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That’s not going to happen lol.

The product was created in a pretty decent amount of time. I had 4 energy drinks bought since I expected I would have to work right through the night to get things done. I only needed one drink for the whole project and my latest night was around 1:30am. The main bulk of my work was completed relatively fast and better than I expected. I finished the sales letter today (Sunday) at about 7pm. I want to point out that I finished the “letter”, which means it is a Microsoft Word document.

There were a few important things that I forgot to think of while making this product and obviously they’re a big part of what it takes to make cash online.

Bonus Material

I have to supply some sort of bonus material for the product because that is a big part of selling. I’m sure that you’ve seen the infomercials on television where they say “we’ll double the order absolutely free”. You have to always create more value.

There is no way in hell that I can get a full product done, with a sales letter. And have to go and write all the bonus material up. There’s just no way of achieving it. I’m sure I could find some junk PDF that I could give full of affiliate links and that would save a lot of time, but I need good things. I need good products that meet the specific needs of my potential customers.

This is a very time consuming thing to do and it is one I totally forgot in the product creation process. Obviously I’m going to have to invest a lot more time working on these bonus ebooks.

Testimonials

I understood that I was going to need them, but since I thought I’d be submitting this for approval on Monday, I totally spaced on the fact that I’m going to need to get testimonials. This really isn’t the difficult part because I can get them. It just takes people a little time to get back to you since they’re going to have to read the guide and form an opinion.

I guess it is good in some ways since I will have a little more time to get the bonus books done while I wait to hear back about my testimonials.

The Sales Page

I have the sales “letter” done, which is currently a .docx file. Turning that into a webpage isn’t that simple. I’m going to predict that doing it will take roughly 5 more hours of my time. First I have to get all the text onto the page the way I want. That means proper spacing, alignment, headers, table, boxes, etc. This will take up probably the least amount of time, but still a huge pain in the ass.

The other overlooked issue is the graphics. I don’t claim to be a whiz with this sort of thing, but I’m not an idiot either. I can put out things that don’t look amazing or look bad. It’s just another time consuming headache to get right. Making an ebook cover can be a pain in the ass too. All of this little stuff adds up in time that you have to put in before you can launch a product.

But there’s still more when it comes to a sales page. You need other important pages like Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Contact, etc. All of these are pretty straight forward and you should be able to find a template somewhere on the internet to use. But there is also the affiliate page. I find this page a huge pain the ass to create since you’re expected to put in all this shit to help. Personally, all I want to do is give the affiliate link and where they should sign up with the affiliate program. I don’t want to teach people how to do basic internet marketing. I don’t want to make stupid banners (hello! they don’t work).

I never use the affiliate resources and I make plenty of money affiliate marketing, so other people shouldn’t have to either. Well, people that know what they’re doing don’t need it. The only thing I care about as an affiliate is conversion rates and commissions. That’s where I want to bust my balls to help affiliates.

All of this extra stuff is just another block of time that I will need to invest.

How Did I work This Weekend?

Well, I was planning on getting some solid work done on Friday night. I wasn’t planning on starting until Friday evening because during the day I have my regular work to do. I was just too exhausted in the evening to get anything meaningful done. I work really hard through the week at this stuff and I get up pretty early to go to the gym each morning. By the end of the week I need a good sleep.

Instead of getting a lot of work done on Friday night I just worked on the table of contents for the product. Basically the idea behind doing this first is to have an outline for you to follow while you’re working. It just makes the entire product come together. If you’re curious how I come up with up a good TOC, I just go to Amazon and find a book on the topic I’m writing. All of them have this feature where you can view some of the pages in the book. You can take a peak at the table of contents for a lot of different books and come up with the best topics that you’re going to have to hit.

The idea is to change things from writing a very large ebook to writing a lot of articles for various topics.

On Saturday morning I started into the book. I spent the entire day all the way up to 1:30am working on this. All that time involved researching, digging up information and writing coherent information for the product creation. I was pretty happy with the way things went with this. I learned a lot of little tricks that helped me get information in a much easier manner. I was under the impression that I was going to have a very difficult time finding information on this topic. I’m not going to say anything until I launch, but when I announce the niche you’ll see where the difficulty lies.

On Sunday I was going to start into the sales letter. The good thing about the sales letter is that it isn’t as long as the ebook, so there is a lot less writing. The only difference is that you really have to pay attention to what you’re writing and why you’re writing it because you’re selling. I started out by creating a table of contents for the sales letter. Of course specific things need to be hit when you’re writing the letter. There has to be a section for building your credibility and authority as an author.

I did find myself reading parts of Robert B. Cialdini’s Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. This is a really good book to have. It is considered a classic by marketers and you’re going to hear it being recommended by copywriters. The book is only $12 and it’s like the bible of marketing. Not only is it jam pack full of studies, but it’s one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read. I’m going to have to sit down and do a comprehensive review of this book. You’ve probably seen me marketing it on the original AMXpert.

Eventually I worked through everything and got what I hope is a decent sales letter. Unfortunately I’m not experienced enough with these sales letters to know whether I did a good job or not, but I guess time will tell.

I guess that’s all I’ll write today. It’s just over 1400 words, so it is my shortest post on here in a while. I guess you guys need a little break from all the text. I’m watching my fantasy football team right now. I’m having a really good game, but the person I’m playing is having a really lucky ass game. It’s annoying when they win based on a lucky ass defense getting two defensive touchdowns. Here’s a salute to the best player on my team, Pierre Thomas.

The reason I say that is the keywords are going to be easy to overtake. A lot of the sites are going to get into the money spot with 10 backlinks. There’s no point in building hundreds and hundreds if 10 is all I need to get the job done and the time for the site to grow older. I need to invest time still, but nothing in a significant manner and I have to find another project to get involved in.

Product creation isn’t something that I’m necessarily new too, but it’s something that I haven’t learned how to make successful. Just over a year ago I made my very first ebook product. I want to declare that it is a failure, but I still make cash online with it. Anything that makes more than $10/year is profitable and not really worth my time to take down.

The funny thing about this topic is that I’ve been thinking about it for the last 5 days or so. Just by coincidence, I had two sales for my first ebook in a matter of 40 minutes yesterday. At $37 each, that’s $74 total. The interesting thing is that all through 2009, I made one sale with this product and that is it, but suddenly I get two in a space of 40 minutes. I looked at my site traffic stats and saw that I was getting a huge numbers of searches from Google. They weren’t searching long tail keywords or anything like that. They were searching the product name.

Since no one has really had the need to search this before, I find it concerning. Most of the traffic is coming from Eastern Europe. Mainly Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. The first thing that has popped into my mind is that some business in this area of the world has a product which is the same name as mine and they’re doing some PR campaign. That is really the only logical conclusion I can come up with to explain the curiousity in the product name. Most of the traffic is coming from Google.no, Google.de, and Google.se.

The other conclusion I came up with is that there has always been a product like that in Eastern Europe. And I can only assume that I suddenly got a bump up in the Google rankings for foreign searches.

I haven’t got any sort of conclusion on this yet. I’ll keep you updated on it though. The last thing I want is to get into some legal battle with a company.

Edit: Figured it out. Apparently there is a product by the same name in Eastern Europe. I have no idea why a Czech company would call their product by an English name. I guess they must be doing some sort of  PR campaign. All I know is that this PR campaign is definitely not internet based.

Why Product Creation Now?

Lately, I’ve been on an avoidance of my own products. I’ve been just focusing on getting affiliate sales and doing shit like that. But I’ve been driven into this position and yes there is a story that goes along with it. This is a story of an anti-affiliate scam artist publisher asshole…

I’m not going to name names, yet, because I first want to launch my product first. The reason that I have to create this product is due to the fact that there isn’t any other product available. He is literally the only one that had this product. There were some ten dollar books on Amazon on the same topic, but I’m not looking for a 40 cent commission on sales.

I’ve been promoting his product for over a year. I’ve been making this guy sales month after month, with no problem at all. In June of 2009, I asked him for a review copy of the product because I wanted to be in a better position to sell it. This is a completely valid request for someone that was selling his products for a while. He flat out said no I couldn’t have access. At the time I remember thinking that was a pretty dick thing to do. It’s not like I’m a moocher because I’ve been selling his product for a while. I let it go since I have more important things to do.

Sometime in mid-August there was a PDC message from this guy saying that he was effectively ending his affiliate program in a week. I don’t receive email notifications from PDC since vendors tend to spam messages of their new products. I also log into my account only once or twice a month. There really is no need to log in and check stats when you get an email notification for a sale.

Early in September I logged into my account and there were a bunch of messages in my inbox from this guy. Obviously the one in August saying he was ending his affiliate program. I want to add that he never really ended it. I  still got sales and everything during these times. He was still on PDC and I was still a technical affiliate. He just didn’t want anyone anymore, even though he still uses the PDC payment links. One of the messages told me to take all references to his product on my site or face legal action. I had to laugh at that one because there is no way in hell that I’m ever going to comply with that. I have every right to talk about his product.

Another one of the messages too a particular interest in one of my pen names on EzineArticles and all the articles I had linking to my website. He wanted to know if they were mine, which is frankly none of his business. But I’m guessing if I replied to that he would of demanded that I removed them all. Lastly, he also awknowledged that he wasn’t going to pay me at all. He officially announced that he was going to screw me out of my last month of payment.

His particular interest in my sites tuned me into the fact that he was probably upset with the fact that I was starting to impede on his search engine territory. My site was in the June Project and I was pushing into some meaty keywords. I’m 99.9% convinced that he has a huge problem with the fact that I was starting to get a little too successful with my affiliate marketing and pulled the plug on everyone because of that fact. He just seemed way too interested in my site and was watching it too much.

Obviously, I’m pissed the fuck off and I want blood. I want to not only compete against this ass clown, but I want to ruin him. I want to take over the niche. I want to dominate it. I want him to literally cry over the fact that he ever decided to be a total prick ass mother fucker to me.

I’m probably going to put this one up on Clickbank, despite my poor history with them. I want to take all the affiliates that he lost be his incredibly stupid move. I can put it on CB where affiliates will logically be more receptive to it since it’s not like the “new guy” on the block can rip them off. They can make their cash online and I can make sure they get a higher commissions. There is also a potential for backend sales, which will only help to sweeten the deal for affiliates. My goal is to get commissions (with backend) up to around $40 per sale, which is sweet.

This is something that I’ve gotten really motivated to do. It is like my “hate fuck” of product creation. I really want this one to work.

I also have a website that I’ll probably have to make a product for. This is something that I never really wanted to create a product with, but I’m sort of stuck. I’m getting an incredible amount of search engine traffic and I haven’t figured out how to properly monetize it. I just can’t seem to squeeze enough money out of the vistors I’m getting, so I’m going to go with a product. That puts me at two projects so far for this month.

What I’ve learned from other products I made?

I have learned a lot so far when it comes to how you do this. I’m not successful, but I’ve learned a lot of little rules that need to be followed. Rules that I think will benefit you.

What niches?

This is one that I’m betting people will have a lot of different opinions on. I started with advice that I got from the Warrior Forum. The advice was that if I wanted to make money, I should go into the niches that are the biggest (hence why my first product was on weight loss). This was articulated to me in a very smart way and it is best addressed with an example from Clickbank. The top selling products on that site are mainly in the make cash online/internet marketing niches (now that I look it doesn’t appear to be that case anymore, but the example stands).

Basically all the products in this niche are essentially the same. They all teach some variation of building sites, selling products, building links and making money. That’s essentially what they all say. They’re the same, yet they have one or two features that differentiate them and there sales letter plays up a different angle. The same thing is true for weight loss. They’re all the same, except they have one thing different and they market it from a different angle.

I think the logic is sound on this piece of advice, but I still didn’t do well with my first product. This is where my advice comes into play. When it is your first product, don’t go into the competitive niches. There is a huge learning curve when you create your own product. There is the added pressure of having to compete with all the big boys.

Go into a smaller niche where you can spread your wings and learn how this particular game goes. I’m not saying that you should go into a completely non-existent niche because I wouldn’t advise that either on the first try. Find a niche that you know there is a market in, but not something that is big. If you put your product on Clickbank don’t expect to make it to gravity of 100+. Aim for 3-4 gravity and get as much out of the experience as you can. Once you’re satisfied move onto your next proect.

Can You Sell the Niche?

This is something that I think is extremely important. When I created my first product in the weight loss niche, I never thought of the fact that I struggled to sell other products in the niche as an affiliate. There are two particular reasons why this is important to understand. The first is that when you launch your site you’re not going to have the online real estate in place to immediately send traffic to your product that you know has been proven to convert. Secondly, how the fuck do you expect to sell a product if you can’t make make sales as an affiliate?

What you need to do is create products in niches that you’ve made sales in prior to making the product. This advice will save you so much frustration. I’m not saying that this is a binding rule, but it’s something that you should consider valid and put a lot of thought into it. At the time I was thinking my affiliates would do the selling for me.

Affiliates

I learned very fast that first and foremost, you have to always depend on yourself. The idea that if you build it, they’ll come isn’t necessarily true. You can’t always depend on your affiliates because no one is going to jump in head first. They’ll feel out the ground and see how your product is going, but they’re never going to throw a ton of traffic at you.

Obviously this time around I’m going to focus harder on getting affiliates, but I know now that I have to think first about driving my own traffic and driving my own sales. Affiliates might come after that point, but I still have to treat this like any other site I plan to make cash with.

Product Creation and Sales Letter Creation

There is something that I learned pretty fast when it came to these two things… the sales letter is going to be the much more difficult thing to create. I know that when you see someone’s product hidden behind a great looking sales letter you think of amazing things. You think that it is revolutionary. That is ground breaking. That it goes over and above everything you’ve ever seen.

If you’ve read these products you’ll learn very fast that they aren’t revolutionary or ground breaking. They’re essentially long informative articles. I’m not trying to trivialize the products out there, but you need to get the ‘worthier than thou’ mentality out of your head. Making them isn’t out of your intellectual grasp. You don’t need to have a 7 year University education to talk about some cure for hemorrhoids. All you have to do is write in a coherent manner and provide information that people will find useful.

And remember, your product doesn’t have to be uber advanced. Sure, some people might be looking for something way more advanced than what you are selling. Let them refund. Fuck’em. You don’t need them as a customer. There are plenty of people that are complete retards when it comes to looking up information and they’ll gladly buy your product on their horrible case of piles.

I guess the point I’m trying to make is that making a product isn’t hard. It’s something that is time consuming and requires a lot of researching skills, but it’s not something that requires some ‘worthier than thou’ license to create them.

The sales letter is something that is a little more difficult to do. This is something that I have yet to perfect myself, but it’s something I’m always working on. You’ve probably recognized a few important things about them. They’re fuckin’ long. They have a lot of information. And they’re full of a lot of marketing practices you’re probably not consciously aware of. The reason that this is more difficult is due to the fact that you’re going to have to tweak tweak and tweak it some more because it’s never going to be perfect.

Refunds

One of the biggest fears I’ve had about making a product is the refunds. There is no rationality behind this. Every product that I make I sort of sit there after the first sale and patiently wait for the first buyer to immediately refund my ‘crap’ product. It never happens. My very first product was refunded once and it was expected since the conversion came from CB-Analytics. Other than that I haven’t had one. I had one refund with my $7 report project. The guy was a total asshole too, but I ust refunded their money without even replying their email. I’m not going to fight with someone over seven bucks.

You shouldn’t worry about refunds. You really shouldn’t. Chargebacks are another thing, but refunds are nothing. Most likely you’re not going to experience huge refunds, but let’s say you did. Let’s say that your refund rate starting out was 50%. You’re going to get mouthy emails for it too. You’ll find out that your product needs to be improved and typically the mouthy emails will let you know exactly what you need to improve it with. So don’t worry about that shit.

If you’re sitting on a product right now because you’re afraid some people will refund it, seriously get it up now. Don’t sit on it. We’re always most critical of ourselves and we tend to elevate the people around us (mainly competitors). It’s time to get some self-esteem and realize that you’re better than all the other pricks out there and that you can make cash online until the cows come home because you have a superior product. And even if you don’t have a superior product, you can sure as hell profit with it.

Your Goal

Knowing exactly what your goal is with your product is very important because a lot of people misinterpret exactly what their goal as a businessman should be. Let’s say you have a product for curing hemorrhoids. What is your goal for this product? I can already hear my readers speak: ‘to get rid of hemorrhoids’, ‘to help people feel better’. ‘to improve the lives of those that buy my product’, etc. Well, you’re wrong. The correct answer is to make cash online. In fact, you want to make as much money as you physically can. When you think of a product price, you don’t think about what you think is ‘fair’. You try to get as much out of a person as possible in such a way to maximize profits.

‘…but that’s greedy.’ It is. That’s the point. I’m trying to make money. That is the entire goal. I’m not saying that you make bad products or anything. I’m saying your goal is money. In fact the quest for money will help you make better and more premium products.

For example, today I was having a discussion with one of my lifetime friends in which we could have a huge untapped market. He doesn’t do affiliate marketing or anything like that, so don’t assume we’re talking about internet marketing. He works as an engineer, but he works with a sports league in his spare time and one of the league owners asked him if he’d be willing to do something for him (create a product) that the league needs. My friend didn’t have time, so he was going to pass it on to me. As we were talking about it we both came to the logical conclusion on how much to charge this guy for the work. We both concluded on as much as we can physically get out of him.

Just to side track for a minute, we start spit balling the potential of what this guy wanted us to do. We are pretty sure that we could sell this to just about any sports league in the world. The funny thing… the niche is completely untapped. I’m obviously not going to go into detail on what exactly it is, but the market is hungry. It’s a huge time consuming pain in the ass for a lot of leagues and this could save a huge amount of man hours.

Just that aside should demonstrate that all product creation is the same.

The Upsell

I think this is one of the overlooked positive aspects of selling. Upselling is the ability to sell another related product to a buying customer or sell an upgrade to the consumer. I’m sure you’ve seen the upgrades on a lot of pages. Backend products are upsells too because if they just bought they’re more likely to buy again.

And this isn’t an online phenomenon either. Some of the best businesses in the world have this sort of shit built in. I think the most classic is a funeral home. They’re selling caskets, funeral services, burials, tomb stones, etc. They upsell the hell out of someone’s death. You’ll find the same thing in electronic stores. If you’re buying a big screen television, they’re going to upsell the three year warranty, surround sound speaker pack, wall mount, etc.

Upselling is how you make the extra juicy profits on a sale. And the cool part is that people are more likely to give in if they’re planning to buy. Typically it’s just a little bit more and they’re getting such a good deal they can’t back down. That’s how you want them to feel. Let’s say that they want your $37 product… but wait, for just an extra $15 they can get the uber awesome premium version of your product with the extra bonus material.

You get what I mean.

For My Product

Building the product shouldn’t be that hard to do. It all comes down to finding information, compiling information into a logical pattern and than writing it into a coherent ebook. The plan for me is to work on this starting tonight (Friday I posted this). I want to get it all done with sales letter by the end of the weekend. That is at least my goal at this point.

I picked up the necessary supplies for this project. If you’re curious, that means basically 4 cans of energy drink. I was going to pick up some Red Bull, but there was this other type at the grocery store called Red Rain. It was on sale at the store, so I thought why not pick it up. Basically these are used for all nighters that might be required to finish this.

Sniper Sites

I guess I should give a little update on these sites. I like to wait until Saturday to give these types of updates because that gives me an exact 7 day span since the previous update. It really prevents me from skewing the results up very much. But due to the fact that I’m going to be busting my balls all weekend making a product, I’m not going to have time to really update you on Saturday or even Sunday. Even if I do update you on Sunday I won’t be able to write a mega post that I’m currently playing around with.

Let’s just get down to the numbers…

Total Invested: $354.20 US

Total Earned: $66.11 US ( $23.36 from last week )

This is actually much better than expected. Last week I did $18.58 for a full week and I did $23.36 for only 6 days. You also have to take into consideration that I had a site outtage on Tuesday of this week. Things are improving.

I also wanted to apply some extra stats for the month of September. It is going to be a complete pain in the ass to build these statistics for you, but I’m going to do it anyway.

Total Unique Vistors for September: 3372

Average Per Site (41 sites total): 82.24

Total Adsense for September: $58.92

Average Per Day: $1.964

Total Amazon for September: $3.30

Total Clickbank for September: $0.00

My only Clickbank sniper site had around 219 vistors for the month. I had 37 CTR, 2 order form impressions and 0 order clicks. Obviously not enough going on. I blame this mainly on WordPress. 7 out of 41 sites are currently on WordPress and frankly I’m really not a fan of doing this when selling products. I can’t remember exactly how this particular site ended up on WordPress, but that’s where it is. I either have to put a very simple theme up for it (like this one) or put up a static site. WP is fine for writing content and doing what I’m doing here, but it is rotten as a landing page. There is too many distractions. This is why I like this theme. The distractions are at the bottom, so you’re going to have to scroll through everything to get to it. A big aspect of landing pages is the ability to control the eyes of the reader and that is tough to do with WP.

I thought the statistics were a little interesting. Shows you how a lot of little sites can add up to give you a lot of traffic. I didn’t have much in the way of Amazon sales. Most of my Amazon sites are in the second wave of sites, so I expect to see better results from it next month. Well, I’ve passed the four thousand word mark now, so I guess I should wrap it up.