Marketing your digital information product online
From: Jonathan Mizel
Cyberwave Media, Inc.
Dear Friend and Subscriber,
Over the past year we predicted the coming boom in the sale of digital information products. This has become a reality as more and more regular people create their own products and participate in the online marketplace each day.
In examining this trend, past newsletter articles revealed easy and inexpensive methods for you to set up a system to process orders, accept payments, and manage affiliates.
Now, we are excited to cover the final and most important step to success (our favorite by far). Your marketing!
In this article, you'll discover how to:
- Get your initial traffic
- Establish your first metrics
- Maximize your visitor value
- Roll out your product or service with advertising
- Develop affiliates
- Create your back end
Each of these areas is important, and even more critical is the order in which you perform them.
For example, if you roll out a big advertising campaign without establishing metrics first, you'll likely lose money since you have no idea what your offer should earn.
And if you approach affiliates before you maximize visitor value, you'll waste their time and destroy your credibility since affiliates want offers that sell.
| Note: Using affiliates to test conversion rates is fine if you let them know in advance. When we roll-out new offers, we'll sometimes use affiliates, and offer a financial guarantee or additional commission to compensate them for the extra risk of sending traffic to an unproven offer. |
In previous articles, we revealed how to get your site set up, and activate your Clickbank and Aweber accounts to start accepting orders.
Now, let's start at the top of the list and review the marketing tasks in order.
1) Getting your initial traffic
By far the most important step once you have a sales letter up and a processing system in place, is to see whether or not people buy from you.
We watch too many entrepreneurs fall in love with their product or service, and drop as much as $10,000 on advertising before they know how their offer will perform. Avoid this common mistake!
We always recommend using pay-per-click search engines (specifically Overture and Findwhat) for initial testing and help you determine your first batch of keywords so you will maximize your investment.
If you can't make money with pay-per-click search
engine traffic, you probably can't make money!
Whether you love them or hate them, pay-per-click search engines are the best way to generate your initial traffic and measure visitor values. Since search engine traffic, specifically from Overture and Findwhat, is largely driven by type-in searches, this provides a more accurate gauge of how an offer converts with real live prospects.
How many visitors do you need?
Your goal is to generate about 500 unique visitors to the site and evaluate what happens. Ideally, you should see opt-ins and sales, as well as generate some feedback from customers.
If you don't make enough sales to cover your advertising cost, you need to re-write your letter and test different conversion elements until you do.
| Note: While nearly all aspects of selling a digital information product online are cheap, even free, this step isn't. Depending on your keywords and target market, you might spend as much as two thousand dollars over four or five tests to determine viability. If this sounds like a lot, imagine wasting not only your money, but years of your time trying to figure out if you have a winner or a dud. |
2) Establishing your first metrics
Once you have traffic and a few sales under your belt, carefully analyze your statistics, calculate visitor values, and measure return on investment to determine profitability.
Pay close attention to the following two metrics:
- Cost per visitor
- Value per visitor
The key to making money is paying less than you earn per visitor, and doing it often enough so it's an economically viable business. Only when you have an accurate calculation can you go on to the next step.
3) Maximizing your visitor value
Once you have a clear picture of your visitor value, and you know how to measure it consistently, it's time to start tweaking and testing to see if you can improve it.
This is where you aggressively test different sales letter elements like headlines, offers, guarantees, and prices, etc.
It's also time to set up your Aweber follow-up system. This can increase profits dramatically by simply reminding prospects who said they were interested (by opting in) to take action and make a purchase.
Once your Aweber account is set up, we recommend adding an exit pop-up to your site which appears only when a visitor doesn't click the order link. The pop-up should be an opt-in box to allow interested parties to request follow-ups or check out a free sample chapter or report.
You are looking for at least a 10% subscribe rate. If you are getting better than that, congratulations! If not, increase the desirability of your opt-in offer by including additional bonuses like more sample chapters, hot excerpts, even a "light" version of the product to increase your list building power.
AWeber provides a seven follow-up sequence at no additional charge, which is plenty to start out with, since most of your prospects will buy within three or four e-mails.
| Note: If your seven-part follow up doesn't result in any additional conversions, you'll need to evaluate your follow-up and sales material. You should receive at least 20% extra sales from your opt-in efforts. In other words, if you get 10 sales from a campaign, your follow up system should generate at least two more. |
Here's what to send to your opt-in list, and when to send it, to maximize conversion:
- Immediate follow up: Thanks and download info or sample chapter retrieval instructions.
- 3 days following last message: Follow up with reinforcement of product's key benefits and answer the most common questions (FAQ). Suggest they buy with a call to action and link.
- 4 days following last message: 3 - 5 testimonials and call to action with link.
- 3 days following last message: Story about someone who successfully used the product and call to action with link.
- 4 days following last message: 3 - 5 more testimonials and call to action with link.
- 7 days following last message: Story about someone who had the problem the product solved, but didn't use it and had a negative outcome.
- 7 days following last message: Offer special bonus, pricing, or suggest a different product from a competitor via your affiliate link.
This is an excellent time to set up your Aweber follow up system for your buyer list as well. This follow up sequence is proven to increase back end sales, reduce refunds, and generate testimonials you can use in your advertising.
- Immediate follow up: Thanks for purchasing, including product retrieval information.
- 1 day following last message: Follow up to make sure the customer was able to download the product. This simple step keeps returns and dissatisfied customers to a minimum, creates a bond, and is completely automatic!
- 3 days following last message: Send the customer an unadvertised bonus, something valuable they didn't know about and didn't expect. This reinforces the worth of your product, and the relationship.
- 3 days following last message: Send a second follow up, and re-confirm customer was able to retrieve and read the product. This will help you identify and eliminate any quality issues with your product.
- 7 days following last message: Ask for a testimonial. Simply have people send in their comments, positive or negative, and say you'll use the feedback to either improve the product, or list them as a reference on your sales letter. If your product is good, you'll hear about it often. In addition to testimonials, you'll probably also receive JV proposals.
- 7 days following last message: Send a resource, article, or other information related to the subject matter (of the product) they bought from you previously. It can even be a link to a great site or other free topical information. The key here is building the relationship.
- 7 days following last message: If you have an advanced version of your product, or a natural upsell like coaching, consulting, or other back end service, offer it here.
There are several ways to set up the post-sale Aweber sequence:
- You can manually add buyers to the list at the end of each day. This is the easiest method. Just take your list, manually import them into the Aweber sales follow-up system, and remove them from the Aweber opt-in list so they don't get re-solicited.
- Drive the buyers into an Aweber form on your confirmation page and let people add themselves. That way, you get their full name and you can set up the form to automatically take them off the prospect list in one step.
4) Rolling out your product or service with advertising
The process of buying advertising is difficult, expensive, and risky. In this example, we set a budget of a few hundred dollars, we limit ad buys to several key places, and we do it for research purposes only. Outside of generating a positive ROI, the main reason to buy ads is to refine your metrics.
Your job is to create and test promotional tools your future affiliates can use to turn their traffic into sales. Three things to test:
- Pop-ups: Create a few teaser pop-ups designed to get click-throughs and generate leads to your opt-in list. If you aren't comfortable creating a graphical pop-up, simply use a text-based ad with a headline, bullets, and a link. Contact a few sites similar to yours and offer to buy pop-up or pop-under ad inventory on their site, and spend less than $100. Measure impressions to clicks and shoot for a 5% click through rate or better.
- Banners: Create a few banners. Ask the site owners you contact about pop-ups if they sell banners as well, and again, set your budget at no more than $100. Measure how many impressions yield clickthroughs and shoot for a 1% click through rate or better.
- E-mail teasers: Write a teaser ad to drive traffic into your landing page and buy advertising in e-zines and newsletters targeted to your demographic. Your goal is to get a 2% click through rate or better.
The purpose of buying ads
The easiest way to get others to start sending you traffic is to offer proven tools like pop-ups, banners and email pieces.
You can also develop advanced tools like reprintable articles, special reports, custom opt-in forms, and other content based promotional pieces which can generate a flood of traffic at almost no cost, though they are more time consuming to develop and test.
5) Developing potential affiliates
Let's review a few important points pertaining to affiliates, super-affiliates, and high-volume resellers.
- They have traffic and mailing lists they need to make money with.
- If your offer makes them money, they'll run it continuously until it stops or decreases significantly.
- They are inundated with offers from other merchants to promote competing products, and can consider only tested offers with high visitor values and conversion rates.
- They want affiliate programs that are easy to participate in with tested tools and bulletproof tracking.
You can generate traffic, or you can find it and just stand in front of it.
When considering who has the kind of traffic you want, start with the easy one first - everyone selling something similar to you.
Another great partner source are businesses that have top listings in search engines. You know they get traffic!
But the one I want to focus on now is the obvious choice for any ClickBank merchant. Namely other ClickBank Merchants! They understand and trust the system, and they are already qualified and approved to start selling!
This is easy folks, all you do is:
- Go to the ClickBank Marketplace and look for all the other merchants selling similar items or selling to the same demographic. The top sellers are listed in order of sales rank, so focus on the top twenty for your category.
- Visit their Web sites and find their e-mail address and the name of the site owner. If possible, get their phone number as well.
- Contact them via e-mail about doing a joint venture or mutual promotion using a letter like this:
Hi Jim,
I went to your site via the ClickBank Marketplace and noticed you are selling self-defense products and information.
I just published a book called "Surviving Terrorism in the New Millennium" and it's doing very well. I'm contacting you to see if you want to do a joint venture.
Our product sells for $39.95 and the sales page converts about 3% of all visitors to a sale. We give you 50% commission, meaning you'll make about $0.60 per visitor you send over.
You are already a ClickBank affiliate, so your links are very easy to set up if you want to work together. Check out our promotional tools at:
http://www.surviving-terrorism.com/affiliate-tools.html
· or better yet, drop me a line or give me a call and I'll work with you personally.
This is a simple way to add a new profit center to your business, and if you have any traffic at all, you should be able to make several hundred to several thousand dollars a month.
Regards,
Reginald P. Longfellow
415-555-6754
PS: I can also market your product to my list and if it sells well, we can do some targeted promotions.
PPS: Let me know if you want a copy of my book to check out. |
You want to develop about 10 good partners who promote you aggressively. Eventually, you'll want to expand to as many resellers as possible, but if you create a highly responsive offer, they'll find you.
6) Creating your back end
This subject alone could fill a book, so let's keep it simple: Back end promotions are the items you sell to people who already bought from you.
They are the easiest, most profitable sales you will ever make since you are soliciting people you know are interested (and qualified) to buy your product or service. In other words, you won't have to struggle with building trust and credibility.
The simplest way to create a back end, with little or no work on your part, is to find existing products that compliment your own, and sign up for their affiliate program and send these offers to your buyers list.
A slew of great products can be found on the ClickBank Marketplace, through affiliate channels like LinkShare, and on search engines. Just type in your key words and phrases and add the word affiliate and you'll find plenty of potential partners.
You'll have to share the revenue, and check out the offering to review it's quality, but you can get started quickly, and test the pulling power by sending a teaser to a small segment of your list.
The optimal back-end strategy
Of course, your best bet is to create your own back end product, like an advanced version of your first product, a tool or resource (helping the customer overcome a problem or reach a goal), consulting and coaching, or even a seminar. This way, you control 100% of the process, and, you reap all the cash.
If you offer multiple products and services at different price points, you'll find greater participation among your customer list than if you offer only one price point.
- Some people want a $20 e-book, while others want to attend a $2,500 seminar.
- Some people want private consultation, while others want to be part of a group or network.
- Some people are looking for an all-inclusive home study course, while others would rather pay you for a service and let you do the work.
Is that all there is to it?
There are a few things we omitted from this article series:
- Creating e-book covers and site headers
- Using special ClickBank management scripts
- Additional automation tools
While all of these are important, none are critical to your success. Plenty of people are making $20,000 a month or more without scripts, graphics, or custom databases. After you have some sales under your belt, you can spend the money to make your site look better and improve your automation.
In the meantime, the component that's really going to get your bank account moving is your sales letter, which is a function of copywriting and advertising, not design or technology.
Therefore, our recommendation is to create a sales process that works, then add the bells and whistles after you have made the money to pay for them.
Over the past three years, we have seen dozens of smart business owners take an idea and create a successful information product. Some turn their passions and hobbies into e-books, like Mike McGroarty and Willie Crawford.
Others, like Yanik Silver and Dean Jackson partnered with experts in a specific field, and came up with winners.
Since it's so easy to create a product, and even easier to set up an online sales system, and since it can be done on a limited budget, the question you must be asking yourself right now isá
When are you going to get started?
Hopefully sooner than later!
Respectfully submitted,
Jonathan Mizel
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