KaChing: How to Run an Online Business that Pays and Pays

by Comm, Joel

  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.

  Recruiting Your Affiliate Sales Team

  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.

  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.

  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).

  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.

  Figure 4.5 ClickBank brings your information product to cash registers across the Internet.

  There is one more thing that you can do to boost your affiliate sales: Encourage your sellers, especially your biggest sellers.

  The 80/20 rule applies to affiliate networks as much as it does to every other part of your business: You’ll find that most of your sales are coming from just a small section of your affiliate network. (It’s likely that you’ll also find that those super affiliates are the people you’ve recruited personally after meeting them at a workshop, seeing them at a conference, or communicating with them for a while online. They will often be people you know.)

  Send all of your affiliates regular e-mails telling them about new product launches and suggesting the benefits of promoting your product. And send small gifts to your biggest affiliates to show how much you appreciate their work.

  Add a Shopping Cart to Your Site

  So you have a product. You have copy for your sales page, and you know how to recruit an army of sellers motivated to bring in a load of customers. You’re almost ready to throw open the doors and hear your online cash registers KaChing out.

  There’s just one small problem.... You don’t have any cash registers.

  In order to sell your information product, you need a way for customers to choose the products they want and process a payment. As you might have guessed, that’s all been systematized, simplified, and made a breeze. Just as you can now have a complete affiliate management program by doing little more than paying a few bucks for a piece of software, so is it possible to pay a company to handle the payment process for you.

  Again, a number of different companies offer this service, but one of the best is E-junkie (www.e-junkie.com), which comes with all of the features that you’ll find most useful, including buttons that you can just copy and paste, the ability to accept discount codes (all
owing you to organize seasonal sales promotions), calculators for sales tax, VAT and shipping, and even an affiliate management program (Figure 4.6).

  Figure 4.6 E-junkie (www.e-junkie.com) gives your shoppers carts to load up on your goods.

  For a fee that starts as low as $5 per month, you can upload your product to E-junkie’s servers. E-junkie will give you a button that you can paste onto your site and your sales page. When buyers click the button, they’re taken through the payment process, using PayPal, Google Checkout, and a bunch of other systems. Once the payment has been made, E-junkie then directs customers to a download page. It can even handle physical goods such as books, CDs, and DVDs.

  In terms of technical demands, you won’t need to know much more than how to do Control-C (copy) and Control-V (paste) on your keyboard in order to start making money.

  The Big Launch!

  Creating an information product takes time and effort. The process of creating the product can take several months if it’s a full-length book—or even just a 100-page e-book. Writing the sales copy can take time and money, and you still have to design and publish the sales page and start building your network of affiliates.

  At some point though, you’ll be ready to start selling.

  Now you could start slowly: Make the product available, put up a link on your web site, and start directing your readers toward your sales page. You’ll hear a quiet but steady tinkle of KaChings. But that would be a waste of a valuable opportunity.

  A launch is a tool that you can use to generate publicity, provoke word-of-mouth recommendations, and build the kind of buzz that brings even more sales. It’s your product’s birthday, a time to celebrate, throw open the doors, and get those cash registers ringing.

  The preparation for a launch begins a long time before the launch itself. Most of that work will take place behind the scenes, but when you leak small snippets of what you’re up to, you can help to build anticipation so that buyers are ready for your big announcement. You don’t just want people to be interested in what you have to offer when you launch; you want them lining up with their wallets out.

  For example, in November 2009, I launched a new online TV show. Obviously, my production team and I had put a huge amount of effort into creating the content, filming the action, and editing the footage. In order to prepare people for the show and to make sure that we were starting with an audience, we created a short teaser that we put on YouTube. I then posted a series of tweets that built interest.

  The first tweet, posted on October 25, said simply:“Saw finished edit of the NEW Joel Comm Show, to debut in mid-November. You are going to love it!”

  Note that there was no link there and no further information. I wanted my followers on Twitter to ask questions. By holding information back, I built their curiosity.

  Five days later, I went some way toward satisfying that curiosity by posting this tweet:“It’s the World Premier of the teaser for the NEW Joel Comm Show! ->http://TwitPWR.com/jcshow/- enjoy and plz RT! #joelcomm”

  I followed that tweet up a few hours later with this one:“Would love to hear more comments on the teaser video for the NEW Joel Comm Show ->http://youtube.com/joelcomm - Premiers in November!”

  As of this writing, we’re still at least two weeks away from the first show and at the moment, my followers can’t do anything. They certainly can’t watch anything, and I’m not selling anything. But I’ve already told them that something is coming, I’ve shown them a neat one-minute teaser, and by asking for their opinion, I have them talking about it. The excitement is building so that when we launch, people will be ready.

  This kind of preparation is vital for getting the most out of launch day. It gives you the time to guide leads through that four-step sales process that ends with “pay me.” It means that in the weeks before your product is available, your market will already be familiar with you. They’ll have checked out your web site, followed you on Twitter, and joined your Facebook fan page. They’ll already be willing to trust you, and they’ll want to be a part of your success—and enjoy success themselves—by buying your new product.

  And that preparation can make money, too. When Darren Rowse of ProBlogger used Twitter and his weekly newsletters to generate interest in his new photography e-book, he received both valuable feedback and orders for 50 copies, enough to cover his expenses.

  The launch day itself becomes an opportunity, not to convert those leads (they should already have been converted; you’ll just be giving them a way to spend their money), but to bring in new leads. Some of those leads will be converted right away by the persuasive power of your sales letter. Others will start going through that four-step sales process and buy from you in the future.

  The main job of launch day is to attract attention, and there are lots of different ways to do that. Giveaways always work well. The best example occurred in July 2009 when Moonfruit, a web site development company that’s part of SiteMaker, wanted to celebrate its tenth year in business: It chose to give away one MacBook Pro every day for 10 days. To enter the running, all Twitter users had to do was post a tweet with the hashtag “#moonfruit.” Twitterers could post as many tweets as they wanted, with each tweet increasing the chances that they’d be selected. (Third-party applications like Twiveaway and Tweetaways automate the process of selecting a random giveaway winner and even notify them for you.)

  The tweets came in at a rate of 300 posts per minute. Messages containing the hashtag were taking up almost 3 percent of Twitter’s entire communications. For days, #moonfruit was the most popular trending term—and might have remained so if it hadn’t mysteriously disappeared from the list of trending topics. Moonfruit’s web site traffic increased by a factor of eight and sign-ups went up 100 percent.

  That wasn’t a launch (although you could call it a relaunch), and the idea wasn’t completely original. Squarespace, a rival web site builder, had already tried something similar but fluffed it. Promising to give away 30 iPhones in 30 days, Squarespace instead handed out gift tokens. Moonfruit did better simply by delivering what it promised. The principle remains: A company picked up a huge amount of viral marketing and positive publicity to mark a special occasion. It did so by giving away something valuable.

  If you decide to use a giveaway as a method of attracting eyeballs, the temptation will always be to give away copies of your own product. You’ll be able to control delivery, and the costs will be minimal. There’s nothing wrong with doing that, and I do it often. But giveaways of your own product appeal mostly to people who already know you and already know that they want your information. It excites your main market, but it can leave people who don’t know you cold. Because they don’t yet understand the value your information will bring them, they’re not certain that they want to invest the time required to enter your giveaway and read your book.

  Give away something that everyone wants, and you’ll attract attention beyond your core audience. Gadgets, especially Apple products, always seem to do well, and I’ve picked up plenty of responses by offering a Flip Mino video recorder. Passing out products that are related to the subject of your information product whenever possible is also a good idea. That will get your promotion discussed among people who might not know you but are interested in your subject.

  One of the criticisms of Moonfruit’s campaign was that although it attracted attention to the company, it wasn’t quite clear how many of those new users were interested in actually building a web site. As an advertising campaign, it was powerful but inaccurate. When a publisher supports an information product about tiling your own roof or earning money with pet photography by offering a free roofing hammer or a year’s subscription to a photo hosting company, that giveaway is much more targeted.

  Giveaways like these benefit your audience, but you can also add sparkle to your launch by giving things away to others. I once organized a tweetathon to mark a product launch, spending a day streaming live from my office as I chatted with other marketers and
special guests. We raised a fair amount of money for WaterIsLife, had a great time, and also attracted quite a bit of media attention. The press love writing about businesses working for charities, because it makes them feel that they’re helping charities, too. And audiences like taking part in charity events because it’s such an easy way for them to give back.

  Best of all, you actually do get to give back. A successful product launch makes you feel good, but actually doing good makes you feel so much better.

  Finally, the preparation for just about every product launch will usually involve a press release. It’s as traditional as tinsel on the Christmas tree and, too often, about as useful. The problem isn’t that publicity isn’t a valuable part of a product launch. In fact, it’s an essential part of a product launch. It’s that too few people understand how a press release works and how to use it.