“ I like to think of sales as the ability to gracefully persuade, not manipulate, a person or persons into a win-win situation. ” – Bo Bennett
First off, let me acknowledge that things are probably taking longer than you expected. I know you were hoping that you’d be able to setup everything in just 5 minutes and be ready to start driving traffic.
But don’t worry, we’ll get there! The first few steps in listbuilding lay the foundation for your business. Once you have these things in place, you can focus 100% on driving traffic and making edits to your copywriting to improve your conversion rates.
Now let’s take a look at what the ultimate sales funnel should look like:
The first thing it all starts with is the squeeze page on the left. This is where you’re going to be giving away your free offer in exchange for the visitor’s email address.
So they have to signup with their email in order to get your free offer.
As soon as people enter their email address on the squeeze page and submit their information, they’re going to be taken to the Free Gift Download page. The reason you want to take them here immediately is so they can get what they just signed up for!
Some people will say to take them to the OTO, but here’s the problem with that- the subscriber won’t trust you yet.
Instead, it’s better to let them see the free gift so they trust you a bit more.
Once they’ve done that, then you take them to the OTO. This is a special sales page just for these subscribers that is going to offer them a special discount of some sort. It should be closely related to your free offer, but a lot more comprehensive.
For example, if you have a free report that offers five tips to lose belly fat quickly, your one-time offer might be about how to lose 20 pounds in 3 weeks, or something like that. It builds on what the free offer provides, and provides even more information and more value. So it might be a video product that explains different diets and different exercise plans, if you’re in the weight loss niche.
As far as pricing goes, you can go with any price point you want. Some people recommend a low price to get more sales, but some of the greatest marketers out there recommend going with a high price point, like $97. You’ll get fewer sales, but (probably) make more money in the long run.
If they decide to purchase your OTO, great! You can even send them to an upsell offer after that if you want, so now you may put a $197 product or service in front of them. Perhaps it’s a coaching offer, or a service that’s related to your OTO.
Or you can choose not to, it’s up to you. One rule to always keep in mind is that the more upsells (and downsells, which is the complete opposite) that you put in front of a new subscriber; the more likely you are to make them frustrated. After all, they came to you wanting a free gift, NOT to get bombarded by a dozen different products and services.
And if you want to kill your business fast, a good way to do that is to throw offer after offer in front of your subscribers. Sure, you may make more money short-term, but you’ll lose out long-term.
So they download the report, but also, and more importantly, they’re now on your email list. That was the whole point, so you can continue building the relationship you already started with them with your free offer.
The best way to do that is to share a lot of great information for free, and sprinkle in some stories about yourself. Your subscribers want to know that you’re a real person- one who is very helpful and is helping them to solve their problems.
You want the people on your list to get to the point that they’re excited to see your emails. You want them to read these emails like he’s reading them from a good friend or mentor.
This allows you to continue to provide more great information for free, as well as to continue to promote more offers in the future. These might be memberships, services, personal coaching, physical products, etc.
Remember that most people need multiple tools and sources of information to solve all of their problems, so someone building a business may be willing to buy a computer, WordPress class and service through your affiliate links.
And at the end of the day, promoting these other, higher-priced offers is what will make or break your business. You can make decent money promoting low-end offers, but it’s easier to make good money quickly when you get $1,000 per sale rather than $7!
So again- that’s just an introduction to the sales funnel. It’s showing you the big picture, so you have an idea of where we’re going. The first step to all of this is the download page, since we need to have something to send the visitor to once they subscribe.
Creating the Free Gift Download Page
Since I don’t know if you’re using HTML, WordPress, TypePad or anything else, unfortunately I can’t walk you through every single step to make a download page.
That said, what I can do is tell you what to include on this page:
- A big “Thank You for Signing Up!” across the top
- A link to the free gift (whether it’s a report stored on DropBox, private video on YouTube, etc.)
- A link to your “One Time Offer” page
That’s it!
Now I will explain the “One Time Offer” in a second, but keep in mind that there’s a reason we put it here.
Again, the reason is because we don’t want to offer a paid product to someone until after they’ve looked at their free gift. Remember that the free gift was designed to help the person know, like and trust us, right? So now that they trust us a little more, they’ll be more willing to buy something from us.
Now let’s talk about your OTO.
How To Build Your One-Time Offer
So once you’ve created your download page it’s time to put together your one-time offer. It’s basically a more comprehensive offer than the free gift you already showed them.
Your OTO needs to be in the same niche and closely related to what they just opted in to. If you are giving away a report on how to grow tomatoes quickly, then you want to make sure that your OTO is going to be related to gardening. Now, that’s not necessarily niche that I recommend you go into, but my point is that you want to keep the OTO related to the product they already received.
Your OTO should either be a product that you created or a very high-quality PLR product. PLR stands for Private Label Rights, meaning you have the ability to put your own name on it and even change it.
You should not be using an affiliate offer here. You want to have your own product, even if it’s PLR so it was mostly created by someone else.
Now, if you are going to use PLR, and I definitely recommend using PLR as a base, make sure you change both the sales page and the content itself just to make it seem more unique. A few good options are to get some new graphics for it (Fiverr or the Warriors for Hire section work well for this), personalize the sales letter, and edit some of the content to suit your own style.
The problem with PLR is that there’s a lot of PLR content out there that isn’t worth reading, let alone selling. Stick with high quality content if you’re using PLR. The best source I know of is BestQualityPlr, but you can check out other sources as well.
Keep in mind that if you have a low-priced OTO, your product doesn’t have to be very elaborate. It can just be a 20 page report or a few short videos. The focus is to have it be something that provides a lot of value and helps the person solve their problem.
Something else to keep in mind with the OTO is that it should be worth several times what you’re asking for it. So if you’re only asking for $7, it should be worth at least $27. That’s because you want this to seem like a great deal, not just something you put in front of them to make a few bucks.
To be honest, most people will NOT buy your OTO. That’s fine, because it shouldn’t be in your business plan for this to be a major revenue generator. After all, you’re building an email list, which will allow you to generate sales for years to come as long as you treat your subscribers right!
…but when people do buy that OTO, there’s a good way to see if they want even more from you. The way to do that is with a high-ticket upsell.
Adding a High-Dollar Upsell to Maximize Your Profits
Now, let’s talk about adding a high-dollar upsell to maximize your profits.
Having a high-dollar upsell in place allows you to really ramp up your business. When you have an offer that’s priced at, $97, $297 or even over $1,000 that converts well, you are able to make more money per visitor to your website. So (for example) instead of making say $1 per visitor, maybe now you make $10/ visitor.
That means that as long as you spend less than $10 per person you have coming to your website, you make a profit.
This is huge.
That’s why most people who have been in this game for a while say that you MUST have high-ticket items. Nobody makes a living selling $5 information products all day. Instead, you use these inexpensive products to build a customer base, and then some of those customers will invest higher amounts of money to solve their problems.
Some of the best high-dollar upsells are high-end training or coaching, exclusive membership sites, and services. And keep in mind that these don’t need to be yours. Unlike the OTO, it’s actually a great idea to act as an affiliate for these high-end items. That’s because you may not be considered an industry expert yet, but as an affiliate you can network with experts, help your clients AND make some money in the process.
It’s a win-win-win.
If you can’t find a high-dollar product, you could bundle together several different products into one larger package. I’ve done that a bunch of times.
For example, you can bundle together several high-quality PLR products, give them completely new, unique graphics and edit the content (and by “edit” I mean take out the fluff and add in some more of the useful stuff!).
Now you’ve got a high-ticket offer to sell your customers.
The trick with high-ticket offers is that you still want to make the customer feel like they’re getting the better end of the deal. So if a product costs $100, they should see the real value as more like $500 or $1,000. That’s not easy to do, which is partially why copywriters get paid so much for their craft.
The key to doing this is to help the person see the long-term benefits of the investment. Guide them towards understanding that the $100 investment now could help them generate a full-time income, lose 50 pounds or gain some other huge benefit over time.
If this all sounds like too much, that’s okay. You don’t necessarily need a high-ticket item, or even an OTO to get started in list building.
Just keep in mind that without promoting a paid product upfront, it will take longer for your business to become profitable. Plus, if you wait too long to begin promoting paid products or services, your subscribers may have gotten used to getting free content 100% of the time, and not want to invest any money.
As far as the next step goes, let’s move onto setting up your autoresponder. Now that you have your free offer download page, your OTO and (maybe) a high ticket item up and ready for sale, you can set up your autoresponder to begin collecting emails.
