In your sales letters…

Show your website visitors a bargain. If your product can save them money, make them money, or if you’re currently running tests on price points be sure to tell your visitors that with a tangible and honest dollar figure. This is especially true if you are running a special – let them know if they order today they are receiving a discount and that you won’t be holding that price for ever. You want to consider showing them twice – by either a percentage or dollar figure. “Order now and save 30% of our regular price.”

Using bullets is a common practice in both online sales letters and printed pitches. They work in our busy lives as most readers are skimmers. Use bullets (dashes, dots or circles preceeding short sentences) to highlight benefits, features or a list of bonus products of your main product. Benefits are the key to selling anything.

Compliment your reader in your ad copy and on your thank you page. We all love a compliment and this helps to earn your readers’ and/or customers’ trust. A fine example seen on another site: “You’ve made a smart business decision by landing here and taking time to investigate this…”

Apart from pricing techniques you may like to try increasing the perceived value of your product by making your offer scarce – in quantity sold or through bonus products. Although this adds stress to the reader it does help to let them know your offer may not be on the table for long…

Find your competitors’ products’ weakness and use it as your USP (unique selling proposition). Let your readers know that your product has been recommended, written about, or given more success to your customers for specific reasons that your competitions products are missing. As an example: your USP could be that your competition doesn’t offer exclusive rights, consultations, etc.

Use the ‘fear factor’ in your sales letter copy. By owning, knowing, or using your product or information your customers can avoid pain, wasted time, loss of sales, etc. Sad but true, this ‘fear factor’ motivates people to buy. As a general rule don’t over-emphasize this one; play the card out on the table and let your customers decide if avoiding pain is their motivator.

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Dear Laura,

Good Morning! I’ve been reading through www.smartzville.com, and keep running into new ideas on new pages. And I’ve found out that I’ve made what may be a definate beginners mistake. Without doing enough research, and going on what I thought was a really good idea (since I loved it), I went out and plopped down $45 for a domain name and hosting account. Then I went back and started reading the sites of people like yourself, Brooks Owen (big in mail order), Jim Edwards, Michael Campbell, Joe Garris, and such and went “oh crap, bad move”.

So, after a day of “oh well”, I read some more, and I found a really good idea. And honestly this idea was so simple and so much of a zebra in a herd of milking cows that I just wondered why I didn’t think about it before. What’s the idea? Simple, find an already running site, grab it, and do a little remodling to make it better.

After doing more research on words and searches (like I should have done first), going on eBay was like going into a supermarket looking for just the right brand. Mind you, there are alot of junk sites, half baked ideas, and domains that you would never think of trying, on eBay. But, after two days and about four hours each day, I found two good brands. And what’s really sad, is I only paid about $48 for both, hosting and all. All set up, and one even comes with a product in hand.

The one with the product is …url removed…, and is not all the way transfered and up yet. It comes with a credit repair guide for $14.95 that you can download. The other site, …url removed…, is a site designed for downloadable scripts, ebooks, tools, and software. This site is up and running, but has no product yet. Both sites come with blog, newsletters, chat rooms, and multiple subdomains. Both sites can have individual sales letters within their own subdomains and the purchase button going to a Paypal account. Both sites can also have affiliate links and banner ads so I can get more income off the main pages.

Anyhow, I was thinking of putting some of your items on the second site, as well as content from Jim Edwards and some others. Eventually I will put my own ebooks (when they get written) up as well. I’m trying not to spend too much more since I’ve already gone $100 into this without one sale yet (and half of that was a misstep). And sadly, all I need is $900 a month to replace my current income. Do you know of any other good programs or affiliates to look into? Is there a way to research to find more? Are there any more costs that I need to be aware of?

Well, thanks for the help.

William

**********

Dear William:

By the way, it’s great to hear from you again!

My friend to be honest, I liked your first idea. It was original. I’m not sure where you’re going with it, but I envision it to be personable, interesting and has the potential to grow quite a following. Please don’t give up on it just yet – a lot of times a first inspiration (especially when you started with a love for it) is one of the best ideas ever!

And don’t bemoan spending $50 for start up. A few years ago we all had to pay $45 year just to register our domain names! And hosting used to be out of this world. I once worked for my hosting – exchanging hours in lieu of a hosting fee each month!

Now I can’t say much about your new credit site, because all I can see is a parked page, but I urge you to not buy any more sites off ebay without dropping me a line first. For instance some of those existing sites may be blacklisted, been used for spam in the past, and/or are cookie cutter sites. There are ways of checking first, before you bid.

A download site and a credit repair site may seem perfect at first blush, but it may be some work gaining the traffic and clientelle to make them lucrative. There’s just so much competition and only so many things to write about much less originality to set yourself apart.

For instance look at this http://www.digitalshelf .net/ and this http://www.lmphotonics .com/dlstore/index.php and this http://wizzworldwide .net/ and this http://eworldcenter .net/downloadstore and http://wubs-hub.tripod .com/ and http://www.marketandpromote .com

All copycats of the site you bought. There are many more. As I suspect, the same is true with credit repair.

I am not trying to burst your bubble, I’m just making sure you don’t buy more sites on ebay, and that you know that you must rewrite every bit of text on those new sites or you’ll never get any search engine traffic.

Google in particular does not like duplicate content or cookie cutter sites.

The only other expense I could alert you to is an autoresponder account for website subscriptions (once you start getting traffic you’ll want to start getting that traffic to subscribe so you can continue to keep them updated and promote products that will help them).

Drop me back a note if you want to talk more about any of this.

Laura

***************

Back and forth our conversation went. Eventually William decided (on his own) to rewrite the content on the cookie cutter sites he bought on ebay and continue on with his original idea – which was really quite good and I hope one day I can link to it to show you. He’s an original person with an original idea, just like you are, and that is where the potential to make money online lies!

William did write back again shortly after and said this:

“…and now the stupid news. The person who sold me the credit repair site still has yet to send me a copy of the site so that I can make changes. I cannot change the contact info nor the paypal info pages. I don’t even know what the downloadable product looks like due to I can’t seem to find it, but it’s for sale for $19.95. I should have seen this coming I guess. I’m sure this would make a good lesson for your readers. Thanks again, William”

Friends the big lesson of this story is be careful of what you buy on ebay websites. Although there are some smokin’ deals and some good sites available for just the right person to take to the next level, there are also some real duds, just selling a dream. Remember too that some of the auction sellers are as brilliant at copywriting as my good friend Joe Vitale! The only difference is that Joe serves up value with integrity to his customers…

Laura Childs
www.makemoneywithyourideas.com

******

Parts of this correspondence have been edited to protect the identity of the email author. I will not publish last names, urls or email addresses (unless given express permission by the owner). Each letter has been stored on my private files however to supply to the authorites if need be. I urge you to follow a similar practice whenever you you publish, sell, or reference another online.

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Search by: cookie cutter sites, make money online, ebay websites

Dear Laura,

Well, to put it shortly, I’ve been busy. In the past few weeks I’ve managed to pick up 25 or so ebooks for $19.95 from ebay, and about 1000 templates for websites for $10. But, let’s not say that it may be wasted money, because the education that came with pouring over all the new information was well worth the cost.

I’ve managed to aquire a few master resell rights and get myself onto about five different marketer newsletters….This all reminds me of years ago when you would see ads for resale rights in income making magazines. It’s the same game, but with modern spins and new faces.

I’m guessing that with the resell rights I now have, I could get some money coming in. The trick is to write my own letters and make some projects that fit the formula that everyone else seems to follow. I don’t want to go with “marketing” as a niche though. It seems so filled up with more and more names that wouldn’t really mean much to the average person. So I need to find my own path, and make use of the research I’ve gained so far.

But, first things first. Like I said, I picked up some master resale rights to a few products. How do I change the “changeable” parts of the sales letters to brand them as mine? Second, I have at least two PDF files that I want to sell on ebay for now, but do I need to have them on a website of their own for people to gain access to them after the purchase? Which leads to the last question. Do I need a separate page for each downloadable item, or can they be grouped onto one page?

Oh, the ebooks I picked up range from…..to an HTML editor to a FTP freeware package. I originally started with a purchase of an ebook on how to resell webhosting. That led to another page where I found 25 more ebooks, and I just went on from there. And the more I read, the more I find, and the more time gets spent roaming the internet marketplace. So far I’ve seen sites from the very useful, to sites where it’s just one long sales pitch of blatent “buy my junk” sputtered out over and over on one long page. And does everyone call themselves great just because they managed to get a site up and running and a few sales?

Anyhow, thanks for reading.

Bill

*************

Hi Bill!

You’ve been having fun! Just don’t get too deep into all of it that you never actually accomplish anything. One thing, done poorly, is far better than one thing not done at all.

I’ve got server issues to deal with the next few days but I felt that I should at least send you a quick note.

Use your html editor that you bought to make changes to those sales letters.

Unless you’re selling everything as one big package you need separate download pages for each product.

I’m not much of an ebay seller so I can’t comment on what works there and why…alot of the stuff on ebay has already saturated the market, especially the marketing and website management stuff (you’re right).

I agree. It’s the same game – direct marketing, only online. There’s a number of ways it’s done – draw the customer in with a high priced item and then sell them low priced stuff later vs. draw them in with a low priced item then upsell them with the big tickets.

If you’re just struggling over the download issue and you’re only going to be selling on ebay – you can email your buyers the files at a later date – just say so in your auction (product will be delivered within 24 hours of auction close by email, if you haven’t received your product within 24 hours please contact me at you@youremail.com).

The biggest headache of being in the marketing niche isn’t so much making a name for yourself as it is living up to that name. You’re a public figure and people expect greatness from you. They want you to answer all their questions, they are often abusive (you wouldn’t believe the nasty stuff people have sent me!), and they’ll even send you emails saying things like “what are you working on now? I want to know what direction to go into so that I can be one step ahead of you.” What the heck is that? And, they watch your sites (once they know what they are) like a hawk and often duplicate your market. I’ve learned to start making my new sites private. Anyway, apart from being a name among many there are a pile of reasons why I wouldn’t wish this gig on most people.

On the other hand, “And does everyone call themselves great just because they managed to get a site up and running and a few sales?” They have to call themselves great – it’s part of the story that the consumer buys into. Just a few sales? You’d be surprised how much money is made online from crappy sites. It even boggles my mind.

Anyway, I’m knee-deep in code and config errors on 6 different sites (one of the reasons you don’t want to host your sites with a fly-by-night hosting company – because they don’t know the first thing about customer service, or for that matter how to fix server issues), so I’d better run.

Laura Childs
www.makemoneywithyourideas.com

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Some parts of this letter have been edited out to protect the integrity of ideas from the email author. And although I will not post first and last names (unless given express permission) of my email writers, I can prove the validity of each letter written including email addresses, dates, and headers to the authorites if need be. I suggest that everything you publish online, sell online, or reference online, have a similar back up system in place.

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Search by: resale rights, resell rights, money