KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays (20 page)
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Authors: Joel Comm,Mark Victor Hansen
BOOK: KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays
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Your regular readers will have already gone through the first three stages, so when you bring out your product, they’ll be ready for the last stage.
But you don’t want to market only to your regular readers. You also want to bring in readers of other web sites—anyone, in fact, who might have an interest in the information your product contains. You won’t have time to lead those new people through that sales process. You’ll want to convert them right away by persuading them, as soon as they reach your page, of the benefits of your product.
That means creating a page filled with effective sales copy—and usually that means creating a one-page sales letter.
You’ve probably seen these letters online before. They’re unique to the Internet. Head to sales conferences and you’ll be given brochures, flyers, and all sorts of different promotional material, but nothing comes close to the length, detail... and sheer persistent power of an online one-page sales letter.
That’s because offline, space costs money. The more content that sellers want to put in their sales materials, the greater their printing costs. When you’re printing thousands of copies at a time, those differences matter. On the Web, it doesn’t matter how much text you place on a page. While packing a page with too many videos and images can slow loading time, you won’t pay any more for space on the server—and that extra weight is unlikely to be a problem with a sales letter, anyway.
When you’re selling online, you’re free to go on and on ... and on about all the benefits that your product can bring. Sales letters can be thousands of words long and offer testimonial after testimonial and subheading after subheading. They’re enormous.
But they work. In one test conducted by
Marketing Experiments Journal
in 2004, long-form sales letters consistently outperformed short copy, sometimes by as much as 400 percent. In my own experience, I’ve seen upsells and one-time offers produce conversion rates as high as 70 percent. That doesn’t always happen. In fact, it doesn’t happen often, but I’ve never had it happen with any other sales technique.
Marketing Experiments Journal
in 2004, long-form sales letters consistently outperformed short copy, sometimes by as much as 400 percent. In my own experience, I’ve seen upsells and one-time offers produce conversion rates as high as 70 percent. That doesn’t always happen. In fact, it doesn’t happen often, but I’ve never had it happen with any other sales technique.
The reason that well-written long-form sales letters work is that they accomplish two goals. First, they have the freedom to describe every sales point and answer every objection that can be raised from every reader. That’s also why they’re so long: they have a lot of work to do.
And the other reason they work is that their sheer bulk creates the impression that this product will do everything you could want and more. They bludgeon the reader into submission. One of the most common reactions to reading a one-page sales letter is, “Okay, I get it. How much is it already, and where’s the buy button?” When you have readers asking that question, you should have no problem at all converting them.
Of course, the downside of a sales page that long is that no one actually reads it. Or rather, no one reads every word of a sales letter. But that’s the beauty of one-page sales letters: They don’t have to.
Different readers will have different objections and will be persuaded by different benefits. As readers scan a sales letter, the format of the page—the subheadings, the bolding, the italics, and the testimonial boxes—will help them to notice the points and arguments that are most likely to push
their
buttons. Readers will begin at the top and, as they scroll down the page, stop naturally at the areas that interest them the most. Those subheadings and boxes provide easy entry and exit points.
their
buttons. Readers will begin at the top and, as they scroll down the page, stop naturally at the areas that interest them the most. Those subheadings and boxes provide easy entry and exit points.
All of that information overload has another benefit: The details leave the reader more than satisfied. Whatever your product does, you’re going to have competitors. Saturate your readers with information, and they’re going to be less likely to look elsewhere for a similar product. If they don’t buy from you, they’re not going to want to start reading another sales letter all over again.
One-page sales letters that promote information products aren’t subtle. They’re not meant to be. But they are effective, and they need to be well written.
Usually, the best way to produce a sales letter is to hire an experienced copywriter to do it for you. Freelance services like eLance (
www.elance.com
) can be good places to look, and you can also try writing agencies like Scribat (
www.scribat.com
). Be sure to look at samples, but don’t expect the writer to be able to provide conversion results. Clients rarely share them with the writers who produce their sales letters. You’ll have to look at the sales letters and judge for yourself how persuasive they are.
www.elance.com
) can be good places to look, and you can also try writing agencies like Scribat (
www.scribat.com
). Be sure to look at samples, but don’t expect the writer to be able to provide conversion results. Clients rarely share them with the writers who produce their sales letters. You’ll have to look at the sales letters and judge for yourself how persuasive they are.
It’s also possible to write sales letters yourself. Although they look tricky, sales letters actually follow a very rigid structure and use all sorts of little copywriting tricks to lead readers to believe that they need your product. You’ll start with a gripping headline that attracts attention, lays out the problem, indicates that you have the solution, and describes the benefits that those solutions will bring. Subheadings are used to break up the sales letter and introduce new benefits, while testimonials help to build the trust you’ll need to make the sale. You can get those testimonials by handing review copies of your product to friends and colleagues and asking them to say something nice if they like it. Just make sure that you follow the FTC’s finicky new guidelines.
If you don’t want write it from scratch, there are plenty of templates available that you can use to form your sales letter. My friend Michel Fortin, who has been called “the best sales-letter writer on the Internet,” has created a very neat program called ScribeJuice that makes the whole process very simple. You can find it at
www.scribejuice.com
. Even if you prefer to hire a writer rather than try to do it yourself, check out the sales letter on that page; it’s a perfect example of how a sales letter should work:
www.scribejuice.com
. Even if you prefer to hire a writer rather than try to do it yourself, check out the sales letter on that page; it’s a perfect example of how a sales letter should work:
• The gripping headline provides a solution to a big problem right away.
• Bullet points at the first scroll down the page sell the benefits, not the features.
• The red subheadings create urgency.
• The black subheadings describe the content so that readers are able to spot the features that appeal to them.
• And there are tons of testimonials that deliver that trust.
Notice how Michel offers different products and uses an e-mail field to capture the addresses of people who haven’t been persuaded. He’s likely to pick up a very high conversion rate with a sales letter this good, but he’s not going to turn everyone into a buyer. In addition to sales immediately, he’ll also pick up plenty of near misses that he’ll be able to convert in the future with mailings and bonuses.
One advantage of using a template system like Michel’s is that you have the freedom to test different sales letters. That can be very helpful. You can even do this before you begin selling. Create three different kinds of sales letter and instead of collecting payments, invite readers to leave their e-mail addresses so that they can be contacted when the product is ready. Keep track of which sales letter brings in the most addresses, and by the time you’re ready to launch you’ll have a list of people you can pitch to directly—and you’ll know which sales letter delivers the best conversions.
The sales letter acts as a kind of sales assistant. It talks to your leads, persuades them to buy, and takes their money. It goes KaChing. But you still have to bring those leads into your store. Your web site will act as one gateway; search engines will provide another. But you want more than that. You want to recruit other publishers in your field as sales assistants for your product.
You want to build up a team of affiliates.
Affiliate selling is one of the Internet’s biggest success stories. I couldn’t tell you how much money I’ve made as an affiliate, promoting other people’s products on my web sites; it’s always been one of my biggest and most reliable revenue streams. In Chapter 5, I explain how you can do the same thing. First, you should know how to recruit affiliates to sell your product for you.
The principle is very simple. Other people in your field will recommend your product to their users. In return for cashing in on the trust that they’ve built up, you have to give them a share of the sales price. That share can be pretty big. Half isn’t unusual, and some sellers in very competitive fields have even been known to give away as much as 70 percent of their revenue to affiliate sellers.
The best way to calculate how much you should be giving away is to do the research. Search for other information products in your field and look at their affiliate programs. If you find that affiliate commissions for products similar to yours range from 35 to 50 percent, there’s little point in trying to buy market share by offering more. In fact, doing that could even signal that you think your product can only attract affiliates based on sales volume. Affiliates want products that sell and that please their users. Those sorts of products can offer lower commissions. Amazon, for example, has one of the lowest payouts on the Web, with commissions for sellers as low as 4 percent. But it can get away with those low percentages because it has such a trusted brand that people are not hesitant to buy from Amazon.
To keep track of the amounts you need to pay your affiliates, they’re assigned a unique code that’s worked into the link that they use to send you traffic. A software program tracks that code automatically assigning the right commissions to the right referers.
It’s a simple idea that’s helped individuals and companies make millions online, both as publishers and as affiliates.
There are two ways to get your product into the hands of affiliate sellers.
The first is to build your own affiliate program. As always, there are a number of different software programs available that make the process relatively painless. (Once a system is shown to work on the Internet, you can be sure that it won’t be long before some smart people bring out tools to make that system easy to use.) For example, iDevAffiliate (
www.idevdirect.com
) is just one program among many. It lets you hand out affiliate codes, track sales, and manage commissions.
www.idevdirect.com
) is just one program among many. It lets you hand out affiliate codes, track sales, and manage commissions.
These sorts of programs can be a little complex, but it’s worth putting in the time to play with them and understand how they work—and how they can work for you. Consider it part of your online business training. Even if you decide to focus primarily on third-party affiliate agencies, it’s still worth having your own affiliate system in place so that you can recruit sellers directly.
You might well find that it’s those connections that bring in the biggest affiliate sales.
I constantly receive e-mails, tweets, and messages from people asking if I’d be willing to promote their product to my web site users. With their generous affiliate commission, they tell me, we’re both guaranteed to make a fortune, so what do I have to lose?
The answer is
trust,
which is why I turn down just about all of those requests. I’m not going to recommend a product that I haven’t tried or that I don’t know. That doesn’t mean that I never offer affiliate products to my lists. As you’ll see in Chapter 5, I do that frequently and make good money from those offers. But they always come from people I know, people I trust, and usually people I’ve met at conferences. Because I know they deliver good information, I
want
to tell my readers about them. And because they know me, those publishers are prepared to tell their readers about my products—on an affiliate basis—in return.
trust,
which is why I turn down just about all of those requests. I’m not going to recommend a product that I haven’t tried or that I don’t know. That doesn’t mean that I never offer affiliate products to my lists. As you’ll see in Chapter 5, I do that frequently and make good money from those offers. But they always come from people I know, people I trust, and usually people I’ve met at conferences. Because I know they deliver good information, I
want
to tell my readers about them. And because they know me, those publishers are prepared to tell their readers about my products—on an affiliate basis—in return.
In addition to creating your own affiliate management system, you should also be looking at using third-party agencies. You can think of these as giant wholesale warehouses in which producers pitch their wares to retailers. Those retailers can look at the details of the product, view how well they’re selling and the commissions they offer, and decide whether to promote them themselves.
There are a bunch of different sites offering this service, but the market leader is ClickBank (
www.clickbank.com
). It costs $49.95 to join as a seller, but that can be recouped with just one or two sales, so the price shouldn’t be an issue (
Figure 4.5
).
www.clickbank.com
). It costs $49.95 to join as a seller, but that can be recouped with just one or two sales, so the price shouldn’t be an issue (
Figure 4.5
).
What will be an issue is the competition. Because ClickBank has such a massive collection of affiliate sellers and such a wide range of publishers, you’re likely to find that your product is battling for eyeballs with lots of rivals—even if many of them are just plain poor.
ClickBank affiliates and buyers look for products that are growing in popularity, so to stand out on the site, it’s important to generate sales from multiple affiliates. That will get your product rising up the ranks and attract attention. Use your own affiliate network, promote your product on your site and to your own mailing list, and you’ll find that success breeds success. The more sales you make on your own, the more affiliates you’ll pick up on ClickBank—and the more sales those affiliates will generate for you.
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