Congratulations! At this point, you are now 50% of the way through this book, which is rather an accomplishment, you’re a trooper! And what do you have to show for it? Well, believe it or not if you have gotten this far then you already have a far more comprehensive knowledge than the vast majority of Internet marketers out there today.
And we’re just getting started.
We’ve looked at the basics thus far, albeit in more detail than most people and with a lot powerful take-home tips thrown in for good measure. From this point though, we’re going to start getting a little more advanced and looking at the things that make the difference between a successful marketer and a really successful marketer.
Two More Terms: Landing Page and a Sales Funnel
Just before we jump into these more advanced techniques though (sorry!), let’s quickly introduce you properly to just two more terms. They are the Landing Page and the Sales Funnel.
Your landing page, which we have already touched on briefly, is essentially a page that is dedicated to the sale of a single item. This is like an eCommerce store (an online storefront) except it only sells one product. And as a result of that, it means it can be highly optimized and targeted to really push that one thing you’re trying to sell.
In fact, the typical landing page will have no links to any external pages and not even to other pages on the website. Why? Because you want to keep the user right on that page and not make it easy for them to get distracted or to leave. What’s more, you want to ensure that your visitors scroll down the page – and as such the design will normally be long and narrow. Getting your visitor to scroll down the page is a smart move, because the more they scroll, the more ‘invested’ they feel. Once they’ve spent a lot of time reading, they feel far more inclined to buy – if only so it wasn’t a waste of time!
The color scheme of the landing page meanwhile will normally be red and/or orange on white. The reason these colors are often chosen is that they have been shown to have an impact on us psychologically that makes us more inclined to buy products. Actually, simply looking at the color red makes our heartrate increase and this in turn makes us more eager to buy. Studies show that if a donation box is the color red, it actually gets far more money donated than if it is any other color!
In terms of content, the landing page will normally contain a lot of copy to sell the product. We’ll look at how to write this content in a future chapter but for now, suffice to say that you make it sound as great as possible while reeling the reader in and occasionally interspersing that content with ‘Buy Now!’ buttons.
Sales Funnel
So that’s your sales page or landing page. What about a sales funnel? Essentially, a sales funnel is a sequence of events that ultimately leads to your customers wanting to buy from you. Remember how we said that the average conversion required five ‘touches’? Well a sales funnel can be thought of as those touches.
So for instance, you might start out with some free content on your blog, which promotes another free product in the form of a ‘video presentation’. To access the presentation though, they first need to sign up to the mailing list and then click the link to gain their ‘VIP’ access. From there, they can then watch the video, which will end with a call to action explaining how good your eBook is. If they buy the eBook, they’ll then be told about your course, where they can gain knowledge that only the top experts on the planet normally have access to – but it’s very expensive.
Using this sequence, you can now take someone from never having heard of you, to wanting to spend a lot of money with you. Each stage and each ‘touch’ makes them more committed and if you have done this correctly, you’ll have providing some high quality value at each stage. This is essentially similar to the technique used by the foot in the door salesman. The foot in the door in this case is the free content – you can imagine that they’re just about to slam the door in your face before you say ‘hey wait, it’s free!’. They then give you the benefit of the doubt and listen to what you have to say. If they like it, they’ll be intrigued when you offer more, at which point you say ‘hey wait, all you have to do is sign up!’, ‘hey wait, it’s very cheap!’, ‘hey wait, it’s only a bit more expensive than the last thing you loved!’. This works far more effectively than simply going in cold and trying to make a sale and it’s why offering free content and building a relationship is so important for the Internet marketer.
Another way to look at the sales funnel is to break it down into common stages. One way this is often portrayed is as such:
Lead
A contact who you think might be interested in your offer. You’ve had no interaction but you have their details and you know they are interested in your niche.
Prospect
This is someone who has confirmed interest. This might mean they’ve subscribed to your mailing list, or that you have told them about your product and they gave you their card.
Qualified Prospect
At this stage, you now verify that the lead has actual need for your product. Are they qualified for what you’re selling? Many view this as the most important stage in your sales funnel and many people emphasize how important it is to point out who your product isn’t for. Maybe your product isn’t for beginners.
Committed
This is someone who has committed to buy your product. Normally this stage is pretty much moot for the Internet marketer – unless you have set up some kind of pre-order scheme (which is an excellent form of verifying by the way – see below!).
Transacted
This is a dumb word yes… But it basically means that your lead is now a buyer and all you have to do is to fulfill the agreement. Do well here and you can get repeat business!
Verifying
Right, now onto the good stuff!
Let’s start with a top-level concept that can potentially guarantee your success and prevent you from wasting your time and money. Verifying means taking your idea and ensuring it has legs. It means proving that your business model works and makes money before you go ahead and spend any time or money on it.
The problem that a lot of people make here is to think they have an amazing idea for, say, an app and then to spend three years perfecting that app (and telling everyone they’re onto the next big thing, though they won’t tell anybody the idea). From there, they then go on to release the product finally and pour as much money as possible into marketing.
And no one buys it.
Oh dear!
What they should have done is to verify the idea first. So for instance, this might mean setting up a faux landing page where they’ll sell the product before it’s finished. When someone makes it as far as the checkout page, they then simply say ‘sorry but the product isn’t available yet’.
But at this point, that person has seen the pitch, they have seen how much the product costs and they have gone to click buy. This tells you that the product is something they would have paid for. And by collecting as much data as possible, you’ll be able to see whether your business would have been profitable or not. You can even use this method to test multiple iterations of the same idea and multiple price points. Either way, you guarantee for yourself that the product has a market before you spend time on it.
This is another big benefit of selling a PLR product, or of selling an affiliate product. Either way, you get to choose something that has already proven successful before you go ahead and spend any money on it.
You can also use verification in a number of other ways. When it comes to app development, a close cousin of verification is to have a beta release or just a rapid iteration cycle.
In other words, don’t kid yourself into thinking that your app has to be completely perfect before you sell it. The great thing about apps is that you can update them long after they’re out in the market and every old buyer will automatically get the update. That means you shouldn’t perfect your product before you start selling it – but afterwards! This is called the fail fast technique – put together your MVP, or Minimally Viable Product, and then see if there’s an audience for it. If there is, you develop it and invest in more marketing. If there’s not, you move on to another idea. This is just playing the ‘game of numbers’ and it’s a great way to ensure a win comes along for you soon. It’s a foolproof business model and those are definitely the very best kinds!
Finally, you can even verify your marketing itself. Instead of waiting to see whether it’s worth chasing after a keyword, try using AdWords to see what it would be like to be at the top of Google for that term. This way, you can then see which keyphrase brings in the most traffic and thereby invest your time most wisely.
Good business really means mitigating risk. Verification and fail fast do precisely that, so make sure you are doing as much as you can.
Data
Another method you can use to practically guarantee your success is to make sure you keep analyzing your data and even to use split testing AKA A/B testing.
So your data simply means your traffic stats and this is something that’s incredibly important for the digital marketer.
If you have a website, then you need to sign up with Google Analytics, or at very least use the stats that come with CPanel or WordPress (through Jetpack – a collection of plugins). Either way, this will let you see who is visiting your website, where they are coming from, how long they are spending on each page… etc.
Carefully reading your data is highly important because it enables you to go to the next stage and start tweaking your business model for enhanced results. For example, this might show you that you’re getting a good amount of traffic for some keywords you weren’t targeted. This might in turn show you that you should be targeting them. Likewise, you might see that your efforts on Reddit are yielding greater returns versus your efforts on Google+ – so you should invest more time there. You may find that your bounce rates are too high and try making small changes to increase them. Pay attention to your data and you can see what’s working and what isn’t, thereby eventually enabling you to focus more on what is working to the point where you’re only doing what works and thus making much bigger profits!
Earlier we mentioned that you could use Google Analytics to set up ‘goals’, allowing you to see data relating to a goal such as someone reaching your checkout page. You can then look at which keywords, which pages and which designs are leading you to the most sales.
And with regards to split testing, or a/b testing, this basically means that you’re setting up two identical versions of your landing page/website/eCommerce store and then sending half of your visitors to each. From there, you’re then going to make one small change – for instance you might make the banner slightly larger on one of your sales pages, or you might tweak the price slightly. Then you leave both versions of that page running and you compare the data from each. Eventually, you’ll probably notice that one is performing slightly better than the other – and you can try making other small changes to see how they impact on performance. For those who are familiar with the scientific method, this is simply running a study with a control group – the control being the original site. If you see a significant improvement in results for a change, then you simply adopt that change across the board. This way, you only make changes that increase your sales and you gradually optimize your landing page more and more until it is perfectly honed. This way your page evolves to be successful and even if it wasn’t successful to begin with, the hope is that it will be by the end.
If you’re not sure about how to proceed with split testing, you can actually handle it through a tool called ‘Optimizely’.
As you can see then, you can use this strategy to turn a product into a massive hit and it’s almost foolproof as everything is tested – essentially verified – before it is accepted. Just note that you need a lot of data for a study to be significant, so don’t be in a rush to adopt a change when it might simply be succeeding as a result of fluke.
Selling On Different Platforms
Something that a lot of Internet marketers never consider (and are seriously missing out on) is the option to use various platforms through which to sell their products. This might feel a little like you’re taking the ‘marketing’ out of Internet marketing but when you consider the potential benefits, it’s more than worth your while.
So an example of a platform might be the Kindle Store. This is a place where you can sell an eBook in PDF or ePub format and anyone with a Kindle can download it. You have to give a fair old commission to Amazon unfortunately and it can eat into your profits. But at the same time, the benefits work similarly to affiliate marketing for product creators – here Amazon is your affiliate. If you are selling the eBook already from your site, chances are that these Kindle sales won’t cannibalize your existing sales and this is all extra income you wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. So there’s really no reason not to do it. Likewise, you can use the aforementioned LuLu on top of this to sell physical copies through their market – there’s no shortage of options. Another popular platform is eBay – you can use this to sell apps, to sell eBooks and more! Again, this is all extra money through a medium that lots of people feel more comfortable using.
Another great example of a platform like this is the Google Play Store – which remember doesn’t only take apps but also eBooks, music, films and more.
When using these platforms, it pays to take into account some basic SEO. Whether it’s Google Play, Etsy or somewhere else, these platforms work like search engines. That means that the title of your product, the description and the reviews all help to determine how your product ranks in the listing for specific keywords. Understand this and use it wisely and you can thereby encourage your product to be the first result for a number of highly popular searches and eventually this can drastically increase your sales.
And there’s nothing to stop you going on all of these and JVZoo and ClickBank and CommissionJunction. Think about how much you can scale up your sales and how easily you can experiment with different price points and more!
Scaling – The Repeatable Business
When your business starts to succeed, you’ll want to scale it in order to start making a bigger impact and in order to start generating more profit. This means your business model needs to be scalable – which most Internet marketing models are.
An example of what isn’t scalable (in most cases) is a service business. If you are selling your own services as a web designer, then your business isn’t scalable because you can only increase your revenue by working faster – which has a limit. Selling white label services on the other hand is scalable, which is why it makes sense for service providers to eventually transition to this model – or to productize their service. That said, some people enjoy their work and don’t want to scale necessarily, which is fine too!
The very best and easiest type of scaling though, is to choose a repeatable business model. To see how this might work, let’s imagine that you have written an eBook and you’re now selling it on Kindle. It doesn’t sell very often – perhaps once a week – but it makes you $10 each time it does. That’s still $40 a month and it’s completely passive income, so not bad!
But this is a highly repeatable business model. That is to say, that you can do it again and start making $80 a month. Do it twice more and make $160 a month. If you can write 10,000 words a day (which is highly doable) then you can write an eBook a day and upload them all to the store.
Now you can magnify those profits multiple times over. After you’ve written 100 books, you’ll already be making $200 a month! Write 1,000 and you’re now on $2,000 a month – a livable salary.
And what’s more, is that in all likelihood, you won’t need to write 1,000. One reason for this is that your sales will promote each other – as you gain more attention for the first 10 books, people will start to see your other titles show up as ‘suggested reading’.
Likewise, at some point you will likely happen upon a ‘lucky’ title that will sell drastically more than the others – possibly more than the others combined. There’s a lot of luck involved in marketing and eventually one of your books is almost sure to be lucky. In business, it is usually said that 80% of your profits will come from 20% of your efforts. This is called Pareto’s Law or The 80/20 Law. Either way, it means that while most of your books sell one a week, a few of them will probably sell 10 a day.
Upselling and the ‘Value Add’
Another way to drastically increase your profits from your various business models is to employ some kind of upselling or ‘value add’. This means that you’ll be taking your existing customers and then getting them to spend a little more.
One of the most obvious examples of this can be see if you go to a club in Vegas. Here, there is a limit to the capacity of the club – let’s say 2,000 people. If each person pays $5 for entry, then the maximum they can make from entry alone is $10,000. That’s not bad before drinks but Vegas isn’t known for aiming low. Thus, most of these businesses will get more profit by providing some kind of ‘value add’. That means they will somehow offer extra value to the customers who are willing to pay a little more – and this way they have ‘upsold them’. They do this in this case by selling a VIP area that costs an extra $10 but which gives them somewhere to keep their coats, a champagne cooler and guaranteed seating. This way, they just increased their potential sales to $25,000 from entry alone.
You can do the same. For instance, if you have a product on your site that you’re selling, then why not offer to throw something extra in for an additional $5. This also works particularly well as at this point the customer has already committed to buying – meaning they’re already past many of the psychological barriers such as giving their card details. They’re far more receptive at this point, especially if that ‘little bit extra’ doesn’t seem like much in the context of the price of the product itself.
A great example of this working online? Go to Vista Print and order yourself some photos. When you head to the checkout, you’ll be given the option to order mugs, calendars or mouse mats with your photos on. And when you go to click buy, you’ll be given a last minute option to add some return to sender stickers to your order!
