Players With Money Sample: Product Creation

Contents
Finding Your Market 3
Find Peoples’ Key Needs 5
Section summary 12
Broadening Your Search 13
What Can You Learn From Trends? 16
Section summary 20
Naming Your Product 21
Checking Domain Name Availability 22
Section summary 24
Creating Your Product 25
Affiliate products 28
Outsourcing 29
Section summary 30
The Sales Process 31
The #1 ‘Success Tool’ 31
The Sales Funnel 32
Section summary 37
Squeeze Page Construction 38
Section summary 41
Creating A Killer Sales Page 42
Who Are You Selling To? 42
The Basic Structure 43
Videos And Audios 47
Testimonials And Buy Now Buttons 48
Section summary 50

Finding Your Market
If you were creating your first online product, you would most probably and quite naturally look around to see what ‘expert’ advice is available.
Without question, the first piece of expert advice that you should heed is that you should never begin to create a product without first knowing if there is a hungry market for it. You must establish that there are people that you already know would be interested in buying it before doing anything else. This is obviously sound and logical business sense with which nobody in their right mind would choose to argue.
The next step that is generally recommended tends, however, to be one of two options:
• Take your interest, favorite pastime or area of specialized knowledge and use keyword research to find what people are looking for that can be related to what you have or know, or
• If you have no specific interest or specialized knowledge, sit down with a blank piece of paper or an empty document on your monitor and brainstorm as many ideas as you can. Then you do keyword research in exactly the same way as above.
The theory seems to be that using either of these methods will give you a perfect foundation upon which you can build your business.
And, whilst not saying for one moment that these two methods don’t work at all – they do, and have done so for me on many occasions – nevertheless, I would suggest that there is something lacking with both ideas.
For example, if you start from your own interest or specialized knowledge, then you have immediately limited your potential targeted customers to a tiny percentage of the worldwide internet population.
If your passion is hurling, for example, or your specialized knowledge was acquired from 30 years working for Boeing or DuPont, then there will certainly be people that are interested in what you have to say, and maybe even a handful who will be prepared to pay for it.
But why would you spend all that time and put in the work needed to create a product that you knew would only ever sell to a handful of people before you even started?
As a labor of love, maybe it makes sense but as a business decision, it absolutely does not!
These are somewhat extreme examples, but if you were a newbie to internet marketing and chose to follow the common wisdom, this is very possibly where you could find yourself.
Using brainstorming is all very well, and is obviously a recognized new product idea generation technique, but why do all the work yourself? There are a ton of online resources that have already done most of the work for you, so why waste your time and effort replicating what other people have already done for you?
The thought behind ‘Product Creation From The Outside In’ is that if you do exactly the same as everybody else, then you will most likely end up in exactly the same place as everybody else - and most people do not succeed in internet marketing! So, from here on in, forget what you think you know about how to find your target market:
• Forget about your hobbies, interests or specialized knowledge. Whilst they may very well constitute the single most important thing in your life, you must accept that there is not necessarily one other person on the face of planet earth who is willing to pay for what you can tell them.
• Forget brainstorming also. It is hard work and there is no guarantee that the results you achieve will help you in any way.
In other words, let’s forget what you are interested in and focus only on what others are dying to know about - and rather than brainstorming let’s use the available online tools and resources that will tell you all the answers that you need.

Find Peoples’ Key Needs
In order to decide what kind of product you want to produce you need to know what people want to buy. In order to establish this, you should start from a couple of very basic facts about how and why people use the net.
The majority of people use it because the internet is the single biggest depository of information available - and people most commonly seek this information by typing their questions or queries into search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN.
It follows that if you know the kind of questions that people are asking, then you should also know the answer it is that they are seeking.
No matter how complex or involved some online questions or queries might initially appear, I can tell you that the information people are seeking is almost always available somewhere on the net if they are willing to dig deep enough to find it. Moreover, it is usually available free!
Why then would people be willing to pay you to provide the answers?
There are two reasons:
• Firstly, most people are not determined enough or are perhaps too lazy to keep on digging to find what they need whilst surfing the web.
• Secondly, the vast majority of people are simply not aware that the information is available and that there are tools that will enable them to find it.
Your job is therefore straightforward. You have to know what people are seeking, know where to find the answers and then pull that information together to create a product for which you already know there is a massive market.
Armed with a totally open mind – you should at this stage have no preconceptions, literally no idea of what your product is going to be. Let’s begin from the broadest ‘macro’ position possible, by looking at what people who are online (your potential target market) are looking for.
How can you tell that someone is looking for something? The words that they use would give you the clues that you need, right?
It follows that if people are using words that clearly demonstrate need in their searches, then if you can ‘match’ their ‘need’ words, you will know what they want and be able to satisfy that need or desire.
Instead of starting your topic search using your interest or area of specialized knowledge as the central focus, just start with ‘need’ words like ‘alleviate’, ‘analyze’ ‘detox’, ‘how to’, ‘get rid of’, ‘fix’ and so on.
Lets run a search using the free Wordtracker keyword research tool for ‘fix’ and see what it throws up.
The first thing to say is that such broad searches are always going to find a lot of completely irrelevant keyword results, and so you might have to scan through quite a few results before you find anything that looks like it merits further investigation:

For example, the first few ‘fix’ result are related to a Coldplay song and they are people who are not actually looking to fix anything, so you can immediately discard these results.
The highlighted result ‘fix scratched CD toothpaste’ looks interesting however, especially as there another couple of results near the bottom of the table that are quite closely related.
We’ll look into these phrases in a little more detail in a moment to see if these are phrases that are worth looking into further.
Before doing so, look at a few other results shown. Quite a few relate to fixing PC problems – ‘registry fix’, ‘free registry fix’, all results that relate to ‘nod32’ and so on.
These are nice results, but that is a hugely competitive marketplace in which it is going to be extremely difficult to make any impression no matter how good the product that you create. I see no sense in doing something that you know to be difficult if there is an easier option available.
Competition is critical when looking at whether it is worth creating a new product or not. On one hand, the more competition there is, the more indication there is that a market has money to spend. However, on the other hand, the more competition there is, the harder it is going to be to make sales and therefore money. What you are therefore looking for is somewhere in the middle.
Fixing PC faults and errors is just way too competitive.
How about ‘fixing CDs’’? Lets check how many searches have been done on that exact phrase in Google by entering “fix scratched CD toothpaste” including the speech marks to see how many results are returned for that exact phrase.

Wow!
Only 268 websites show up in a Google search for a phrase that Wordtracker (which is one of the most accurate keyword search tools around) suggest there will be 382 searches a day. And that is not taking another 100 a day who are searching “fix a scratched disc” into account either!
To put it into perspective, that is around 12000 searches a month on a phrase that only has 268 sites making any reference to it, according to Google.
That is a phenomenal ‘result’ and a sub-niche or micro-niche that there is almost certainly money to be made in.
It is also a niche that you would never have discovered if you had stuck to your own personal interests or specialized knowledge when carrying out your initial niche research!
The next thing to do is ask yourself a question, or perhaps apply a little test to what you have discovered so far. I call this the ‘means or end test’.
You have discovered an excellent micro-niche made up of people who are presumably seeking instructions about how they can repair their scratched CDs using toothpaste.
But is that really what they are asking about or looking for?
Is what they find from this search going to represent the ‘means’ or the ‘end’?
For example, ask yourself whether the ‘toothpaste’ bit of this search is really important?
Sure, it may be a way that they have heard you can repair a scratched CD, but do they really care how it gets repaired? If the most effective form of repair is toothpaste or a 15lb sledgehammer, does it matter?
Of course it doesn’t! They want to fix their CD so that they can get the ultimate listening pleasure from their music collection. The ‘fix’ with toothpaste is the means and the end is enjoying uninterrupted music.
This is an important difference to understand because whilst this is a great keyword search term that you can definitely work with, I suspect that it is going to be quite difficult to produce a money spinning product that answers only this one question – heck, I don’t even know if it works or whether it is some kind of urban legend or old wives tale!
So, ‘go narrow’ with your focus, but don’t allow yourself to be blinded to the bigger picture.
Whenever you are lucky enough to find such a superb micro-niche ‘pointer’, always take a moment to apply the ‘means or end test’ to establish what this tells you about the bigger picture.
You should also expand your search for the term that you found out beyond Google, as the results generated by different search engines will always be different, both in terms of the number of results returned (which is perhaps to be expected) and the sites that are shown (which is perhaps less expected).

The reason that you should do this is that the sites that are shown in the search results can be a terrific source of additional income when you eventually launch your product.
Check out the sites that you find in your search results. See if they are selling products, or are monetized using AdSense or any other form of paid advertising.
If they are, then the site owner is trying to earn money with the site, so approach them with your finished product and suggest a joint venture. They send your product details to their mailing list and get a share of the commission on every sale generated.
It is simple, straightforward and effective. Yet this is something that so many marketers miss – it’s another ‘outside in’ tactic!
Check out Yahoo, MSN as well as Google. When you get the results page up on your screen, I would recommend that you take a ‘screenshot’ picture to save for referring back to later using the excellent free Screenhunter screenshot tool.
There is one other search tool that I would thoroughly recommend you should have and use. As I suggested earlier, one of the reasons that you are going to be able to create a product that you can sell from information that is freely available is that most people don’t know how to find the ‘free info’ in the way that you do.
Download and install the free Power Search Tool toolbar, because this will give you the ability to dig far deeper down into sites that are dotted all over the net that might have in-depth information that you can use in your new product.

In this example, I am searching for the same search term, but specifying exactly what ‘File Type’ I am looking for.
Used correctly, PST will take you several ‘layers’ deeper in searches than Google or Yahoo ever will, allowing you to delve into places on the net that 90% of web searchers will never go!

Section summary
• Make sure that there is a market for a product you plan to create.
• Use free keyword research tools like Wordtracker to establish what people are searching for.
• Apply the ‘means or the end’ test to any good search terms you find in order to ‘flesh out’ the product that you will produce, in order to broaden its appeal as widely as possible.
• Use the different search engines to find other monetized sites with whom you may be able to form joint ventures.

Broadening Your Search
It looks like there is a product just waiting to be made, but is also seems likely that the exact phrase ‘fix scratched CD toothpaste’ is possibly too narrow to create the whole product around. After all, we have already established that there are another 100 searches a day for “fix a scratched disc”. We want to grab those people too!
Let’s broaden this out a little, especially as this is such a narrow micro-niche that even the broadest term related to fixing CDs will probably work for us. Using the phrase ’fix CD’ would represent a good generic starting point:

Let’s use another tool to see how difficult it is going to be to get a top search engine ranking for these CD related key phrases.
Using the ‘Page Rank Results’ search tool, you can quickly discover what Google Page Rank the top pages for any given keyword search term have. This will then give you an indication of how competitive this particular market is going to be, and how hard it is likely to be to achieve top ranking yourself.

Using ‘fix scratched CDs toothpaste’, you can see that the top rated site has a Google PR of 4, as does the next one in the list. After that, the next one rates a 3.
This basically tells you that it should certainly be possible to have your site ranked pretty high for this particular keyword term within a couple of months, and that further confirms that a product that shows people how to repair CDs is a viable proposition.

What Can You Learn From Trends?
Okay, now you know that there are people out there who are hungry for more information about how to fix their CDs. Now it is time to see what else we can find out about them, as this will help to narrow down the focus of where the final product should be headed.
Head on over to Google Trends to see what more we can discover. This is a site that shows the most popular search terms over the last week, with the top 10 shown on the first page, and the top 100 featuring on the next page after you click on ‘More Hot Trends’.

To be honest, this first page is not a great deal of help to you. Whilst you might think that the results shown here would be a great basis for a product, they are trends that change every week, and so if you try to create a product based on what you see here, you would be forever chasing your tail, and that is never a good thing for any business.
This is still a very, very useful site, however! Type in ‘fix CD’ to see what this will tell you:

From this you can see that the trend line for searches on that phrase have dropped slightly over the years since 2004, but that is to be expected with the market shift over the same period towards DVD’s and mp3 players.
Now try narrowing the search down to only the last twelve months but keep it set at the default ‘All Regions’ search to see what this tells you:

This page indicates that the search volume for the phrase ‘fix CD’ has stayed pretty consistent for the last twelve months or so, which augurs well for a long life for any product that you decide to create around this phrase.
This is very important information and before deciding to create a product, it is something that you definitely need to know.
If search volumes are not reasonably consistent, then you have a product that will by definition not sell at all from time to time, which could have seriously adverse effects on your cash flow.
For example, here is the graph for search volume for one of the most popular search terms generated by using ‘get rid of’ as our keyword search ‘seed term’, that is ‘get rid of fleas’.
As the saying goes, a picture paints a thousand words. In this scenario, there will be months where you cannot sell your product no matter how good it is.
Knowing this before you start could save you wasting an awful lot of time and effort, and it is freely available - so do not ignore it.

And returning to our ‘fix CD’ statistics, there is one other extremely interesting thing that you should note. A significant percentage of searches for this phrase are not in English, with Swedish, Dutch and German language searches all featuring pretty prominently.
This is something that many marketers will miss! They automatically (and I am sorry to say very foolishly) assume that all results returned by Google and Yahoo are in English.
Do not make the same mistake yourself, because doing so means that you automatically choose not to sell to a significant tranche of the market who are actively seeking a product like yours.
Guess what? The vast majority of your competitors will do the same, so all you have to do is make a little more effort and you effectively have a big slice of the market with little or no competition!
You can use a basic machine-driven translator like Altavista Babelfish, which in some languages (English to French, Dutch or German, for example) will do quite a good job for you. However, if you are going to publish and sell the product after translation, get it checked for accuracy first.
You now know that there are some very good search terms with very little competition relating to fixing CDs. Let us move on…

Section summary
• Broaden your search to find more keyword phrases and check the Page Rank of the top rated pages to establish how difficult it is going to be to gain a top ten search engine ranking.
• Use Google Trends to establish that the key phrase that you are building the product around is one that is consistently searched for. This should confirm that your product will have a reasonable ‘shelf life’.
• Consider getting your product translated (if applicable) when Trends indicates reasonable foreign language interest.

Naming Your Product
It’s a little while since I used a CD player or listened to anything on CD, but I can definitely remember how frustrating and annoying it could be when the darned things did not work properly! So, if I was still using CDs (as large numbers of people evidently are) I would definitely be interested in a product that offered to make my music listening experience more enjoyable and less troublesome.
I am not, however, certain that I would be in a great rush to purchase a product that was named either ‘fix CD’ or ‘fix scratched CD toothpaste’. One is way too dull and boring and the other is, frankly, just too bizarre to even contemplate it appearing on my credit card bill!
You need to come up with a title that has sufficient basis in fact to tell the potential customer enough for them to make a decision but which nevertheless has some sort of ‘salesy’ buzz about it.
It doesn’t matter what it is that you are selling, or to whom - you need to use every tool at your disposal that will help you maximize your sales, and a good product name or ‘Title’ is one very important but often underrated aspect of this.
Equally importantly, your website needs a name that will tell people what it is you do, whilst at the same time being search engine friendly.
Of course you could just call the product ‘fix scratched CD toothpaste’ and give the website the same name. However, this is hardly likely to inspire anyone to buy the product and I strongly suspect that a product that focuses so tightly on this one tiny micro-niche would not be a very long book!
It would not represent great value for your customer and that should always be a primary consideration.
So there must be a degree of compromise and balance in selecting an appropriate product name and website url. Both should, in their own ways, do the job that is required, but in a manner that is attractive and also informative for your potential customer.
Remember that our ‘means and end’ test clearly indicated that anyone who is using these search terms is really interested in their music playing properly. Perhaps you could Title the product ‘Fix Your Scratched CDs’ with a sub-title of ‘For Perfect Music Every Time!’
You could then tie that together with your sales enabled webpages by registering the domain name ‘FixYourScratchedCD.com’ or ‘Fix-Your-Scratched-CD.com’.
Checking Domain Name Availability
Head on over to your favorite domain name registration website or, if you do not have one, try GoDaddy.com and see if either name is still available in .com ‘flavor’.

In fact, both of these names are still available and you therefore have a couple of options.
• If you want to, you could grab both names and then set up one account so that it automatically redirects to the other. You would in that way cover both bases, and only need to create the one copy of your site.
• Alternatively, if you just want to have one domain name, then I really don’t think it makes a great deal of difference which one you choose.
The ‘non-dashed’ version is less easy for human visitors to read, but domain names without dashes are still far more common and therefore it is quite likely your visitors would naturally use this format. Anyway, whichever version you choose, register your domain name.
Then you need a hosting account. You may already have a favorite webhost, but if not, I can recommend Hostgator, with their $7.95 a month ‘Baby’ account representing great value.
The final thing that you will need to allow your website to go ‘live’ is a way of transferring your site once it is built from your PC to your webhosting account. The software that you use for this is known as an FTP client, and there are several different free ones out there (all of which do pretty much the same thing) such as Smart FTP or Cute FTP.
The last job that needs doing is to tie your domain name together with your webhosting account, a procedure known an ‘changing your DNS’.
There are Flash video tutorials provided by Hostgator in case you are not sure what this means or how to do it (these will probably help you even if you have not used either GoDaddy or Hostgator!).
On the same page, you will also be able to see video instructions on how to go about using either of the FTP Clients mentioned above as well.

Section summary
• Give your product a title that helps sell it. If possible, tie your domain name to the same phrase.
• Register your domain name with GoDaddy.com and set up a basic hosting account with Hostgator.com. Download a free FTP client program like SmartFTP or CuteFTP.
• Change your DNS in order to tie your site URL together with your hosting account.

Creating Your Product
The first thing to appreciate about the product that you produce may seem obvious but, if it is, then I am baffled as to why so many people seem to miss it. The more value you provide to people, the more sales you will make and the more happy customers you will have!
It is not exactly rocket science, I grant you, so why do so many marketers not seem to understand this one simple fact?
For example, I have seen many software products for sale that only came with the most basic written instructions about how to use it.
Why not make a simple video to explain it? The technology has been around for years now, and to my knowledge there have been free video recorders on the market for at least four years, so how come people have not done it?
In my opinion, there are two reasons. One is pure laziness and the other is a lack of focus on what the customer wants.
Don’t allow yourself to make the same error. Focus on what the customer wants, and what you can do to make his or her usage of your product the most rewarding, simplest and most pleasant experience that you can.
In this way, you can guarantee that they remember your product as being a high quality item that represented excellent value and you as the good guy. I am certain that you immediately see how this significantly improves your chances of making more sales to them a little further down the line, right?
So, the first thing that you need to do is collect together all of the raw data that you are going to use to produce your product. This is where a ‘deep digging’ search tool like PST really comes into its own – use this rather than one of the bigger search engines and you will find many, many more sites than you ever imagined possible.
Bring your information together. If you are going to create a product based on an extremely popular subject (e.g. ‘marketing using video’) then you are literally going to have thousands of websites that you can use as a source of information and a ton of information on each of them as well.
So, you have to decide what to include and what to leave out in this scenario. Leave out the stuff that everybody knows or information that is easy to find.
Remember that when people buy something online that they do so in the hope of discovering ‘secrets’ or solving some kind of ‘mystery’, so ask yourself whether the facts that you are considering including address these desires. If not, then leave them out, except where you need to include them to tie together the information that you do want to include into a logical narrative.
For example, if you were creating a ‘marketing using video’ product, then you could not really avoid mentioning the fact that you need some way of recording the video (digital camera or webcam), editing software and so on.
That has to be done but make sure that your primary focus stays on things that most people do not know or will not have come across before. These may be things that you have discovered as a result of your ‘deep digging’ or even things that are easily available that your customer is nevertheless unlikely to know about.
In our video example, this might be a link to a video showing the viewer how to create some really cool effects that you found on YouTube! Even though it is one of the most popular websites in the world, the chances are still pretty good that you have just told them something that they did not know.
This is the first way that you make sure that your product gives your customer great value for the money he or she has just spent with you. Tell them as many ‘secrets’ and as much information as you can to make it unlikely they will have seen them before.
Of course, they are not truly ‘secrets’. However, you found them after all, but you are in a very small minority of people who are willing to make this kind of effort!
To return to our ‘Fix CD’ product, the situation is a little different, simply because the information that we can tell the potential customer is by definition quite limited. There are, after all, only so many ways that you can attempt to ‘fix’ a compact disc so that it plays again!
Try to think from the ‘outside in’ again. How can you add value to this product and make sure that everyone who buys it is going to be happy with their purchase?
The answer to this question is, any way you can! I appreciate that this is not especially helpful (!), so here are a few thoughts that you could use and adapt to whatever the product is that you are crating.
Go back to the ‘means and end’ test. They do not actually really care about the CD itself, what they are interested in is being able to hear the music that the CDs pump out. That happens as a result of a CD and a CD player working in harmony with one another.
So, is there any information that you can include about basic CD player problems and the solutions to them? Is it easy to repair such a player, and can you tell them how to do it?
If not, can you include details of the ‘top 10’ bargain CD player models and brands, so that if all else fails, they have some guidelines of what to buy and an approximate price? But, if you do, remember that different brands will be available and popular in different markets and countries, so try not to focus only on your own home country or locality.
However, even including every single bit of information that you can find in an e-book called ‘Fix Your Scratched CDs’, you are probably going to have a fairly short book. So how are you going to justify charging $27 for an e-book that is only 25 pages long?
The answer is simple. Video! This is an absolutely perfect subject matter for not only telling people what to do to fix their scratched CDs, but showing them as well!
Don’t panic. This does not have to be a super-slick professional production, although it does have to be good enough to actually show people what to do. A generation of people who are used to watching and enjoying funny home made movies both on TV and on sites like YouTube are not going to expect your ’how to’ video to look like it was been made by Polanski or the Coen Brothers!
A $150 digital camera with a video facility (which most have nowadays) or even your web cam is good enough and you can use free software like Windows Movie Maker (which you probably already have if you are using Windows) for editing, or you can try ZS4 or Wax, both of which are free.
They want to see what you talk about in the book demonstrated in action, plain and simple.
There is also something very psychologically powerful about using video that will never happen with the written word. If you tell people that something works in a book, and then they try it without success, their most likely reaction is ‘yeah, that book is just another pile of useless junk!’
If, however, you actually demonstrate it on a video and can show that it really works, then people are far more likely to question their own abilities rather than your advice! Seeing is, after all, believing, and after you have demonstrated that it works, they are far more likely to just accept that it is their own problem rather than blaming you for selling something that does not work.
For example (and without getting into too much tedious detail) there are going to be some CDs that even Merlin the Wizard could not fix. Pinholes in a CD that puncture the foil which ’carries’ the music cannot be repaired, period.
So, as long as you tell your customer at the beginning of the video that whilst your methods do work, you cannot work miracles and some CDs are just beyond repair, then you have probably just cut your refund requests to a half or even a quarter of what they might otherwise have been.
Affiliate products
Are you going to recommend affiliate products in your book and on the video?
If so, then please avoid another common mistake by planning how and where you are going to include them before you begin to create your book and video.
So many marketers seem to throw affiliate products in as a complete afterthought, and are then genuinely surprised that they do not make any sales!
If you plan how you are going to include them from the outset, however, that allows you to ‘weave’ them into the fabric of both our book and video almost seamlessly.
This comes over as professional and seems far more like advice than an afterthought (‘oh, here’s a product that you might like to buy…’) sales pitch.
For example, if my book and video have just shown and taught you to repair your CD using toothpaste and it has worked (which of course it will) then quite naturally I am also going to show and tell you what to do next. Which is, stick the recovered CD into the CD ‘burner’ of your computer and make a new copy so that the problem goes away permanently.
Sensible, sound advice, right? No sales pitch there, correct? But, then you can continue: ‘In fact, to make sure that you never have this problem with any of your beloved and irreplaceable CDs ever again, wouldn’t it make sense to do the same with all of them? Here is an excellent piece of software that will enable you to so this’
And there is your Clickbank hoplink seamlessly integrated into the text of your page without even the merest hint of any kind of pitch. Of course, it helps that this product happens to be an almost perfect match for what is needed (check it out to see what I mean) but it demonstrates absolutely perfectly why affiliate products should not be added as an afterthought. Well, assuming that you want sales, that is.
Outsourcing
Anyone who wants to create their own infoproduct can do so with a little bit of determination and application.
Equally, I know many people who do not believe that they can do it themselves, either because they do not feel that they have the necessary writing skills or perhaps because they don’t have the time that is undoubtedly needed when undertaking the whole product creation for yourself.
Therefore many marketers will outsource some or even all of the product creation process.
There are several ways that you can find people to whom you can outsource any or all of the product creation process in this way.
You can visit any of the leading freelancers websites like Elance, Guru.com, freelancers.com or rentacoder.com
On all of these sites, you will be able to attract many different price quotations for the work that you want done. However, I would not necessarily recommend that you should always choose the cheapest, as you will almost invariably get what you pay for, and the cheapest is unlikely to be the best.
I would also strongly recommend that when you find a good freelancer or ghostwriter that you make sure that you hang on to them!
Over time, you will be able to build up a strong and trusting relationship with them, and will also be secure in the knowledge that the work they produce is of a standard with which you are satisfied.
A couple more places where you will always be able to find people who are able to create your product or indeed your sales pages for you are the Warrior Forum and Digital Point, both places where you will find some excellent resources.

Section summary
• Focus attention on giving your customer everything that they could want. The more rewarding an experience using your product, the more likely you are to have repeat customers.
• If you have too much information for one product, leave out the materials that are common knowledge or easy to find.
• Enhance the overall value of your offer by including instructional videos whenever possible (or a detailed instruction manual if your product is software).
• If you are promoting affiliate products in your product, make sure that you do so smoothly and as seamlessly as possible.
• Consider outsourcing product creation.

The Sales Process
So far you have found you subject matter, a niche of a market or a micro-market (in the case of ‘fix CDs’) which appears like it should be pretty profitable and one that you should be able to dominate pretty quickly.
You have created your product in at least two different formats and you could, of course, include others like mp3 audio for your customer to listen to on the move.
So, the next step is to put your sales process in place, or to create your ‘sales funnel’.
The #1 ‘Success Tool’
Before doing so, however, there is one other extremely important weapon to add to your armory without which it is very unlikely that you will succeed with this plan for more than a few days!
I am talking about an autoresponder account.
If you already have such a resource in your ‘bag of tricks’, that’s great, I am preaching to the converted. If you do not, however, please do not attempt to go any further with this project until you do so.
Basically, doing business online is all about communication, because it is your ability and willingness to communicate with your customers that makes them trust you and think of you as a friend, someone that they can turn to for information and assistance.
No matter what your business, whether it is primarily conducted online or offline in the real world, people deal with people, and once your customers trust you and value your ideas and opinions, then they will buy from you again and again and again.
You simply cannot establish this kind of relationship with hundreds or even thousands of customers and prospects without the tools that will allow you to automate large portions of your day to day business activities. That is not negativity or sales talk – that is a fact, because there are only so many hours in every day!
Autoresponders are the #1 tool for implementing this necessary automation and you must have an account in place before going any further.
And, given the critical importance of the autoresponder account to your ability to communicate and therefore the success of your business, you should go for the best that you can afford from the outset.
In my opinion, the two best autoresponders in the marketplace are those offered by Aweber and GetResponse. Either of these will cost you less than $20 per month for what is, in both cases, a ‘Rolls Royce’ level of performance, so take a look at both and make your decision.
Failing that, if money is so tight that you cannot afford the monthly outlay (which is probably going to be the cash equivalent of less than one sale a month of your new product) you can start off with a free account here, but please, as soon as you can, you must upgrade.
If you do not, then you will be losing sales hand over fist, and it is, in my opinion, possibly the worst case of ’false economizing’ imaginable.
The Sales Funnel
The concept of the sales process being like a funnel is one that is extremely well established in business, and one that has been used for many years.
However, even in the relatively restricted field of internet marketing, there are many different sales funnel ‘models’ and some people will recommend more steps in the sales process than others.
The ‘funnel’ that I am going to show you is one that I know will work, because it already does so for me and for many other marketers of my acquaintance as well.
The basic funnel idea is that hovering outside the top, just above the widest part of the funnel, are your site visitors who have as yet not made any decisions about what they are going to do next. Your first job is therefore to make that visitor take the initial decision to enter your funnel by making some form of commitment.
In the perfect scenario, that would mean that they would buy your product immediately when you are showing them your sales page. That is, unfortunately, not how things work in the real world.
No matter how good your sales page is (and it will be good after you follow my instructions later) there is a large chance that people are not going to buy from it on their first visit.
So, you have to do something to pull your site visitors into your ‘funnel’. What you do is show them a ‘squeeze’ page that collects their name and address in return for giving them a valuable free gift.
The first thing to note is that the free gift must be valuable enough for your site visitor to think it is worth giving up their name and e-mail address for. Even if your visitor is not consciously aware of it, he or she is definitely giving something up if they give their name and address to you.
So, the free gift has to be something that is truly valuable. A junky free report that they can pick up anywhere else is simply not going to cut it in this day and age.
The gift that you give away should be something that is closely related to the product that you are selling, and should ideally be something that they will not have seen before. Most important of all, it should be something that makes them want to buy your main product.
From all this, it is clear that one excellent idea is to give away a shorter version of the main book that you are selling, or you could perhaps grant them free access to a short version of the video that is included in the sale. In both cases, it should be just enough information to whet their appetite for more without giving the whole game away!
On your squeeze page, you should also give your visitor at least a hint that they will be getting further information about the product as well. It does not have to be any kind of full-on sales job - it is essentially a very gentle pre-sell simply informing them that you will be sending more information about what you have to offer.
As you gently lead your prospect (as they now are) down the funnel, there are some important concepts to grasp.
You cannot force people to get out their wallet to buy from you. You must persuade them that they want to do it, and persuasion is not all about hitting someone over the head with a brickbat! You have to gently lead them by the hand down the funnel (through your sales process, in other words) and at every step along the way, you must give them a route by which they can step aside.
This is not an escape route, as the whole reason that you are being gentle with them is that you do not want to antagonize or annoy them so much that they walk away from you for good! So, make sure that there are always alternative actions that they can take and that one of the options presented is that they can stand aside, with your thanks.
So, after a visitor gives you their name and e-mail address, the report that they requested will be sent out automatically by your autoresponder.
Now you have the all-important e-mail address - so if they quit now, fine. That is still a great result in terms of the long term development of your business, so there is no need to panic or get too pushy!
You then send them a thank you mail that contains an advert for your sales page. You might also want to include an ‘unannounced bonus gift’ as well as a way of increasing the feel good factor.
If at this point or after downloading the extra bonus gift, they choose not to follow your advert and look at your sales page, no problem. They have most probably left your page with pretty positive feelings about you and the way that you do business already firmly entrenched in their mind, and that is a tremendous result in itself.
If, however, they follow the advert and view your sales page, then there are two choices available. Either they buy or they don’t.
Again, if they don’t buy at this point, it really is no big deal – you have them added to your mailing list so you will have lots of opportunities to remind them what they are missing out on further down the line.
If they buy, of course, that is a tremendous result of money in the bank. But that is not the end of the story or the bottom of the funnel where they ‘pop out’ of the spout!
After they have paid for your product, but before you take them to the download page, make sure that you present another product to them, preferably in the form of a special priced ‘One Time Offer’ deal.
Generally, I try to find products that I can price up to a third above the price of my initial product after applying a significant discount. Then, I create a sales page that highlights that they have only this one opportunity to buy it at this price hence it is a ‘One Time Offer’.
This type of offer is invariably effective because there are two strong emotional elements pulling together – they are getting a significant discount and there is a very real sense of urgency (you can add even greater urgency by building in a count-down timer).
They already have their credit card in their hand and they are already in buying mode - the hardest decision was to buy your original product and the world did not end when they made it! Because of these factors, a significant percentage of people will be willing to spend a little more on an OTO in this situation.
When deciding on the OTO product, I have found that the most effective product to sell should be strongly related to the main product. The best thing at this point is to convince that the main product is not totally complete without them purchasing the OTO. This works extremely well although should be used with caution.
If they buy the OTO, take them straight to the download page and do not be tempted to pitch another product at them before they can access their download. It does not work and is more likely to annoy them than anything else.
On the other hand, if they do not purchase the OTO then you may want to try selling them an OTO downsell. This is generally a ‘lighter’ version of the OTO for a reduced price. At this point, any sale that you make is pure profit so even if in reality you are offering the same thing but are dressing it up slightly different to justify your reduction then this is fine.
You can also include an ad for another product on the download page – an affiliate product for example. This can work well if you have already earned their credibility by showing them that their main purchase is of high quality.
Once you have a customer that is satisfied with their first purchase, it is important that you sell them products of increasing value over the next few months and years. Generally the most profit will be made on the higher priced products. It is therefore of utmost that you earn their trust along the way by only offering value.
I want to have a quick look at a few of the more important points that you should note about ‘squeeze pages’ before giving you a detailed breakdown of how to construct sales pages that are, in one of the terms most favored by the internet marketing community, ‘killers’!

Section summary
• Set up an autoresponder account. Otherwise the chances of your achieving success are far more limited.
• Use a squeeze or landing page to entice people to enter your sales funnel by giving away a valuable free gift somehow related to your product.
• When someone buys your primary product, make sure that you offer them another one in the form of a ‘One Time Offer’.

Squeeze Page Construction

The first thing to say about squeeze pages is that they come in all shapes, sizes, flavors and styles. There are even video squeeze pages available now, so there are literally hundreds of ways that you can build your squeeze page. There are dozens of places where you can buy ready made squeeze pages like the one seen above.
At heart, your squeeze page only has two tasks, which are to make an offer that is so good that your visitor will feel that it is worth filling in his or her name and email, and to tell your visitor what they can expect from you after that.
Do not be tempted to try to make your squeeze page too complex. In my experience, the simpler it is, the more effective your squeeze is likely to be.

This squeeze page is so successful that the company behind it gives away 200% commission on the initial product sale! That is because once people have been drawn into their sales funnel, they are very successful with their ‘back-end’ sales.
One way of creating squeeze pages that has been proven to work, is what is known as the ‘reverse opt-in’ page.
Write some great content – say the first half of a really informative article, and put it on your squeeze page – without any kind of copy asking people to sign up – and then ask to people to sign up to get the rest. You can even do this by saying that this is part one of an article series, and parts two and three will be sent by email.
Another piece of advice (and this applies to every web page that you ever build) is test, test and then test again!
Although you may know your own business like the back of your hand, you do not know exactly what web pages will work best for you without first testing.
So, here is what you do for your squeeze pages (and also your sales pages too). Create two very different versions and get them both live. Track how many people see them and how many of those people join your list after doing so. You can track this by using Google Analytics. When one clearly starts out-performing the other, drop the non-performer and try another style of squeeze.
Keep doing this until you find the style of squeeze that works best for your business, product and industry.
Now that you have solved the ‘macro-puzzle’ move on to the ‘micro-level’ by changing just one word on the squeeze page that you know works best, and see if that improves your results. If so, use the ‘new model’ as your control test-bed and try another slightly modified version against it.
It will take some time but eventually you will arrive at the squeeze that works best for you.
Is it worth it? Of course it is!
Every visitor who lands on your site costs you something in either time or money terms, so this kind of testing is improving your sales and profitability without increasing your cost.
The other thing that you need for your squeeze page is a way of making the name and address capture form ‘live’. This you do from your autoresponder account.
Inside the members area, look for a link that takes you to where you can create a form. Do what is necessary to actually create it and then copy and paste the code that is generated into the squeeze page before you publish it.
Both of the sample pages you have seen show everything ‘above the fold’ meaning that the visitor can see it as soon as he or she arrives on the page exactly what it is about, and it is not necessary to scroll down to discover what is being offered.
It is therefore simpler for the viewer to use the form and make their consequent decision.
Some businesses are still using longer squeeze pages where you do have to scroll down. In my testing, that just puts another barrier in the way of the bone-idle surfer actually taking you up on your offer.
Keep it above the fold and you should see better results, but your testing will be the proof one way or the other.

Section summary
• Keep your squeeze page simple, as it is only designed to capture the prospect’s name and e-mail address before telling them what is going to happen next.
• Create and test two different versions of your squeeze pages so that you can establish which is the most effective. Once you know the answer, test again, and keep doing so until your results are optimized.
• Squeeze pages where everything in is view immediately appear to be the most effective.

Creating A Killer Sales Page
In the internet marketing business, the undisputed ‘kings of the hill’ are the copywriters, the people that create the sales page copy that can pull in literally millions of dollars in just a few days (and that is a story that is becoming increasingly common).
Some of the top guys in the industry can command five figure fees for writing one sales letter which may seem a bit extreme until you think that just one killer sales letter creates millions of dollars of profit!
Now, I don’t know for a fact, of course, but I am guessing that at the moment, stumping up a five figure sum for your sales page is not really something that you are too comfortable with?
Let me start with an acronym that goes right to the heart of how you should create a sales page.
Your sales page should follow the AIDA principle –
• A = Attention
• I = Interest
• D = Desire
• A = Action
In other words, you have to grab your visitor right from the moment that they first land on your sales page. You literally have only a fraction of a second to make sure that they stay with you, because you can be absolutely certain that if they leave you will get no second chance to make the all important first impression.
Who Are You Selling To?
Okay, so we have established that you need to grab your site viewer’s attention. Before you can do that, however, it would certainly help if you know who your site visitor is.
The top copywriters do not begin creating a new sales page without a lot of work beforehand. They spend as much time as is necessary getting to know the person that they are going to be selling to and this is something that is vitally important for you to consider as well.
When creating your sales page, you should have a person – not people, but a person - in mind at whom your sales letter is aimed. You must know everything that you can about that person – their likes and dislikes, fears, dreams, hopes - basically, whatever it is that you can discover about them.
You must get ‘inside’ their head as much as you can, because this will enable you to create a sales letter that is laser targeted at that person’s hopes, dreams and desires, and that will inevitable boost sales.
How can you do this? Well, if you already have a mailing list in your niche, you can fire out a quick questionnaire or survey and ask those list members the questions that you need answers to.
If not, find forums where people who are into your topic gather, look at the questions and answers that are being pinged back and forth, and also ask questions yourself in an effort to discover exactly what it is that people really want to know about or are anxious about.
Once you have this knowledge, it follows that the sales letter that you create should suggest that your product answers the questions that your site visitors might have, or addresses their worst fears.
Giving people what they want is the simplest and most effective way of boosting your sales, and without knowing the answer to the questions that people are asking, this is going to be somewhat difficult.
So the first thing is to know your perfect target customer, inside out and up and down. Only then can you create copy that really speaks in a way that almost forces them to make the buying decision.
The Basic Structure
The next question to address is - what is your sales letter? Maybe that sounds like a silly question, but is it one that you have actually asked yourself?
You know what the sales letter is supposed to do – make sales – but what is it?
Your sales letter is your sales person in print form.
Think of it this way. Before people enter or fall into your sales funnel, it is like they are standing outside your store, staring in through the window deciding whether to enter.
Once they are in your store, however, they have taken their first tentative steps into your sales funnel. Now they meet your sales person – your sales letter.
If this were a real person in a real store, then your sales person’s belief in and enthusiasm for their product is going to be extremely easy to convey in person. The ability to instill belief and confidence whilst creating trust, as well as their own unique set of sales and people skills, personality, product knowledge, and expertise, are equally going to be advantageous.
Does you sales person shout at your potential customer? Of course not - well, not if they want to keep their job!
So, when you start your sales letter, don’t shout either!
Forget the thing that everyone was doing a couple of years ago – big red headlines do not work anymore. Almost inevitably, a big red headline is something that people are just not going to read, so do not waste your time doing it.
Your sales page must, however, have a headline at the top.
That being said, what is its purpose?
The purpose of your headline is NOT to make the sale! According to Michel Fortin, one of the worlds top copywriters and someone who is perhaps most famous for writing the first ‘$1m in 24 hours’ sales letter (yes, really), the purpose of your headline is to do nothing more than make sure that people keep reading!
In other words, your headline is not going to make your sale for you, but it can certainly lose it if it does not grab the attention immediately and force your visitor to stay with you.
Your headline should contain the ‘hook’ – that is the one big idea that you have that dramatizes and brings to life the product that you are selling.
Most typically this will be some kind of veiled clue to the main benefit of your product. It is the one angle or slant that gets your site visitor scratching their head, or that drives them wild, fills them with fear, catches them by surprise, tugs at their heartstrings, or whatever the desired reaction is.
This may sound difficult. It is not, for one simple reason. It is perfectly permissible and makes absolute sense to borrow and adapt other peoples’ ideas by copying headlines that you already know will work!
So, for example, many effective headlines begin with ‘Discover the secrets of’. It works because people love to learn secrets and it encourages people to buy the product because they hate not knowing!
It works, so use it!
Here are a few more that are proven winners:
• The “mistake” that you want to avoid. e.g. The one little mistake that cost me $21675 last year!
• “How to”. e.g. “How to get that Ferrari you have always wanted in one year or less!”
• The ‘New Discovery” e.g. “Learn how a new discovery made this simple little web page #1 in Google”
Once you have created your headline, then it would be great if there were some kind of tool that you could use for ‘testing’ how effective it is likely to be, right? Well, there is and it is absolutely free as well!
The Advanced Marketing Institute’s excellent ‘Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer’ will not only score your headline for emotional marketing value, but it will highlight exactly what emotions it appeals to as well! So you will know whether your headline appeals to people mainly on an intellectual, empathetic or spiritual level.
This tool can take quite a degree of the guesswork out of headline creation, and is something that I would recommend that you should add to your bookmarks or favorites folder, so that you can use it to test every headline before you start to run with it.
Next, you can add a sub-headline that expands on what you have just highlighted, before moving into the body text of your sales page.
Once again, the purpose or intention of the sub-headline is to do nothing more than pique the reader’s curiosity further so that they stay on the page.
Below the sub-headline, you can then either go straight into your main body test or add a graphic. I would tend to do the latter.
Many leading copywriters suggest that a graphical representation of the product – for example, a picture of the e-book cover – works well when used just after the sub-heading. Furthermore, it is generally recommended that, in order to be most effective, it should be positioned to the left which is the position to which most viewers eyes will naturally gravitate.
The most crucial thing about the graphic is that it must be high quality, as poor quality graphics suggest a poor quality product.
Similarly, if you are going to have a header with a graphic on the page, quality is once again important.
Do not, for example, use images in the header that needed ‘blowing up’ so that the edges of the image are blurry or grainy. It does not look good, and as your header is a critical part of the first impression that you make on your page viewer, it could very well destroy any chance you had of making the sale even before they get any chance to start reading the main page text.
So, your headline, sub headline and ‘feature’ graphic are all about creating the attention that is necessary.
Next, you need to focus on the interest aspect of the AIDA principle, and this you begin to do with your main body text.
The first thing to say about sales letter body text is that over-hyped nonsense does not really work any more, so do not be tempted to do it. Nor should you be tempted to include supposed ‘facts and figures’ that are not accurate or even remotely true.
Anyone with a bit on online experience and savvy knows that these kinds of things can (and I suspect often are) fabricated, so they do not really help your case, and make you look considerably less plausible.
If your product is high quality and does a good job of achieving whatever it is that it sets out to achieve, then hype and hyperbole should not be necessary.
Tell the truth about your product or, better yet, weave it into a story that sounds realistic, something that your site visitor can most probably relate to.
In other words, if you are able to create a sales letter that they can empathize with, something that talks of a situation where they can visualize themselves, then you are almost going to force them to keep on reading!
For example, going back to ‘fix CDs’, a sales letter that talks about how your book will show a buyer six ways of fixing their CDs is not likely to be all that exciting or interesting. It would in all likelihood not compel someone to keep reading, so it would not therefore keep the necessary interest.
If, however, you talk of that moment when, on a quiet, relaxing Sunday morning, you go to put on your favorite Mahler CD (naming the composer or artist makes it seem more realistic) only to find that it keeps jumping at your favorite part, and how frustrating that was, then you give your site visitor a scenario which seems realistic.
It is, moreover, one that they can almost immediately empathize with, and thus you have built an immediate bond with them which is more than likely to keep them reading to find out what you did next.
Tell the visitor that you tried a $100 CD repair kit that did no good at all, and that, in desperation, you resorted to an ‘old wives tale’ that you’d heard somewhere about how you could repair it using common household goods that you could never for one moment imagine could be used for such a purpose.