There’s a good chance that you will have heard of these business models before. If you’re already an internet marketer or an entrepreneur, then there’s a chance you’re already selling affiliate products or you’re already reselling and so far it’s taking more work to get things up and running then you’re actually earning for all your effort!
In that case, it’s time to have a rethink about how you’re going to accelerate your business and help it to actually thrive. There are several tricks you can employ to make your business self-sustaining and to help it generate genuine income. It’s all about understanding what makes things sell and understanding how to get traffic to your site.
Creating a Sales Page
The first thing you need to do is to create a sales page. A sales page is essentially a single web page that has a singular purpose: selling one product to your audience. The idea is simple: choose your product, build a sales page, send people to your sales page. Each time someone buys from your sales page, that is called a ‘conversion’. Your conversion rate tells you what percentage of people who visit your page buy. The aim of a sales page is simply to maximize your conversion rate.
I know someone who once found a book they liked online. Set up and affiliate account. Made a Facebook Ad promoting their sales page and then made a ton of passive income. They made several thousand dollars and all from creating one page. Now that’s real passive income! But creating an effective sales page is incredibly important here. The key is to make sure that your audience is quickly engaged, doesn’t leave to go anywhere else and is completely convinced by the time they’ve read through all your copy. There are several different strategies you can employ to achieve all these effects.
The Design
The design of your sales page should be such that there are no distractions. That means no links to other pages on your site and certainly no advertising or links to other sites! It should be long and narrow so that all the user can do is to scroll down the page and commit/engage further and further with your content. Also highly important is that you design your site to look professional. This is important because you need to build trust.
People often feel reluctant to buy from unknown brands online because they worry the brand won’t deliver the product, or that their transaction will be lost in the clouds. Make sure you inspire their confidence and make an impulse buy easy by designing your sales page to be clean, crisp and professional looking.The best way to accomplish that? Use a pre-existing landing page tool.
The best example is to use Optimize Press, which is a WordPress plugin/theme that will make your site look like a professional sales page and include your transaction button. Note that ALL our websites and pages recommended in this book are going to be built with WordPress. WordPress simply makes it MUCH easier to create websites that look professional.
It has been tried and tested by millions of highly successful websites and brands throughout the world and it is generally known for its adaptability and its large number of different add-ons, plugins and features.It’s also very important that you make your transactions as simple as possible.
Letting people checkout with PayPal is a great way to do this for example, because it will allow them to buy from you without having to input their card details or sign up for a new account. You want to make it as simple and easy as possible for them to click buy and get your products immediately.
The Sales Copy
Just as important if not moreso is your sales copy. This needs to be written in such a way as to compel the reader to want to buy and to build desire and urgency. The first challenge is going to be getting your visitors to read past the first line. People are always in a hurry on the web and they don’t have time to sit and read a long passage of text that they know is just trying to sell them something!
Start strong then and get their attention right away. Do this by using a question directed at the user that will make them think, or by using a narrative structure that makes your copy sound like a story. We are naturally inclined to listen to stories and it’s very hard to cut a story off mid-way because we always want to know how they are going to end!
It’s also important to space your content out a lot so that it is easier to skim read (use descriptive headings).
Throughout the text, your aim is to sell the ‘value proposition’. This means understanding the psychological draw of exactly why someone might by your product and what it is about your product that they will want. This comes down to understanding how your product will affect their lives. For example, a fitness ebook will make someone fitter and healthier – therefore also making them sexier, more confident and more athletic.
The same goes for a pull up bar. Meanwhile, a book on making money or some kind of financial investment can help someone to reduce stress by being free of debt, to feel more powerful and financially stable and to chase their dreams. Men might think that earning money will make them more successful with women.Dating books or a dating site membership will improve someone’s sex life, or help them to find love (all depends on the site/book and the audience you’re aiming at!).
Make that the focus of your product description and get your audience to really visualize what you can do for them and how you’re going to improve their lives. Meanwhile, try to describe the feel of the product and how beautifully designed it is. Get them to imagine it being a part of their lives and to imagine holding it. The aim is to build up that sense of desire.
Creating Urgency
And from there, you’re then going to create urgency and scarcity. That means you’re going to make out that your product is in low supply, you’re going to introduce a limited-time-offer, or you’re going to find another way to encourage the person reading to buy now. Try to understand that people make purchases impulsively. We mostly buy things we don’t need on an emotional basis, not a logical one.
So if your visitor has time to go away and think about it, then they will probably not buy and you will probably lose your customer. Likewise, you also need to think about reducing the apparent risk. Promise a 100% money back guarantee and talk about how easily and quickly your product arrives. Show social proof by including reviews from other customers.
By making your product highly desirable and painting a picture and then making the reader act quickly, you can trigger a ton of impulse buys and increase your conversion rates significantly. Especially if buying is easy and your site looks professional! Of course you shouldn’t ‘oversell’ something like a mug with a funny picture. Bigger ticket items = large sales pages. For smaller items that are easier impulse buys, you can use an ecommerce store to the same effect.
Route to Market, Choosing Your Product and Selecting a Niche
You know what though? It is really not your sales page or your persuasive powers that will have the best chance of securing you your sales. What is actually much more important is that you select the right product to begin with and then promote it to the right people. The first tip is to choose a niche that you know and love. This is important because it will mean you understand it much better, you understand how to sell it and you don’t mind spending time writing about it or writing sales copy.
The next tip is to think about the niche and the size of that niche very carefully. Don’t make the mistake of aiming for a niche with too much broad appeal, or you’ll drastically increase your competition and make life very difficult for yourself. PPC ads will charge you more depending on how many other advertisers are after the same search terms as you. That means that you can end up spending a huge amount of money to ‘bid’ for a term like ‘make money online’ or ‘fitness equipment’.
You’ll be going up against the likes of Amazon – and they spend over $1 million a day in some cases on their AdWords spend alone! Better then, is to aim for a smaller niche while still thinking about whether you have a strong product with a good route to market. One of the best ways to do this is to take your niche and then narrow it down to a smaller sub-set.
For example, you can create a highly successful niche simply by taking fitness and then aiming it at smaller sub-section such as ‘the over 80’, ‘teenagers’, ‘women’ or better yet ‘diabetes’, ‘martial artists’, ‘students’ or ‘karate’.
Now you have a much narrower target audience and you can use tools like Facebook to target that precise group specifically. Now pick a product that solves a very specific problem for that very specific niche and market the heck out of it.
You can do this especially well if you can find a new audience for an existing product. A folding bench press for example is ideal for students who have a small amount of space in their home! Now you can take that product, write a sales page aimed at students looking to get into great shape and then advertise in places where students go.But the most powerful strategy of all?
Think about the influence you already have and the routes to market you already have. A ‘route to market’ is any direct access that you have to the audience you want to sell from. For example, if you happen to be best friends with the editor of ‘Gardener’s World’, then selling a gardening product is an ideal option. You already have a means to reach thousands of gardeners.
Why create more work for yourself when that opportunity exists? Just find a great product and ask your friend to promote your affiliate link! Or maybe you’re already a very big name in a popular forum. Simply find an affiliate link for a product you think those people will link and share it in the forum. You can even be upfront about the fact that it will make you money (in fact, I would advise it). But this incredibly simple strategy can make you a lot of money, very quickly!