200-Proof Marketing

I’ll use almost anything to get a competitive edge, and although I won’t tell you all of my tricks, I figured I’ld give you a few.

If you do your Niche Marketing like I do, you sell your products primarily with PPC(pay-per-click) in the beginning. SEO comes later, if at all.

When you release a new product on Clickbank, it goes to the bottom of the list in the Marketplace, where it is usually overlooked by affiliates.

To get affiliates you have to either wait until a good affiliate finds your product and promotes it(which could take months), or use a dirty trick to send it climbing up the list.

How do you raise your product rank in the Marketplace?

Easy… If you’re like me you have a lot of accounts with Clickbank. All you need to do is use another one of your accounts as an affiliate in your PPC ads.

Say your product is on an account called “product” and you have another account called “something.”

Just make an affiliate link like this one: something.product.hop.clickbank.net

Then make that your Destination link in your PPC Campaign.

Now every sale you get on your own will count as an affiliate sale, which will boost your ranking in the Marketplace.

I suggest you only use this until you have a few affiliates. There’s no real benefit to over exploiting it because once a few affiliates find it they will raise the rank on their own.

I realize that a lot of the things I talk about here probably soar right over the heads of people that are just getting started.

The reason I do that is because I prefer dealing with the more advanced topics since those are the ones that can help people already in this business the most.

But it’s important to never forget the basics. With all the new stuff going on, many marketers completely lose sight of the core fundamentals that make Direct Marketing work.

When I first started, I read this book and it helped me tremendously… I believe I read it at the recommendation of Gary Halbert.

The book was published in 1923 by a pioneer and legend of Direct Marketing. Since then it has been read and studied by almost every successful Direct Marketer(if not all). It is the one book that should be mandatory for all aspiring Direct Marketers.

The name of that book is Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins.

I had pretty much forgot about it until a few days ago when I decided to reread it just to make sure I still had a good understanding of the basics.

Here’s the cool part… Not only did it help me cement the basics again but it gave me more idea’s than I know what to do with.

The whole time I was reading it I was thinking to myself “how can I apply this to my business” and the idea’s started flying.

So, if you’re new to Direct Marketing read it at least twice and take notes. The information you’ll learn will be invaluable to you in your business. Some of it is outdated but most of it has stood the test of time.

If you’re like me and you’ve been in the game for awhile, take the time to reread it. I’m sure you’ll find some new ideas in it just like I did.

To make it easier for my readers to read, I threw together a quick and dirty webpage containing the book. I considered putting it in PDF format but I’m too lazy right now so I just copied and pasted it into a webpage.

You can read Scientific Advertising right now for free by clicking the link below…

Scientific Advertising by Claude Hopkins

Don’t be lazy and skip reading this book. If you want to be successful in this business you must understand the principles outlined in Scientific Advertising!

Some of you may think I’m crazy, but I actually enjoy infomercials. They can be entertaining and educational for a Marketer.

The humor is probably lost on non-marketers, but if you understand what they’re doing (or trying to do) it can be funnier than the latest blockbuster comedy.

Just the names of some of them are hilarious…

Take Yoga Booty Ballet for example. That’s a pretty funny name and product, but from the looks of it, it’s selling like crazy.

Who in their right mind thought of such a thing?

Entertainment aside, the main reason I watch infomercials is to see what’s selling and how they’re selling it.

It’s the same as reading all the ads in a magazine month after month.

The ad’s in the magazine or the infomercials that keep repeating are the ones that are profitable.

This is an excellent way to find new products that are already selling and to learn what sales techniques are working in that market.

If you want a wildly profitable product just look at some infomercials…

Some long time winners are Real Estate Investing (no money down and tax sales), EBay get rich quick deals, Exercise machines, Exercise videos, Diet pills, Cooking gadgets, and many others I can’t think of.

If you want to improve your marketing, one of the easiest ways is to study what’s working for other people. That means watching infomercials, buying magazines for the ad’s, and whatever else you need to do for the particular media.

You probably know Testimonials are important and you’ve probably seen how much they’re used in just about every form of Direct Marketing.

But I bet you still don’t understand how powerful they can be and the enormous effect they can have on your conversion rate.

Just watch any Infomercial… The better ones are composed of about 70%-80% Testimonials.

You might remember John Reese’s Relaunch of Traffic Secrets. The sales page was absolutely packed with Testimonials. Over 100 pages worth I think.

So what’s the key to getting the most out of your Testimonials?

First of all… Don’t call them Testimonials in your Copy. Call them Success Stories, Reviews, or anything besides Testimonials.

Testimonial is a dry, boring, and unexciting word. You’ll get better response with one of the alternatives.

Secondly, they’ve got to be interesting and specific.

“Thanks for your book, it really helped me alot”

Short, boring, and undetailed Testimonials like the one above are a waste of space. You want your Testimonials to tell a story, give a lot of detail, and keep the customer interested and excited.

When asking for testimonials, ask your customers to be detailed and if possible put the testimonial in story form.

Maybe even give your customers the option of taking a survey that asks them specific questions like:

In what ways did my product help you?

Tell me, in detail which parts of my product helped you the most.

and so on…

Help the customer write the testimonial you want.

And the last key to a Great Testimonial that will skyrocket sales is….

“Believability”

If your potential customers don’t believe your testimonials, they’re useless.

You want your testimonials to be as believable as possible because the more believable they are, the more they will increase your sales.

How do we make them more believable?

Here are the three easiest ways…

1. Add a picture in the testimonial. The picture can be of the customer, a before and after, or a picture of results achieved.

For example: You sell a book on Quilting and your testimonials show pictures of the Quilts made by your customers.

A picture not only makes the testimonial more believable but it also draws attention to the testimonial.

2. Add Audio to the testimonial. If you let your potential customers listen to the testimonial, it might make it a little more believable.

It doesn’t necessarily have to be the person who wrote the testimonial talking in the audio either. You can hire a couple voice actors if you want to.

3. Video Testimonials… This is quite possibly the future of testimonials because seeing and hearing the person giving the testimonial makes it much more believable.

Do you want an instant increase in sales?

Test adding a couple video testimonials to your sales page and I bet you’ll see your conversion rate increase instantly.

I did a test on one of my Niche websites a few months ago that demonstrated the power of testimonials. It was a new product so there were no testimonials yet, and sales were sluggish. The product was barely profitable.

That is until I got my first testimonial. When I did, I immediately emailed to person asking if they could elaborate and give me a more detailed testimonial as well as a picture if possible.

Almost a week later I got a reply with a testimonial that was about a page long and included a picture of the “results” from using my product.

I featured that testimonial right smack in the middle of my copy(a little toward the top, but below the fold) so it stood out like a Figure Skater in a Hockey Game.

That testimonial more than doubled my conversion rate and made the product a money machine for years to come.

Testimonials are so powerful, that I believe you could sell with nothing more, except a brief benefit driven intro explaining the product and a strong close.

No more body copy, just believable, exciting Testimonials.

So, do yourself a favor and start spending more time on your testimonials. Run a few tests, even something as simple as making them stand out more could easily increase your profits.

Well… It’s not quite free, but from the customer’s perspective it is.

The idea is to offer a product that’s very cheap to create and ship, for Free plus Shipping & Handling.

The catch is that you hide the cost and a small profit in the S&H.

That’s perfectly legal and it’s done all the time. In fact many marketers cover their entire fulfillment cost with their S&H, leaving the full price as pure Contribution To Overhead.

With just a little bit a of thought, I was able to think of quite a few products and markets this could be done with.

The idea has been around for a long time and a lot of marketers use it, but I had never seriously considered it until recently.

To make it worth the effort, you have to move a lot of product and the best way to do that is to target a large, “hungry” market.

Here’s a quick(well it was supposed to be) example…

A well known large market is the diet market.

Creating and popularizing a new diet takes to long so we don’t want to mess with that. Instead we can take advantage of whatever the most popular diet at the time is.

I’m guessing the low carb, high protein diet is still the popular fad diet right now, so let’s think of a product that would help people on that diet.

How about a small book called “10 low carb foods that will curb your carb cravings.”

Craving Carbs is a common complaint for people on that diet so it should appeal to much of our target market.

Next, find a fulfillment company that will print and ship the book for you, so all you have to do is send them the names and addresses of your customers.

You should be able fulfill orders for under $5.00 dollars each.

If you charge 7.95 S&H, that leaves you with $2.95 per order CTO or Contribution to Overhead.

Now write a small ad for your free giveaway. Something that grabs peoples attention, offers them the book for free, and contains some type of limited supply message.

For ordering it would be best to use a 800 number and a website in your ad. You might be able to get away with just the website, but who knows.

Ok… Now you’ve got your product and the ad… The next step would be to find a diet magazine to advertise it in.

Unless you already have a lot of money, you should start with one of the smaller ones that only has a circulation of a couple hundred thousand and work your way up from there.

Just find one that targets your market well and then contact them and ask for a “Rate Card” or “Media Kit.”

Because I don’t want to spend hours researching this, I’ll use “Self Magazine” as an example(I’ld start with a smaller magazine though).

They charge $14,665 for a 1/6 page B&W ad. I know that’s not cheap but they have a circulation of 1,332,782. So your Ad will be exposed to over 1.3 million people.

Because it’s “Free” and because we hopefully wrote a good Ad, we should get a pretty good response.

I don’t want to be over ambitious, so say we get a piddly 0.5% conversion rate. That’s about 6,663 orders which adds up to $19,655.85 in CTO.

We subtract the cost of the ad and we’re left with 4,990.85 in profit.

The truth is, we’ll probably be able to fulfill the product for less than I estimated and the conversion rate will probably be higher than I estimated.

I just like to underestimate things for safety.

I bet your thinking… All that for less than 5 grand a month?

Well not quite, that’s just the first step of many… We can eventually move on to other magazines thus increasing our profit many times over.

But more importantly, we can collect the names and addresses of all the people who order our free booklet.

Then we can create or find another higher priced product, with a much higher profit margin and market it to them by mail.

Let’s say we turn around and send every person that orders our free booklet a sales letter for another product that has a profit margin of $20.00.

It’s much easier to sell to people on the backend than it is on the front, so we should get a much better conversion rate for this list.

Let’s say our second product converts 5%(underestimating again) which gives us 333 orders on the back each month.

We make 20 bucks profit on those orders so that’s an additional $6,660 dollars in profit which brings us to a total profit per month of $11,650.85.

And that’s just one magazine and one cheap backend product.

Do you see the potential here? We not only profit from our first “free” product but we also use it as a Lead Generator for a more expensive backend product.

Then once you have the leads, you can easily sell them more diet related products well into the future.

I should admit that I haven’t tried this yet, but it seems like a good idea so I might give it a try in the future.

Now watch, somebodies going to see this and end up getting rich off my idea…

Oh well… I’ve got more ideas than I do time or motivation.

Failing is part of learning… Heck it’s a crucial part of Success.

Do you have any Ebooks that just wouldn’t sell?

If you’re a Niche Marketer, you almost certainly do. No matter how long you’ve been in this business, you’re still bound to have a few products flop.

When an ebook fails you have 3 options…

1. Forget about it and move on the next ebook product.

2. Try to change your product or copy so it sells.
or…
3. Figure out a way to turn the failure into a profitable asset.

There’s really no excuse for doing #1…

When an ebook fails, you should at least consider trying to improve your targeting and/or your copy so that it will sell. However, some products simple won’t sell no matter what you do.

So if #2 fails… Find a way to turn the failure into an asset.

On the web… Content is one of the main keys to getting traffic. Fortunately you have a book(or many books) full of content just sitting on your hard drive.

Instead of letting your ebook fade away as a forgotten failure, turn it into free web content.

Reformat it however you need to and put it up on a website with Adsense or some other type of ads and now you’ve got a content site that could provide a small income for years to come.

It’s not going to make you rich but it’s certainly better than forgetting about it and doing nothing.

Alright… I know I’ve been MIA from this blog for awhile and that’s pretty common. I’ve got ADD(eventhough I don’t believe there’s any such thing) or maybe I’m just interested in a lot of different things.

Anyways the blame goes to Battle Field 2, which is a addictive online computer game. Well that and about 10 other things.

After doing some thinking about my websites(which ones to keep and which ones to let expire), I’ve decided to change the whole way this site works.

I’m going to start giving away much of the software I’ve written. Some of it will be helpful to all marketers, and some of it will only be helpful to marketers who are at least average with PHP.

If you do know PHP you’re in luck because you can use some of the scripts I’m giving away to make your own software to sell or offer as a bonus.

The first step was to put a Statistical Significance Calculator on this website for other marketers to use.

It should be one of the most important tools used by any Marketer. Whether you’re doing Internet Marketing, Direct Mail, Magazine, or even Infomercials.

The key to making any Marketing business more profitable is testing, and testing is worthless if you can’t trust your test results.

So take a look over on the right side of this webpage and you’ll see a link to the new Calculator.

Alot of Niche Marketers move from one market to the next like they’re stoplights on a highway. But I prefer to dig a little deeper into each Market I enter.

If you’ve been marketing for awhile and you sell quality products, you’ve probably had customers email you and ask for more products related to their market. Many customers aren’t satisfied after just one purchase even if they liked the product.

If you sell a Ebook about how to improve your golf swing, you should also develop a product about how to putt better, how to fix a slice, how to drive further, and so on.

Once you have more than one product you can start selling multiple items to each customer.

I’m selling 3 products to one of my markets and in a recent test I put a little ad for my related products on my thankyou pages and noticed some surprising results.

Of all the people that clicked that ad after making their purchase, over 40% of them bought one of my other products.

Here are some practical ways to implement this multi-product marketing strategy:

1. Do like I did and advertise your other related products on your thank you pages.

2. Use an Upsell and offer your customers the other products before they make it to the Order Page.

3. Collect their email address at the Thank You page and offer them the related products with a auto-responder.

I recommend you test all of these to find which one is most profitable for your market. I would give you some indication but I’m still testing it.

With Clickbank you can add extra products to a order by designating different Item Numbers, Prices, and Thankyou Pages for each combination.

For example: $20 for product 1, $70 for 1 and 2, and $130 for all of the products. You’ll need to create thankyou pages for each of the possible combinations.

If you already have multiple products in one market and you’re not promoting them to each others customers, your missing out on some very easy money.

It’s much more profitable and maybe even easier to add new products to a market you’re already selling to than it is to go out and sell new products to new markets.

I’ve also been seeing some good results from downselling to build trust, but I need to run some more tests before I write about it.

Alot of people obsess about their headline and one fad that thankfully seems to be ending is the use of “Who Else” in headlines.

At first it was praised as a sure-fire way to boost conversion rates by a couple guru’s.

Most people just threw it up on their sales page without even thinking twice, even if it didn’t fit their product. Almost no one tested it, and I’m sure alot of people lost sales because of it.

I’ve seen decent ones like “Who else wants to learn to drive the golf ball further and straighter in only 2 days?” and I’ve seen terrible ones(I actually found this one) like “Who Else Wants To Create Profitable Customers Quickly?”

How do you create profitable customers? Is there a special Lego set for that?

Actually what the hell is a Profitable Customer? I have profitable products but not customers. If I was a pimp and my customers were my Ho’s they could be profitable.

Funny enough when you do a Google search for “who else wants” you get 480,000 results with quite a few funny ones.

Alright back to the topic… When this all started I decided to test it, unlike everyone else. What did I find out? It converted about .6% less than my current headline.

That’s not bad considering I had tested my headline quite a bit but it demonstrates why you should test every change you make to your sales copy. What works for one product may not work for another.

Don’t ever blindly take someone else’s advice.

“Test all things and hold fast to that which is good”
1 Thessalonians 5:21

It’s in the Bible people…

Wow, I should make that my new slogan for this site. It’s crazy how that applies so well to marketing but I guess it really applies to everything in life.

If you want to sell to people, it helps to have some understanding of how they think.

Thankfully there are a ton of psychological studies on buying behavior that we can look at and use to our advantage.

First have a look at this quote from an article in The New York Times:

“Corporate executives are the first to admit they do not really know how advertising works.

They spend $117 billion a year on advertisements, but most people do not remember what product is featured in a given commercial. Four out of five new products flop. There is no conclusive evidence that advertising ever causes sales to go up.”

Wow!

The one thing I focused on was: “There is no conclusive evidence that advertising ever causes sales to go up.”

Now, I assume they’re talking about “Brand Advertising” or “Image Marketing,” which is mostly useless. The one advantage these people bet on is that people will develop a brand loyalty.

That’s great if you’re selling Soda but it stinks for most small businesses.

With Direct Marketing, we know that correct advertising does cause sales to go up. The process we follow leads people to a buying decision.

But, with conversion rates averaging between 1 and 2 percent across the internet, our process still hasn’t been refined as much as it could be.

In my opinion, direct marketing has the potential to convert nearly 100% of it targeted market. Obviously that’s unrealistic, but I believe it is possible.

If you’re selling “Wrinkle Reducing Cream” to women that are insecure about their wrinkles, you should be able to(theoretically) convert damn near every one of them that see’s your copy.

Since this doesn’t happen we must conclude that our “process” is flawed. It’s still the best available but it has alot of potential.

If we want to improve our process we must first better understand why people buy.

Most human behavior is either reward seeking or pain avoiding. That response is one of the most primitive and basic there is. Get more rewarding stuff, stay away from unpleasant, or painful stuff.

That’s why we use benefits and not features. We want the customer to see the potential reward they will get or the pain they will avoid when they buy our product.

So the next time you write sales copy remember to make the reward of buying your product clear. But be careful which rewards you focus on…

The reward of using Wrinkle Cream to eliminate wrinkles isn’t getting rid of the wrinkles.

The reward is most likely one or more of the following: More self-confidence, compliments from others, becoming more attractive, envy of others, or any number of other things…

The reward is rarely the actual effect. When a man buys a Ferrari, the perceived reward isn’t just the thrill of driving a high performance car. The perceived reward is hot young women, respect of others, recognition of success, etc.

Don’t sell a Ferrari with a commercial of it speeding around a track. Sell it by showing a middle aged, average looking man driving around with a good looking young model while people on the side of the road stare and talk about how rich and successful the driver must be.

Alright let’s move on to some Buying Triggers(things that increase the likelihood someone will buy)…

One of the most well known triggers is Scarcity. Which is when there is a limited supply of something. This can make demand go crazy. However most marketers fail to use this correctly because they don’t make it believable. If you say only 10 people will get a product, stand by that limit. Then release a similar product with a limit and watch the product disappear at an astonishing rate.

The next trigger is based on other people. If you see everyone else doing something you are more likely to do it yourself. Home Shopping Channel’s use this and Scarcity to their benefit with the little “Amount Remaining” tickers. It starts at a set amount of say 10,000 then as they present the product, it rapidly drops down to zero. The viewers see this and are triggered by scarcity as well as seeing so many other people buying.

Another trigger is based on like-ability. If someone you like asks you to buy something, you will be more likely to buy it, simply because you like the person.

The Expert Factor also plays a role because people want to buy from someone they believe is in a position to help them.

Then there’s Reciprocity or the desire to return a favor. If your customer thinks you’ve done him a favor, he will try to repay you in some way.

There ya go… That information is potentially more profitable than most $97 ebooks out there. The right combination of the above can make you rich but because your getting the information free you probably won’t realize it until you pay for it.