Product Launches

JV Plus

Wow. I just stayed up all night creating a product, debugging it, writing the instruction manual for it, making the sales copy, and setting up the payment process.

The product I just made is called JV Plus. It allows you to turn ANY site (even this blog) into an affiliate program... cool, right?

Try it out. Just take ANY page on this site... for example:

http://www.robertplank.com/jv-plus

And stick your Clickbank ID in the "www"... for example...

http://stevenss.robertplank.com/jv-plus

Now you get credit for the sale of ANY of my Clickbank enabled-products I link to from my site! (Almost half of my products are on Clickbank.)

This script drops right in to any site... it doesn't matter what kind of site it is. I've never seen anything like this script before... that's why I made it!

You can check out the product here:
http://www.JVPlus.com

Okay, it's contest time. I deliberately violated one of the copywriting rules in Fast Food Copywriting on the JV Plus sales page... can you figure out what it is?

Winner Announced: Mark Squance guessed that the "big mistake" I made on that page was having a video longer than 2 minutes.  He won a free copy of JV Plus plus $20 sent to his PayPal account.

Black Hat PHP

If you're wondering how the launch of Black Hat PHP went... it brought in 186 sales for the main product ($1,616.10) and 6 sales ($562.37) for the $97 upsell, for a total of 192 sales and $2,178.47. That's calculated after taking fees into account.

I priced this one slightly higher (start at 7 cents and increase by 10 cents) because I wanted to get more money out of it over a slower period of time.

I made almost exactly $2,400 in sales total yesterday.... that's from one day! If you're wondering how I'm doing for the entire month, I've brought in $8,241.26 in gross sales for February 2008 which is $7,837.90 after fees.

Factor my day job income after that and it means that even if I take the next week off, this month was yet another $10k month for me.

I can tell you right now that having the 10-comment rule on this blog has made that level of income much easier to attain than in 2007, because:

1. I'm building a list -- I've always built a list but the blog is yet another list-building source.
2. I'm more motivated to pump out new products and write new sales letters because if I don't, I feel like I'm letting REAL PEOPLE down.
3. Having the blog posts available permanently, instead of temporarily when I send out a mailing to my list, means those blog posts can slowly bring in sales over time.

I can't tell you how important number three is. Before starting a blog, I noticed lots of $2000 weeks and lots of $500 weeks in my PayPal income reports. Now it is more like $1500 weeks every single week.

That's much more reliable income. When I first started making big sales on the internet, I'd have a couple of days during a launch when I would pull in $1000 or $2000 in a day, then no more money would come in for the rest of the month.

Check out Black Hat PHP if you missed the big launch. It's quickly approaching the $20 price range so act fast.

Also, can you comment below and tell me if you are making any efforts to stabilize your income, going for steady streams instead of short bursts?

• Are you looking into AdWords or some other form of paid advertising?
• Do you have a blog?
• Do you have an affiliate program that's promoted directly from your e-book?
• Do you offer upsells or one-time-offers... do you have a product funnel?
• Do you have a membership site?

Action PopUp

Is it possible to take an old outdated idea and put your own twist on it?

The thing is, I hate opt-in forms that take me off the current page. Luckily there has been a rise of Ajax-based and iframe-based subscription boxes in the last couple of years where you can fill out an opt-in form and you are NOT taken away from the page you are on.

In August of last year I first released Action PopUp.

Strategy #1: See If They Buy It In the First Place

I didn't know if it would sell well or not... the only real way to find out is to test it with a version 1.0 and see if people buy!

I am not a fan of releasing a free report, or offering nothing but a newsletter in your niche... just make a simple product, price it accordingly (a low price if it's a simple early version of your product) and see if people are willing to pay money for it!

There's really no other way to know for sure.

I launched on August 15th, 2007. It was a dimesale, the price was $7.99 plus a 2 cent price increase with each sale. The launch lasted for two weeks, totaling 242 sales at $2,504 profit ($2,348.36 after PayPal fees).

$2500 for two days of work? I definitely consider that a success! It was something people actually wanted to buy (instead of just saying they would buy it -- beware of this).

Strategy #2: Feature Creep

Because it was a new source of income, I knew I would spend the time to develop it more.

I slowly added new features and released them for free to my existing buyers. This is how you should roll out all your products: software OR information products.

I've developed the heck out of this idea and it's now at version 1.5 with a price of $13.31.

Strategy #3: Eating Your Own Dog Food

I added an option to make it work directly on a page, instead of as a pop-up... which is how I use it on this blog. When someone reads a post, they have a chance to subscribe to my newsletter for updates. Once they do, the subscription box disappears.

Action PopUp personalizes any web page (including this blog) after you fill out the subscription form... and remembers it for future visits.

You might have noticed it already... for example, on one of my posts, I start with this sentence:

"Don't forget, it's okay to make mistakes."

If you are reading the actual entry (not just on the front page)... after you fill out the newsletter box... let's say your name was Steven... the blog entry now reads:

"Steven, it's okay to make mistakes."

The more I used it on my own sites, I found I kept adding little "tweaks" in the script to get it to do what I want... these tweaks eventually became advertised features.

I added a one-time-offer countdown, link capture functionality, a delay-onload pop-up... only when I needed them for my sites.

Have you heard of the phrase, "Eating your own dog food?" It means if you use your own products, they will kick ass. Dog food tastes like crap, but if you were a dog food company and all you had to eat was your own dog food, you would tweak it to make sure it tastes great.

Action PopUp was something I actually used on my sites, so with all the unintentional self-testing I performed, I weeded most of the bugs, added features that people like me would actually use, and made it as easy to install as possible.

It's because of those three simple strategies that I am able to consistently pump out products.

Simple JavaScript

A week ago I made a very subtle change to my blog. You probably didn't even notice it, I bet. I moved the link on the right side for "Simple JavaScript" from the e-books to the video infoproducts category.

That wasn't a mistake.

I went back and recorded the videos for it. So, do you have any old e-books that you can update for the year 2008 and record some quick videos for?

They don't need to be super great. All I have is an out of date copy of Camtasia 4 and a USB headset. I open my PDF e-book to the beginning of the chapter, read the title and the first couple of paragraphs, then get to work, actually performing the steps the book tells me to, step by step.

I am very liberal with the pause button. I read part of the book and then do exactly as the book says, explaining what I'm doing as I'm doing it. Sometimes I'll ad-lib some comment, or go on a rant, or notice something I didn't notice when I wrote the instructions -- but did notice when I actually performed them. (Yet another reason why videos are such a valuable part of any infoproduct.)

People are lazy. If they can watch something instead of reading something, they'll be more interested in it.

My videos aren't award winning or clever. They really aren't that great. But they're good enough -- remember "it doesn't have to look good, just be good?"

I wasn't even decent in my earliest videos. In the winter of 2005 (I think) I recorded about 20 hours of PHP videos that just stunk. I don't even have them anymore. In retrospect I probably should have at least sold away the rights to them.

But I recorded the videos with the intention of selling them. You shouldn't record videos just for the purpose of wasting time and keeping yourself from building your business.

Video takes practice just the same as it takes practice to write well. It probably took an additional 3 or 4 video infoproducts to get it right. Now I don't mumble, I project my voice as well as I can and I speak slowly enough in the videos that I don't trip over my own words or click my mouse around too much like a babbling idiot.

My videos used to take 25 takes on average to get right, now I get through them in one take. Okay, I'll admit that every now and then I will screw up and have to record a second take.

• You can record videos for your old infoproducts and double their perceived value.
• You can avoid what Willie Crawford calls "The $20 E-Book Syndrome."
• You can create products that include audio, video, physical materials or DVDs that sell for $97 instead of $27... that require only 10% more work for you to make.

No one cares if you sound stupid as long as they understand you and you have something interesting to say. If you "get excited about your topic," that's no big deal.

I find that if I try to record a bunch of videos in a row, I get tired and just try to plow through them. They end up feeling substandard and rushed... not good. If you sound rushed and eager to finish the video, you don't sound like you're excited about your topic.

Instead, record a 10 minute video and then do something physical for 10 minutes (hey, let's not get dirty now).

You need to recharge your batteries.

• Record a 10 minute video then get in your car and drive around the block for 10 minutes.
• Record another 10 minute video then go have dinner.
• Record another 10 minute video, then mow the lawn.
• Record yet another 10 minute video, then buy groceries.

Even if you could only set aside time to record one video per day, you could convert your old boring e-books to exciting video information products. That's what I'm going to do this month.

I haven't blogged all week because I didn't want to talk myself out of doing this, but I have three more old e-books that are ready to be converted into video products. I have them all recorded and uploaded as of last night, I just have to work on the sales letters for them, one at a time.

I'll be re-launching Sales Page Tactics Volume 1 with video within the hour -- it's probably already out by the time you read this.

Do you have plans to record just one video per day to breathe new life into an old product? Comment on this entry below and tell me what you are working on.

[HELPDESKLINK]

Top Secret PHP: 300 Sales in 24 Hours

Early yesterday morning (about 24 hours ago) I released yet another PHP video series. This one is called Top Secret PHP.

I launched it using a nickel sale.

What's a nickel sale? Keep reading...

Just so you know what I'm talking about, it's like my other video infoproducts where I supply 7 PHP scripts, provide detailed step-by-step PDF instructions on how they were made, plus a 10-minute-ish video showing it in action, and how you can customize it to fit your site.

It has scripts to run some pretty unique special offers... like fast action bonuses, client-side one time offers, and upsell series.

The rest of the scripts and videos deal with affiliate marketing: how to stop affiliate vendors from stealing your keyword research, how to place pop-ups on other peoples' sites.

It even shows how to tweak your vendor's sales copy to make sometimes very necessary changes (like remove THEIR opt-in forms and ads from sales pages you risked your hard-earned advertising dollars to promote).

Because my most successful product launch (that $3,000 day last June when I announced Web Sites on Crack) was a nickel sale, I decided to go with what works.

A Nickel Sale is Where You Set the Price of Your Product At $0.05.

When someone buys, the price changes to $0.10 and the second buyer has to pay 10 cents for the same product.

Buyer number three has to pay $0.15. And so on.

You wouldn't think it adds up, but it does. I got Web Sites on Crack to run up to the $20 level, which means 400 buyers, so even though people were paying under a dollar at first, the last few people paid $20 for the exact same thing.

With 400 buyers, you average out to about $10 per person or $4000.

Even with just 200 buyers, that's $5 per person on average or $1000 in profit.

An added surprise bonus: That rush of early buyers provides the social proof for others to buy in quickly so THEY don't miss out before the price rises again. It feels like buying a rising stock in the stock market.

Gary Ambrose did this exact same thing with a program called "Nickelmania." I didn't hear about it until a year or so after he did it, after I began doing it.

The difference was with Gary's opp, he offered an affiliate program AND a physical DVD. That is even more ballsy. I'm only offering a downloadable product. If I don't make any money, that's no big deal. But a DVD costs about $5 to have autoshipped. If he gets less than 200 buyers, he loses money.

Then again Gary is all about list building. He is one of those guys who doesn't care about losing a little bit of money because... it's just like AdWords! He's paying for each lead, just like with AdWords you pay for each click to your site, and try to funnel it into a list.

His system is even better than AdWords, because he only pays per lead, not per click, and he's paying for a lead of someone who is willing to give money to him... now he can hit them with a backend product or market to them later down the line.

I've seen Russell Brunson have a site where he PAID affiliates $1 for each newletter sign-up they referred. He doesn't mind the initial loss because he's build a huge list of responsive people.

Even better: pre-qualify subscribers by making them buy something first. I recently saw a site that offered a 1000% commission affiliate program. What he did was charge people 10 cents to sign up to his newsletter, but paid affiliates $1 for each confirmed subscriber. It's the same idea... thinking of it in terms of pay-per-lead.

The moral of the story?
5 cents isn't that cheap, it isn't even a loss after you get a couple hundred sales in.

Here are my sales statistics for Top Secret PHP starting on midnight Thursday January 24th, 2008 and ending on 11:59 PM on that same Thursday...

Number of sales: 298
Profit: $2,179.60
Profit Per Customer: $7.31
Profit after PayPal fees: $2,019.75

Additional sidetracked sales: $124.38

Sure beats the hell out of that slow burning incremental product launch I did with PHP Uncensored, doesn't it? The Top Secret PHP launch just made in a day, what it took PHP Uncensored to two weeks to earn.

P.S. That dimesale / nickelsale script is a part of Sales Page Tactics Volume 3 if you were curious.

PHP Uncensored Version 3

I released the updated "PHP Uncensored" e-book and video package last night, complete with chapter 4.

Some of you were interested in my sales numbers for this launch, I'm going to give them to you. Keep in mind they aren't super great and I never put a lot of work into product launches.

Buyers at $10.00: 168 = $1,680.00
Buyers at $12.50: 28 = $350.00
Buyers at $15.00: 6 = $90.00

(Remember, we want to tally up profits -- not the number of sales.)

Total buyers: 202
Total sales: $2,120.00
After PayPal fees: $1,988.84

No advertising, no JVs, no affiliate programs, just a little bit of good old fashioned lazy forum and list marketing. That means zero expenses for me.

I'm only happy with about $3,000 from a single product launch. Remember that in June I made $3,000 in a single day. I keep telling myself that there are three more chapters to add so maybe things will pick up a bit.

My "Web Sites on Crack" and "PHP on Crack" products sold 405 copies each so I consider that the absolute highest number of buyers I am capable of attracting at this time.

But anyway, back to "PHP Uncensored"...

This latest script in there is a "Link Spy" and shows how to find out what pages on your web site are losing the most visitors.

You get a complete list of what pages on your site your visitors leave from... and which URL they end up going to!

If you can narrow down the links on your site that lose you the most traffic, you could:

• Edit the page and place an opt-in box right before that link to make sure you don't lose visitors permanently.
• Investigate the link and find out if the site you are linking to has an affiliate program you can join.
• Contact the owner of the other site and offer to setup a link exchange.

If an article or page on your site was really really popular... and you plugged that one leak... even one extra sale per week for a year would add up to a nice chunk of change.

Here is the URL to that product so you know what I'm talking about:
www.PHPUncensored.com

Remember that because I'm following that mini product launch plan outlined on my blog earlier this month, every time I add a new chapter, I give free upgrades to existing buyers and then increase the price for new buyers. So the lowest price to get in is right now.