hours, that's how it did!
Out of the 962 people who actually clicked through my e-mail, 211 bought. That's a 21.9% conversion rate on my untested, half assed full of typos sales letter that I wrote in a few hours.
From those $17 purchasers: 141 of them accepted my $7 upsell containing 7 more videos and scripts (Urgency Tactics) ... 66% conversion rate there.
So the grand total was 352 sales for a total of $4,574... $4,320.56 after fees, but the number of sidetracked sales of other products, made up for those PayPal fees.
So why the heck didn't I do a dimesale or anything like that for this launch?
You don't ALWAYS need to repeat the same freaking exact process when you launch a product!
I used to have people complain about my dimesales (because they couldn't get in at a low price fast enough), this time I had people complain about the LACK of a dimesale (because he's used to getting in at a low price).
I haven't given up dimesales, but the effort that goes into pre-selling my list a few days ahead of time is a lot more valuable than doing all the steps to make sure my dimesale works correctly.
You don't ALWAYS need a dimesale offer, just some kind of scarcity. Mine was really low-key... you get in now for $17, but after 48 hours it's $27. No countdown timer, no ticker counting the number of sales... just a simple offer.
If you were on my list you got the Email Marketing on Crack videos that explained it...
- Day 1: Tell your list something's going on sale at such and such date and time.
- Day 2: Explain the biggest benefit. (48 hour notice)
- Day 3: List out the rest of the benefits. (24 hour notice)
- Day 4: Tell them you launched it. (3 minute notice)
- Day 5: Tell them it's the last chance to get in before you close the doors or raise the price
That's it! It's not rocket science. I only started applying this after people told me the dimesales didn't give them time to read the sales letter.
But when I replaced the dimesale with standard scarcity, I still made the same amount of money with less customers -- which means less support.
I know some of you guys might cry and say, "Yeah right, you couldn't have done that without your big mailing list..." How do you think I built that mailing list up in the first place? Product launches on forums to build my list.
One final tip about pre-selling your list: Have the product ready to go before you start pre-selling it. I see lots of guys promote first and then end up having to push the launch date back.
But me, I used those few extra days to whip up an irresistible upsell offer (the extra $7 videos and scripts). 90 minutes of work netted me an extra $707 on that promo. 🙂
Affiliate Incubator Part 1
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.
Ten Testimonial Rule
If you've been following my blog at all then you've probably heard of the ten comment rule... any time I make a post, I ask for 10 comments from my readers... or I'll stop posting forever.
I just applied that to my marketing to gather testimonials for a product.
Nope, I didn't offer a bribe for testimonials, I didn't give away free copies in exchange for a testimonial. (Good way to make sure you never hear from those people again.)
I simply said: I need ten testimonials from SOMEONE... any of my current customers... for version 1.0, and I'll release version 2.0 to EVERYONE.
I Had My Ten Testimonials Within 48 Hours!
It's tougher to get ten people to do work, even if it's 30 seconds of work (writing a testimonial), than it is to get them to pay you money.
I brought in ten sales of Action PopUp no sweat, just by mentioning it in a blog post. I wanted reviews, not sales.
The only thing I needed to do was: end my blog post with a clear call-to-action (what action I wanted you to take), and my goal (what had to happen for the challenge to end).
It's Not Difficult, But So Many People Miss That Point
You have a blog with zero comments on every entry, end the blog post with a reason you want people to leave a comment. End with a question. Give people benefits about why they should leave a comment... what's in it for them?
Use your blog to build a list and send those people to new posts when you write them.
I'll see marketers add a FeedBurner chicklet to their blog, so they've built up their RSS subscribers... but they can't e-mail them... gross! The only contact they have with these people is when they add to the blog.
Now you can't tell your readers... check out this post one last time if you haven't left a comment yet.
You can't follow-up and market to RSS subscribers the way you would to an e-mail list.
To be honest, if I didn't get my 10 testimonials by today, I would have asked my list again... I would have hit the weekday crowd instead of the weekend crowd. I would have put up a talking head video begging someone... anyone... to leave me a review.
With every blog post you should be "selling" some action that benefits you at the end. Leave a comment under the blog entry, or visit the URL I'm talking about. One of those two.
If You Don't Think You Can Get Ten Testimonials...
Try a "five testimonial" rule. You only need five testimonials to release the next chapter, update the next version, launch the next product... whatever the goal is.
Have a clear call-to-action... don't say, "Testimonial please." Say, "What was the one thing you liked the most about it? On what URL did you set it up? What was the one stumbling block that ALMOST didn't get you to buy and how did you overcome it?"
Interview your customers one on one via e-mail and use their responses to piece together a testimonial. After I got my 10 testimonials I went back through all my e-mails, blog comments, and forum posts and pieced together an additional 7 testimonials for a total of 17 testimonials on that page.
Oh yeah, I released Action PopUp 2.0 to all version 1.0 buyers so you can add popups to WordPress blogs with just a few clicks... thanks for the testimonials I needed. Even Michel Fortin posted that blog entry to Twitter.
Was that ten testimonial rule a waste of time? No one needs a call-to-action at the end of every blog post, right? I bet your blog is chock full of zero-comment entries with no call-to-action in sight... am I totally right or am I just a jerk?
Please, answer me below because if I don't get ten comments under this entry... I'm moving this whole site into a paid blog. 😉
Action PopUp 2.0
This message is for my Action PopUp customers only... you need to read this if you want an updated copy.
As you know, exactly one year today -- on August 15, 2007 -- I released the first version of Action PopUp, the first popup ever designed for opt-in forms.
It's an unblockable on-exit lightbox popup that submits your e-mail subscription form in the background... so you can place them anywhere and not lose a sale.
Guess what... I'm releasing version 2.0 of the product. It still has all the cool pop-up features you've grown to love: you can customize colors, size... and show some crazy unique special effects...
Now it also works as a WordPress plugin! You upload a folder and activate a WordPress plugin, and you can create just about any kind of popup just by clicking around.
No editing code or config files... just clicking around on stuff.
If you know me then you know I give free updates for life on all my products.
So how do you get a copy?
Let's call this the ten testimonial rule (instead of the ten comment rule)...
I need 10 reviews for Action PopUp 1.0 for my customers, and then I'll release version 2.0 to everyone.
If you own Action PopUp 1.0, could you comment below and tell me:
- What site you use it on...
- Why it appeals to you (Easy install? Do you run PPC ads and want your click payments to go the extra mile? Cool noticable effects?)
- What feature you personally liked best about the product...
- Why others should want it...
Just answer each one of those questions in a sentence each (heck, only answer one or two questions, I don't care). Just give me a review I can use, good or bad.
Once I have my ten reviews I'll release Action PopUp 2.0 to everyone who bought the first version... use it super-easily as a WordPress plugin!
The new script works just as well for normal sites as well (like forums, sales letters, anything!)
Please post your review below...
