Starting Over – Part 6 (final sequence)

At the end of yesterday’s post, at which point I had produced a new guided meditation as my first product in this whole “starting over” scenario, I mentioned that the next step would be to start contacting potential affiliates about the new offer they could announce to their mailing lists.

I actually jumped the gun a bit on that, as I really should TEST market my new product to my own list first, just to make sure that the sales letter works to inspire folks to actually buy the product.

Nothing worse than inviting a new partner to participate in a venture and then have the whole thing crash and burn.

The main problem here is that we’re just 3 weeks into this starting over process, and I’ve only been building my list for 2 weeks.  With normal PPC advertising and such, I probably don’t have much of a list.  Maybe a couple hundred subscribers at this point.

Sending out a broadcast email to my list to introduce them to my new product is the first thing I’ll do, but this will most likely result in just a handful of sales.  I can also edit the gift delivery page and replace the affiliate product ad for a new ad promoting my new product.  This will make sure that all new subscribers see the offer, producing a few sales here and there.

And obviously, I’ll add a few emails to my autoresponder sequence to talk about my new product, and maybe insert an ad blurb at the bottom of all existing emails to expose my subscribers repeatedly to the offer.  I’ll have to check to see if MailChimp has an easy way to insert ad blocks which can be edited in one place and used in many places.

If I got 20% of my list to buy the product, that may be enough to get statistically valid data.  To be statistically valid, we need about 30 sales to know how well our sales letter is working.  However, getting 20% of any group to do anything is difficult, so I’ll need to do more.

So, how do we get 30 sales quickly, without recruiting affiliates to do it?

There are actually a few ways to do this, but first, let’s look at some numbers.

In order to get 30 sales, we need a lot more people to see the sales page, right?  How many more?

An average sales page on the Internet converts visitors to sales at an average rate of 1%.  This means that the “average” sales page needs about 100 visitors to get just 1 sale.  With my 15 years of experience online, I know I can sell a $10 product and get even a basic sales page to convert at 10% to 20%, meaning I need only 5 to 10 visitors to get 1 sale.

So, this means I need around 300 visitors to my sales page to get my 30 sales.  With a $10 product, this means I’ll make about $1 per visitor.  And that’s if the sales page converts at only 10%.  If it converts at 20% (which I’ve done with a few products), I’ll make about $2 per visitor.  (BTW – I had one sales page promoting a $49 product that AVERAGED about $5 per visitor over a full year.  That product included a book and about 8 hours of audio.)

This means I can go out and just “buy traffic” to my website.  Essentially, that’s what I’m doing with my PPC ads.  I could place more ads (separate from the ads going to my opt-in page) and send people directly to my sales page.  A few days of this and I should have my 30 sales.

Incidentally, this also means I’ve generated $300 in revenue, which can go a long way towards paying for all the PPC advertising I’ve been doing.  As long as this is profitable (meaning I make more money than I spend in advertising), I can keep this up forever, making at least 30 sales ($300) every week — IN ADDITION TO the money I’m making through the affiliate programs.  Also in addition to the money I make from other products I create, and other affiliate products I add to my portfolio.

Eventually, with enough products and enough subscribers on my list, I can count on bringing in $3000 per week or more.  And the only work involved will be to INCREASE that figure.

Promoting more products to more people is the name of the game online.  Of course, we have to get and keep their attention, and this is what we do when we provide free content, such as the blog series I’m writing now.

But what happens if everything DOESN’T go right?

As long as we’re getting SOME sales, we can run a few tests and find out where the problems are and fix them.  The normal approach to testing is to change one thing on the page, wait until enough people have gone through it (usually until we get another 30 sales), change something else, wait until we get another 30 sales, then change something else.  This continues until we’ve tested a variety of variables and calculated which version worked best.

That’s the SLOW way of testing.  There’s a faster way, which requires much less waiting and ad spending.  It’s called “multi-variant testing”, and is something we can do using free tools provided by Google.

Using the Google Optimize feature, we can set up all our test variables at once, send a flow of traffic to the sales page, and when we’ve sent enough (somewhere around 60 sales or so), we can run a report and see what combination of variables worked the best.

Then we just implement that combination of variables (things like headline, lead in, product photo, proof elements, offer, guarantee, etc.) and away we go.  The most profitable sales page possible using the original test elements.

Of course, we could set up a new test with new test elements and see if we can improve the page any further.

Bottom line: in just a week or two, we can make sure we have a winning sales page that affiliates will be happy to promote, and have the numbers to back up our claims.

Interestingly, if the numbers show that your advertising cost is less than what you’d pay for affiliate commissions, you may decide you don’t even want to bother recruiting affiliates for your new product.

Personally, I like to do both.  Nothing wrong with getting MORE sales and making MORE money.

By the time I’m finished running the split tests, my 30 days are up, I’ve made money, and I have a profitable website, which can only grow and become more profitable in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

I also have a good start on a new mailing list, through which I can promote additional products over time (my own and those I represent as an affiliate) while I continue to educate them on the main points they need to know in order to be successful in the niche I’m working in.

And once I KNOW how profitable my website is (from opt-in page through to sales page), and it can support an ad cost of $1 per visitor, I can also buy “mail drops” where an email I write goes out to many thousands of subscribers at once, and I pay for each click that comes out of it, usually about $1 per click because these are QUALITY LEADS.  With mail drops, it’s possible to get a few thousand visitors in just a day or two.  Of course, the same is true with affiliates, and they usually get paid only after actual sales are made.

As I’ve said before, this is just one example of how a new business may be started online.  I’m happy to help you plot out a course that works for you in your particular situation.  Just contact me for help, and we’ll take it from there.