Well, it is Sunday evening and I just finished off my product creation that I had set up for the weekend. I had some very ambitious goals. I said that I wanted to make my ebook and I wanted to have the sales letter complete. I got that done. Even though I completed exactly what I said I was going to complete I feel a bit disappointed. I guess I was overanticipating things because I was thinking about having the product submitted to Clickbank on Monday.
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
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.