KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays (27 page)
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Authors: Joel Comm,Mark Victor Hansen
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There are a few quick points to note here. The e-mail is addressed to the recipient by first name. You’ll be able to capture that information when you ask people to sign up, and the mass mailing program that you use to send out the e-mails will be able to add it automatically. It’s much more effective than writing “Dear Subscriber,” or even just “Hello.”
Again, this is about trust. Subscribers will buy from you if they feel they have a relationship with you. What kind of a relationship is it if you don’t even know their name?
That’s also why the e-mail has a personal feel. It starts with “I” and is addressed to “you.” (And that’s “you” singular. Every e-mail and every article you write is read by one person at a time, so address the reader individually.) At one point, it even describes a personal conversation I had with the merchant.
This isn’t an ad and it isn’t a long-form sales letter. It’s a personal message letting people know about a great opportunity. It still has bullet points to describe the features and allow readers to see that this product is meant for them. It identifies the product’s unique selling point—its size and comprehensiveness—and it works in the guarantee and the price.
It even creates a sense of urgency by raising the price for people who delay. Of course, the link is isolated so that it stands out and is easy to find. You can also see my company’s address at the bottom of the e-mail (above the unsubscribe link). No one has ever stopped by after reading an e-mail like this, but CAN-SPAM says we have to do it.
You’ll also notice that the unsubscribe link goes to AWeber (
www.aweber.com
). This is the company that I use to handle my e-mail marketing campaigns, and it’s the one used by most major marketers (
Figure 5.6
). Although lots of companies offer similar services, AWeber is probably the Microsoft of e-mail marketing software. It’s the default option and provides services that are both reliable and flexible enough to handle any campaign.
www.aweber.com
). This is the company that I use to handle my e-mail marketing campaigns, and it’s the one used by most major marketers (
Figure 5.6
). Although lots of companies offer similar services, AWeber is probably the Microsoft of e-mail marketing software. It’s the default option and provides services that are both reliable and flexible enough to handle any campaign.
E-mail marketing might have picked up a bad name, but that reputation isn’t completely fair. Double opt-in messages should form a part of your Internet business and a part of your affiliate strategy, too.
Figure 5.6
AWeber really can help with your e-mail marketing. Prices range from $10 per month for 2,500 subscribers to $130 for 25,000. It’s not a free service, but the e-mails are effective and worth the money.
AWeber really can help with your e-mail marketing. Prices range from $10 per month for 2,500 subscribers to $130 for 25,000. It’s not a free service, but the e-mails are effective and worth the money.
Every holiday season, Google brings out a new set of AdSense units. They’re in the same formats, and they’re all in the usual sizes, but they’re decorated with little seasonal pictures. Thanksgiving units might have little illustrations of turkeys; Christmas units could have pictures of Santa or snowmen.
Google does this partly because it likes to be cute. The company uses any excuse to change the Google logo on the search engine home page. It also does this because the company understands the value of timing.
At Christmastime, readers are going to be attracted to a little picture of Santa. They’re going to notice the illustration in an ad unit, and instead of looking away, they’re going to look closer. And while they’re looking, they just might click the ad. The difference isn’t huge, but many publishers have reported higher click-through rates after using Google’s seasonal ads. (How those ads are implemented though will always be more important.)
Timing is something that affiliates often neglect. It’s as though they forget that they’re earning money from retailers and completely miss the value of matching products and campaigns to the seasons. It’s one of the problems of spending hours in front of a computer: Not only do you forget what day it is, you even forget what time of year it is!
That’s a shame, because it’s valuable information. The busiest day for Amazon, for example, is exactly 10 days before Christmas.
Most of your affiliate earnings are going to come from writing content that recommends products and inserting text ads into the words. You’ll put up the content and watch a percentage of your users click through and buy. Occasionally it pays to prepare and to match your affiliate campaign with the season.
If you know that a large number of people are going to be doing their Christmas shopping on Amazon on December 15, for example, then you could put up a blog post on that day with an affiliate link to a great gift. You could even support that post by including a reference to it and a link in an e-mail sent to your mailing list. Better still, you could hunt down a merchant that you know and trust and negotiate a discount code. That would allow you to create a time-limited offer—exactly the kind of thing that drives sales the most.
Instead of saying, “This product is great, and you should buy it,” you’ll be able to say, “This product is great, you should buy it, and I’ve managed to get you a discount. Enter this code within the next two days and you’ll save 10 percent.”
Because you’ll be striking at a time when you know people are planning to buy anyway, as long as the product is good, you should find that you make plenty of sales.
One of the most interesting results that Shawn Collins turned up in his affiliate survey revealed a particularly effective strategy for increasing affiliate earnings ... asking the merchant for a higher affiliate commission.
According to the survey, 58 percent of respondents had successfully asked an affiliate manager for an increase in their commissions. Presumably, many of the 42 percent who said that they hadn’t successfully requested an increase hadn’t asked for one. Simply getting in touch with your affiliate manager and suggesting that you should be paid more can increase your earnings.
I suspect you’ll have to do a little more than say please, though. Affiliate managers are likely to be generous if you can point out how much money you’re making for them—and how much more money you could be making for a competitor who has a slightly better program than theirs. Don’t beg. Just point out that their program is no longer competitive and that you’re making enough money for them that they should keep you on board.
If Shawn Collins’s survey is anything to go by, that should be enough to land you higher commissions.
On December 1, 2009, the Federal Trade Commission’s new guidelines for endorsements and testimonials in marketing came into force. They’ve been a long time coming. The rules hadn’t been updated for almost 30 years, and a great deal had changed in the marketing world since 1980. The guidelines themselves took a couple of years to put together and were based in part on feedback from marketing and advertising associations, as well as consumer organizations. They aren’t difficult to read, and there are plenty of examples that make reasonably clear what you can and can’t do. As with any legal document that affects me, I asked my lawyer, Kevin Houchin, to look over it and give me his opinion.
What he said was both fascinating and important.
The guidelines concern the way that endorsements and testimonials are used in advertising, and they are intended to ensure that advertising isn’t misleading or dishonest. That’s fair enough. There are 16 new rules, but Kevin identified two that are going to have the biggest effect on marketers, especially affiliate sellers.
The first is the issue of
generally expected performance.
generally expected performance.
This goes to the heart of why we place testimonials in sales letters. We want leads to understand that they too can enjoy the success that other customers have had using the product. That’s why whenever someone sends me an e-mail telling me how much their AdSense income went up as a result of reading the AdSense code, or how many followers they picked up after using my Twitter strategies, I know I have a valuable asset that can help me build trust. I can put that testimonial in my sales material and prove that my product works.
People have used it, and these were their results. If you use it, you can have these results, too.
And that’s where the problem begins. Testimonials are meant to be inspirational. They’re supposed to show leads what it’s
possible
to achieve using your products. The most powerful testimonials always come from the outliers, the people who put every one of your strategies to work, who thought about what they were doing, and who burned the midnight oil to put it all together.
possible
to achieve using your products. The most powerful testimonials always come from the outliers, the people who put every one of your strategies to work, who thought about what they were doing, and who burned the midnight oil to put it all together.
But these people are not typical. I know that when I sell a product—or even when I recommend a product to my readers—they aren’t all going to make full use of the ideas that the product contains. Some will, and they’ll have great results. Many will implement
some
of the strategies, and they’ll get results, too. Some, though, will do nothing. The book will sit on their desk, get covered in papers, and achieve nothing more than make their workspace a little messier.
some
of the strategies, and they’ll get results, too. Some, though, will do nothing. The book will sit on their desk, get covered in papers, and achieve nothing more than make their workspace a little messier.
When I put up testimonials, I don’t want to pick the average results because that average score will be brought down by all the people who didn’t do anything to build their success. I want to pick the best testimonials, the ones that tell people what’s possible if they’re prepared to put in the effort. Those are the ones that describe just how much life
can
change once they’ve bought my product. The results might not be typical, but they are
possible.
can
change once they’ve bought my product. The results might not be typical, but they are
possible.
The new FTC guidelines say I can’t do that. They state that the endorsement must describe what buyers “will generally achieve.” In the past, we could have gotten around that by putting up a best-case testimonial, then adding in small type underneath, “Results not typical.” Not anymore. The FTC states specifically that this kind of provision isn’t strong enough to overcome the impression that the result in the testimonial is average.
In other words, if you sell an information product that teaches knitting enthusiasts how to sell their creations and someone writes back to you saying that after buying your book, they’ve managed to earn a five-figure monthly income, give up their day job, and live the life they’ve always dreamed of ... you can’t use it.
That sounds like a terrible waste, so Kevin Houchin came up with a number of other options. One was to wing it. The FTC has to prove that your advertising is misleading, and that’s not going to be easy to do. Before the FTC attorneys go through all the hassle of launching a court case, they’ll send warnings asking you to change the advertising copy. That’s one option, but it’s not the best.
Alternatively, you can do what the FTC wants you to do. It wants you to use testimonials that reflect typical results, and to be able to produce evidence that those results are typical.
So before your launch, you could hand out samples to a representative number of people. Ask them to use the product and tell you the results. Collect testimonials from everyone, and use the responses that reflect the average results. You can also ask a market research firm to do this work for you.
That’s worth doing in any case. It will give you valuable insight into the effectiveness of your product. But it’s slow work; it might be expensive (especially if you’re using a market research firm); and it still makes using your very best testimonials difficult, because those won’t be typical. The FTC states:
[I]f the advertiser does not have substantiation that the endorser’s experience is representative of what consumers will generally achieve, the advertisement should clearly and conspicuously disclose the generally expected performance in the depicted circumstances, and the advertiser must possess and rely on adequate substantiation for that representation.
So you
could
use that great testimonial, but you’d have to explain afterward what most people actually achieve and have the evidence to prove it. Consider the following testimonial:
could
use that great testimonial, but you’d have to explain afterward what most people actually achieve and have the evidence to prove it. Consider the following testimonial:
Since reading “Make Money with Knitting,” sales of my
woolen sweaters have added two zeros to my income!
I now make $12,000 a month selling my knitwear. I’ve
given up my teaching job and knit on the deck of my
beach house in Cancún.—
Jane Smith, Owner, Knitwear, Inc.
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