5 Sales Email Myths that are Costing You Money

Recently, I worked with Darren on some sales content—including launch emails—for the release of a new product at DPS. That launch email was tested against another version written by a professional marketer in a split test before the launch. In (what was to me) a shock result, the email I’d written achieved:

• 7.3% more opens (39.5% to 32.2%)
• 4.8% more click-throughs (7% to 2.2%)

As we’ll see, this experiment busted five key sales email myths:

1. Use call-to-action sales links in sales emails.
2. We need to “sell” the customer on the product before they’ll click a link.
3. A sales email should focus on a discount or offer.
4. A sales email should overtly drive readers to action.
5. Scannability is about bold font, bullet lists and subheadings.

First up, let’s look at the email.

—-

Subject: Wish you could take Gorgeous Photos, Every Single Time? Now You Can

Body:

Wish you could take gorgeous photos, every single time? Now you can.

Photo Nuts and Shots is your comprehensive guide to creative photography. And for a limited time, you can get 25% off the cover price!

If you know your way around your camera, and you’re ready to harness practical techniques to take stunning, evocative images, this 100+ page ebook is for you.

Over 9 down-to-earth chapters, professional photographer Neil Creek will show you how to:

• harness light to convey emotion
• know the rules of composition … and when to break them
• take the sharpest possible photo every time
• adapt the camera’s exposure to produce the shot you want
• master the concepts of shot perception, planning, and execution — in any setting
• tap into your unique creativity to take evocative photographs that reach out to viewers
• be the best photographer you can be.

For full details, visit our Photo Nuts and Shots page.

This lush, inspiring, practical guide normally retails for $19.99 but for a limited time, you can secure a copy for just $14.99.

That’s 25% off!

Of course, you’re protected by a 60-day money-back guarantee, so if you don’t feel this detailed ebook has helped you become a better photographer, you can get a full refund.

For more information, and to order your copy today, visit Photo Nuts and Shots info page.

Darren Rowse

PS: Order Photo Nuts and Shots in the next week and you’ll also go into the draw to win a brand new Canon EOS T2i SLR camera and lens.  But hurry, time is limited.

—

One thing you’ll notice is the aspirational nature of the selling point here. This was an aspirational product, being sold to people who had an ambition. Also, the DPS audience members aren’t new to the Web—they’re comfortable with technology and this medium.

The other email we tested used an offer-based subject line that promoted the launch discount. While discounts certainly appeal to customers, this example shows that a discount doesn’t always have the pulling power we think it will. What works best always depends on your audience.

This email contains a number of audience-specific techniques that I’m happy to discuss in the comments if you like, but in this post, I really wanted to focus on the broader techniques that I think helped give this email—and could give any sales email—a solid head-start in the response rate stakes.

1. Tie the opening to the subject line

The first sentence of this email is identical to the subject line. I don’t think that’s necessarily ideal, but I do think your email has an immediate hook if your subject line identifies your key selling point, and your opening answers that point.

As I’ll explain in a moment, this email does achieve that “answer” in its opening. But what do I mean by “answer”?

In this context, an answer isn’t necessarily an answer—to a question, for example—although it can be. An answer is a secondary piece of information that actively and substantially supports the proposition contained in your subject line. Look at a book’s chapters and you’ll see that their opening paragraphs directly relate to, explain, and/or support their titles. You’re aiming to achieve the same thing, but in a sentence.

So, for example, it would be much stronger to follow this email’s subject line with an aspirational opening sentence than an offer-focused opening sentence. Why? Because the selling point in this version of the email is aspiration. The opening sentence needs to reinforce that positioning whole-heartedly.

2. Make the first word count

The first word in this email is “wish”. It’s a present-tense verb, it directly reflects the selling point (aspiration), and it’s sweet and non-spammy. Wish? Who doesn’t have a wish?

I could have started with “Do you wish” or “Have you ever wished”, but those sentences just push that crucial word—wish—further and further away. We have micro-seconds to catch potential customers’ attention. We need to cut to the heart of the matter.

That first word is valuable in itself from a positioning point of view, but as we’re about to see, it has much greater value than this alone.

3. Link to the sales page

The first link to the sales page appears on the second line of the email. It’s an informational link containing the name of the product.

The other email we tested included its first link to the sales page in the fifth paragraph, and the link text was a call to action: “Order your copy here.” In fact, that email had two links, and used the same call to action in both. As you can see, the email above does not use call-to-action link text.

I think this points to a couple of common misconceptions about writing sales copy:

1. The first is that a call to action is the appropriate form of link text in sales copy.
2. The second is that a reader needs to be told things—that you need to “sell” them on your concept—before they’ll be sufficiently convinced to click on a link. I think most web users are more sophisticated than this. They trust their own opinions far more than yours or mine, and they know that clicking on a link is not a commitment to buy.

If you look glance at the opening of this email, you see two things: “Wish you…” and a link to Photo Nuts and Shots. I may be alone, but to me, that says “Problem? Solution.”

4. Make it scannable

You knew this was coming, right? And yes, we included a list (every point starting with a carefully chosen verb, to exemplify a benefit), a bolded discount offer, and an eye-catching post-script with a competition to generate immediate action.

But the other email we tested had all these “scannable” elements too. So what’s the difference?

I think scannability has evolved from the early days of subheads-and-bullet-list advice. As we just saw, at first glance, the opening contains a problem and a solution—even if the reader isn’t reading. This may sound extreme, but I’ll say it: the reader doesn’t really have to move their eyes to get that information.

If, as we know from research, readers’ eyes stray down the left of the display, then we should provide them with as much information as we can on the far left of the page. I am an extremely lazy online reader, so I know from personal experience that this makes a big difference to comprehension.

I think scannability comes right down to language choice and sentence structure. On the left-hand side of this email we see—even if we don’t consciously read them—the following words:

• Wish you could
• Photo Nuts and Shots
• Over 9 down-to-earth
• For full details
• This lush, inspiring
• That’s 25% off
• Of course, you’re protected
• For more information
• Darren Rowse

This information combines to deliver:

• acknowledgement of a problem
• the name of the solution
• a link
• value: the book length (9 chapters; I used the number because it stands out more clearly in body copy than would the word “nine”) coupled with the size of the discount (also a number)
• reassurance

The one thing to remember with this left-hand-side technique is that words in subsequent lines of the same paragraph may not display against the left-hand margin in the user’s email client. You really need to focus on first words of paragraphs with this technique.

5. Beginnings and endings

There’s another little scanning-related technique that I wanted to mention. Let’s look again at the list of benefits, which is probably one of the parts of any sales email that gets the most attention.

• harness light to convey emotion
• know the rules of composition … and when to break them
• take the sharpest possible photo every time
• adapt the camera’s exposure to produce the shot you want
• master the concepts of shot perception, planning, and execution — in any setting
• tap into your unique creativity to take evocative photographs that reach out to viewers
• be the best photographer you can be.

I have this idea that we pay attention to the beginnings and ends of pieces of text. Take the middle sections out of these bullet points, and here’s the message you end up getting:

• harness light …  emotion
• know the rules … break them
• take the sharpest … every time
• adapt the camera’s … shot you want
• master the … in any setting
• tap into your …. reach out to viewers
• be the best … you can be.

This applies to other pieces of text, too. Like the first two paragraphs:

Photo Nuts and Shots … 25% off the cover price!

If you know …  100+ page ebook is for you.

And the refund paragraph:

Of course … get a full refund.

So don’t just pay attention to the left-hand side of your content. Also pay close attention to the endings of each piece of text in your email.

Warning: oversell

This email did achieve a good response rate. However, the complaint rate on this email was higher than the other version we tested by 0.04%.

That’s a small percentage, and you’d probably say it was worth it, given the higher open and click-through rates.

Interestingly, Darren told me that the ebook’s author, Neil Creek, also voiced concern at the strength of the message in this email. When the email was mailed to the whole of the DPS userbase, the words “every single time” were removed from the subject line.

I have to admit that I was extremely impressed by the product itself, and that obviously came across loud and clear in my writing. But it makes an important point about word choice and expression. The bottom line seems to be, don’t go overboard, however enthusiastic you may feel about the product.

Rewriting the myths

After this experiment, here’s my take on the sales email myths I outlined at the start:

1. Use call-to-action sales links in sales emails.
   Write your copy for the audience, and use what feels like natural link text. If it’s a call to action, fine. But it needn’t be.
2. We need to “sell” the customer on the product before they’ll click a link.
   Some readers may need convincing, but many just want to look at what you’re selling for themselves. Don’t make them hunt for the link.
3. A sales email should focus on a discount or offer.
   The focus of your email should be dictated by the audience’s needs.
4. A sales email should overtly drive readers to action.
   You don’t need to use in-your-face techniques like call-to-action link text, repetition, and screamy sales lines (“Don’t miss out! Order now! Limited stock available!”) to get results.
5. Scannability is about bold font, bullet lists and subheadings.
   Scannability is about paragraphs, sentences, and words as much as it is these presentation mechanisms.

How do you feel about these ideas? Do you think they’d work with your readers? What other suggestions can you add? Also, if you try some of these techniques and can share your results with us in the comments, we’d love to hear them.

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The 10 Commandments to Successful Blogging

I’ll start off by saying that blogging is absolutely fantastic to do if you are passionate about a certain topic.

If you can write dozens or hundreds of articles related to the same topic without seeing it as a chore, then a blog is a great medium to build up an audience and establish yourself as an authority in a certain niche.

If you want to blog to make a full-time income, I can tell you that it’s possible but it’s not easy and it won’t happen overnight.

Let me share with you what I’ve learned since starting my blog

It’s been just over 2 years since I bought my blog domain. When I started Upgrade Reality, I had zero knowledge about websites, blogging or WordPress.

It took me an entire year of having a horrible theme, spending hours playing with code and tweaking my blog, and writing dozens of (in retrospect) terrible articles before I had a decent understanding of what a respectable blog should look like and what content it should have.

Looking back at some of my older screenshots and articles, it was so bad I can’t imagine how anyone ever read that I had to say.

I truly wish that I had spent money on a mentor or found a blog post like this one, because it would have saved me months of discovering things by trial and error. I can tell you that there is no point in re-inventing the wheel. There are proven methods and tactics that work, and until you know better…copy.

Here are 10 ‘Commandments’ you need to follow if you want to have a successful blog and dominate your industry.

1-Invest In Your Blog

With millions of blogs and websites to compete with, you need to set yourself apart from the rest in order to gain a big audience.

The first thing that a new visitor sees when he lands on your blog is the design.

I’m a big fan of a simple and clean, yet gorgeous design and pretty logo. Your blog should be easy to navigate and it should be 100% clear what you want the visitor to do (I.e. subscribe or click on your latest article).

Unless you have web-designing experience, don’t try to design your own blog layout. Find a web designer who will create a custom theme for your WordPress blog, and be prepared to spend $250-$500 on that. It may seem like a lot of money if you are just starting, but it’s the best investment you can make. Trust me!

2-Have A Specific Direction

Your blog needs to have a clear purpose.

What do you write about? (e.g. Self Improvement)
What are you trying to achieve? (e.g. Helping people gain confidence and get the life they want)

This direction that you have with your blog needs to be overly evident to anyone landing on your page. Every article you write should be related to the purpose of your blog (trying to help people) and it should be clear to anyone who lands on your blog for the first time (i.e. your logo or slogan should state what your blog is about).

3-Learn To Format Your Articles

One thing that took me a long time to realize is that articles on a blog are formatted in a completely different way to a book you buy in the store or an essay that you write in the office.

Articles on blogs are broken down into lots of small paragraphs, many sub-headings, list points and they often contain images.

The reason for this is that people don’t read massive chunks of text on their computer screens. In fact, the majority of people scan through an article, reading only the subheadings or bullet-points, and they will read the entire article properly if you managed to get their attention when they scanned the article.

For an excellent resource about writing and text-formatting, head over to Copyblogger.com.

4-Study The Writing of Successful Bloggers

There’s no better way to learn than by studying and copying successful people.

Take time to read and study the articles and writing styles of some of the top bloggers in the world like: Leo Babauta, Darren Rowse, Steve Pavlina and Jay White.

5-Start Building A List From Day 1

This is probably the biggest mistake I made with my blog and it is one that I regret.

If you do not have an email list, start today. The money is in the list. Not only will you be able to make much more money when you have an email list, you will be able to build a much better relationship with your readers and help a lot more people than when you only write articles on your blog.

I don’t mean a Feedburner email list, I mean using a professional mailing-list system like Aweber or Mailchimp.

6-Have a Free Report

Have a free report, a video or an ebook that you can offer to new visitors. People love free stuff, especially if the free stuff contains awesome content and information.

Offer your freebie as an incentive for people to sign up to your mailing list. It will increase the number of people who sign up to your updates dramatically!

7-Guest Post

Do you want more exposure and more readers to your blog?

Then you need to get your name out there. The easiest way to do this is to write great quality, useful articles as guest posts for other blogs in your niche.

Take a month or two and write 30-50 awesome articles that you are going to send to related blogs in your niche. You will see a massive increase in readers from a guest-posting campaign like that.

For a great resource about guest posting, check out this article on Viperchill.com

8-Network

It’s not about what you know, it’s about who you know.

This is such an old but such a true statement. Knowing the right people could result in massive growth and awareness of your blog.

Go out and find the top 10 blogs in your niche. Then go out and find another 20 medium-sized blogs in your niche. Then go out and find 10 smaller blogs than your own blog.

Leave a few comments on their posts and send the owner of each of those blogs an email. Follow them on Twitter.

Note: Don’t network for the sake of personal gain. This is very important. Be genuine, make real connections and make friends with these people without asking anything of them. Over time they will happily help you out if you have shown that you are trustworthy and shown them that you help them out too.

9-Create Your Own Products

Creating and selling your own products is by far the most profitable business model.

You can make some money with advertising space on your blog, and you can make decent money by promoting products and using affiliate links.

However, the most profitable is if you create your own products (ebooks, guides, videos, membership sites etc.) and you sell them to your readers.

Creating a product is hard work, but you don’t have to do everything yourself. You can outsource many parts, like the design, the sales page and even the content. If you know the problem you want to create a product (solution) for, you can give guidelines or a skeleton to an experienced writer and pay him to create the ebook for you.

Start with a small product, but start with it. Create your own products and keep creating them. Henri does it, hundreds of other bloggers do it, I do it and now you need to do it too!

10-Provide Value

This is the most important thing that I can tell you about blogging. You need to always provide value.

Whether you are making someone laugh, or helping them live a healthy lifestyle, or giving them information how to blog like a pro…make sure that your content is always useful.

If you are providing value, visitors will become loyal readers. They will return, and a percentage of them will turn into regular buyers of the products you create and recommend to them.

Parting Words

Before I end this article off I want to leave you with some final blogging advice.

If you are blogging to build up an online income, then you need to treat your blog as a business. A blog does not make money, a business does.

The blog is just the medium that you use to connect with the hundreds or thousands of people that could become buying customers. If you do not have the mindset that your blog is an actual business, I can tell you that you are doomed to make little money until you change that mindset.

Work your way through all the points in this list and you should notice a big difference in your blog’s traffic, readers and in the amount of money you make from it. (But it will not happen overnight).

About the Author: Diggy blogs about Self Improvement at UpgradeReality.com. He has also created a foolproof guide to help you overcome your personal obstacles and inspire your personal growth, so check his site out.

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Twitter Backgrounds are Branding Machines

I don’t use Twitter as much as I probably should, and I actually use it for more of a blog feed than anything else. No matter how you use Twitter, it’s important to get your name and brand across. With that being said, think about your Twitter account and how many people are visiting your profile page ever day, weekly or even yearly. Even if YOU aren’t actively posting on Twitter, it doesn’t mean that people aren’t visiting your page, so it’s important to leave a lasting impression.

Twitter Backgrounds Leave an Immediate Impression

What’s the first thing you see when you visit someones Twitter page? Most likely it’s their background image. Not only do the backgrounds give us a creative insight on what the person is about, but it’s also a cool way to get your message or web site across. Who are you, what’s your business and how can I learn more about you? These are all different topics that you can use in your background.

Since going live with a new blog design, I thought it would be a good idea to change things up and go with a new Twitter background as well. You can see the new background below, which was designed by DesignPax.com.

My New Favorite Twitter Background – View Full Profile

My first Twitter background had some basic information on myself and where you could visit my blog and social pages. This time around, I just wanted to go for a big branded effort and get “ZacJohnson.com” across to the user.

Excellent Twitter Backgrounds and Resources

What are some of you favorite and most memorable Twitter backgrounds that you’ve come across while scouring around Twitter? Instead of running to Twitter and having to visit all of your followers pages individual, many design blogs have done the work for us. I love looking through galleries of Twitter backgrounds and seeing the creative ideas and designs that people come up with. Below are a few sites that feature some of the best designs we’ve all come across.

Effective Twitter Backgrounds: Examples and Current Practices
100+ Incredible Twitter Backgrounds
42 Twitter Backgrounds
40 Cool Twitter Backgrounds
25 of the Best Designed Twitter Homepages

If you don’t have your own unique Twitter background, you should! It’s free branding that may be getting seen by hundreds, if not thousands of people daily. Get creative and design your own Twitter background, or find someone that specializes in design work, like I did with DesignPax.com.

What’s the inspiration for your Twitter background, or some of the favorite designs you’ve come across?

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Introducing the Social Eyes Theme for WordPress

The importance of owning your own online real estate is becoming more obvious every day. Why make others rich off the sweat of your labor and your passions?

So if you’re in love with all the traffic and reach that social networking sites provide, you’ll want to take a long look at one of the latest creations from Copyblogger Media’s StudioPress division — the Social Eyes Theme.

By all means, stay engaged with your Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn communities. But do it smartly, by bringing them back to a socially-optimized place of your own.

Here’s a quick look at what you’ll get “out of the box” with the brand-new Social Eyes theme:

• Quick-change between two different color schemes without touching a line of code
• A beautiful social networking feel for your website design
• Evolve with your site’s growth using six different page layout options
• Show off your latest content using the featured article function
• Logical navigation & category layout that lets your readers get to what they want, fast
• All the SEO, security, and design benefits of the Genesis Framework
• Unlimited updates, domains you can use the theme on, and support (you’re not on your own)

Click here to dig deeper into the Social Eyes theme.

Or, click here to get more details on the Genesis Framework and find out why it’s the smartest way to build any WordPress site.

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How to Harness Your Email List to Help Pay Your Rent

This guest post is by the Blog Tyrant.

Wouldn’t it be nice to send out an email or two and pull in $10,000+ to pay your rent or mortgage payments for the year? It is actually possible using your own products or those of selected affiliates. And while some of you will be thinking that word “affiliates” sounds dirty and underhanded, I’m here to tell you that affiliate marketing is actually one of the most honest ways to make money on the Web.

In this post I am going to show you how you can make $10,000+ a year using your email list and a product or affiliate program. I’ll even do a bit of math to prove it.

photo credit: Esparta

How it works

Let me start by giving you a little overview of how this all works, in case you’re totally new to the idea. I’ll go in to more detail later on.

1. Use your blog to grow an email list
   If you’ve read any of my other guest posts on Problogger you will notice that I have a pretty (un)healthy obsession with email lists. I’m constantly telling my readers to focus on growing a list of active, engaged, and interested email subscribers. It should be the main focus of almost every blog.
2. Provide value
   The most important thing to remember with this process is that you need to provide value. You need to enrich the lives of your subscribers. You need to solve their problems. Without this step you will find that your list grows largely unresponsive.
3. Create a product or find affiliate programs
   The next steps is to create a product of your own (ebook, ecourse, etc.) or find a product of someone else’s that you can promote and sell to your email list. It needs to be highly relevant, valuable, and helpful.
4. Promote it to your email list
   This stage is actually rather complex and can involve a pre-launch and launch, as well as automated messages and so on. The net result is that you make a lump sum of money during a launch period, or an ongoing stream of income from automated sales that happen over time.

The whole thing can be a very exciting process and, if it’s done correctly, it is an extremely ethical way to make good money while enriching the lives of your subscriber list.

Doing the math

Now, let’s do a little math to see if $10,000 per year is really possible. In fact, if you really catch a hold of this concept you’ll find that $10,000 is actually rather conservative. The possibilities with this type of marketing are endless.

Let’s take a look:

1. Capture four email subscribers per day
   Let’s assume you are able to capture four email subscribers per day. It is a very small amount that any one can do with ideas like this and this.4 x 365 = 1460 subscribers per year.
2. Sell a $37 ebook to 20% of your list
   If your followers are loyal and engaged you should be able to sell to around 15% to 20% of them.1460 subscribers x 0.2 = 292 sales @ $37 = $10,804

Now, for those whose lists are significantly larger than this, the estimates are conservative. For those who have smaller lists, this can serve as inspiration to keep going with your blogging work. Remember, an ebook is just one example of the multitude of things you can promote to your list.

How to make $10k+ per year with email subscribers

photo credit: peasap

The wonderful thing about this process is that it can be expanded upon to incredible levels. For some bloggers, $10,000 is a tiny sum of money. My hope is that this post serves as a catalyst for you to learn more about the field and really take your blog to its full potential.

1. Grow the email list

The email list is the backbone of all good blogging income sources. If you can capture a large number of email addresses of readers who love what you write, trust your advice, and look to you for help and new information, then you are setting yourself up to be in a very profitable situation.

I know what you’re thinking: “But isn’t it rude/annoying/spammy to sell stuff to my followers?” This is a very common question. I encounter so many people who don’t want to sell anything to their subscribers but, to be honest, the logic doesn’t make sense to me. Why? Because, like everyone else, you also have bills to pay, you aren’t trying to rip anyone off, and with the right products, you can help your subscribers to better their situations.

Don’t get me wrong: some people abuse their lists. I don’t condone this at all. But guys like Darren, who only sell high-quality ebooks or training courses that can help you grow a bigger and better blog, are helping their subscribers. Why shouldn’t Darren make some money selling a product that has taken him years and years to acquire the knowledge to create—and helps you in a big way?

How can you grow your list quickly?

• Focus on value and quality information
  Your blog needs to publish high-quality content that adds value to the lives of your readers. Every time someone sees a post on your blog, they should leave feeling like a problem is solved. This is important.
• Have an angle
  There are hundreds of millions of blogs out there. You need an angle. Why should people read your stuff over someone else’s? Without an attached story or angle, you give a person no reason to subscribe to your blog.
• Use Aweber to add subscription boxes and send a free ebook
  I recently wrote a post about why I switched to Aweber and the reasons are simple: you can add a subscription box to your blog in about five minutes, you can send out a series of automatic follow-up emails and, best of all, you can send out a free ebook automatically. This is a tried and tested method for capturing a lot of email subscribers: write a highly valuable ebook that appeals to your niche, and give it away in exchange for their subscription.
• Write guest posts related to your niche
  Once your free ebook offering is up and running, get out there and start guest posting on as many of the top blogs as possible. Darren has a thorough post on how to do this, so the only thing that I’ll add is that you should make your posts as good as possible, and in some way relate them to your free ebook. This ensures that all the visitors that trickle through to your site are interested in your stuff.
• Engage people in email, Twitter, comment threads, etc.
  If you want your email subscribers to be loyal and engaged, you want to make sure you engage them in as many places as possible. As a general rule, I reply to every comment on my blog, and Twitter and Facebook accounts. I work from home so it’s easy for me to do this, but even if you work in an office, you should make an effort to reply to contacts and commenters each evening when you get home.

As a general rule of thumb, the number of email signups you attract is a good indicator of how successful your blog is. You might be getting all the traffic in the world, but unless you can convert it somehow, you probably aren’t making much progress. Capturing as many email subscribers as possible is the first and most important step in affiliate marketing.

2. Create a product and/or find an affiliate product to promote

This section is broken up in to two parts—your two different options. The first option is to create your own product and sell that to your list. I prefer this option because you can tailor it to suit your readers’ needs and wants. The second option is find someone else’s product to promote to your list for a commission (i.e. an affiliate program). Let’s take a look at both.

Creating your own product

The wonderful thing about the Internet is that it allows you to create your own product without much in the way of difficulty or start-up costs. In a recent article on how stay-at-home moms can make money, I said that a product launched off the back of an expert blog is one of the easiest and most rewarding ways to make an honest living online. This is true.

Your product could take one of many forms:

• an ebook
  Creating an ebook is one of the simplest ways to make money from your blog. All you do is brainstorm a concept, write it out in Word or Open Office, tizzy it up with graphics and pictures, and then convert it into a PDF. Instant product. The problem? There are a lot of them out there. People have become a bit blind to them. If you are going to sell an ebook, you have to make sure it is of an outstanding level of quality and addresses a problem that’s massively relevant to your blogging audience. Ideally, it will cover a topic that hasn’t already been heavily written about.
• an ecourse
  Another popular option is to develop an ecourse that teaches your readers how to do something. It could take the form of a series of emails sent out every week, or it could be an ebook mixed with video and delivered in module form. This is sometimes a better option because, the course content can be created or amended on the go, to respond to the feedback you get from users.
• a membership site
  This is new black: it seems like everyone is creating membership sites nowadays. A membership site is basically a password-protected area of your blog that people can only access by paying. It could contain tools or courses or a forum of experts, for example. Some of the more successful membership sites are SEOBook and SEOmoz.
• a physical product
  If you are one of these talented people who have an actual real-world skill like painting or designing clothes, you might want to make your product a physical one. This can work extremely well if you have a big list of people who admire your work.

Whatever you decide to create, you have to make sure it appeals to your readers and continues to add value as you’ve done on your blog. People simply will not pay for something unless they know that it will add to their lives in a meaningful way.

Promoting someone else’s product

If you don’t have the time, energy, or ideas to create your own product, you can start out by promoting other people’s—by becoming an affiliate. For example, if I created an amazing Blog Tyrant ecourse, I would offer people the opportunity to sell that ecourse on my behalf and earn a commission (usually 40% to 80%) on every sale. If you believed in that product (trust me, it’d be awesome!) then you could sell it to your list. Money for jam.

There are a few prerequisites to generating an income through affiliate sales:

• The product must be relevant.
  If you run a dog-training blog there is almost no chance that my amazing Blog Tyrant product would sell to your list. You need to find affiliate products that are highly relevant to your blog.
• You must believe in it/use it yourself.
  Personally, I never promote an affiliate product unless I use it myself. My site is all about helping people dominate their niche and grow an online business that allows them to work from home. Why would I risk my reputation (and in some cases friendships) promoting a product that I’ve never used?
• It must be reputable and safe.
  Some affiliate programs out there really do not offer good protection for their customers. It’s getting rarer and rarer, but every now and then you come across a program that gets people involved with spam, or makes it difficult to get a refund. If you are going to promote something to your list, you want to make sure it comes from a reputable source that you know and trust. Shoemoney says that he never promotes an affiliate unless he has met the owner in person. This is a good rule.

Please do not think that affiliate programs are all dirty. They aren’t. There are some really solid brand names out there who are promoting very valuable tools and information. Darren’s one of them. With a little bit of research and planning, you will be able to find something great for your crew.

Finding affiliate products to promote
There are so many different places to find affiliates out there—some good, some bad. What you often find is that it is best to locate the product you want to promote first, then figure out what company that product creator is using to sign up affiliates. Some of the main ones you might want to look at include:

• E-junkie
• Commission Junction
• Shareasale
• Clickbank.

A lot of the larger companies run their own affiliate programs. In this case you want to visit the sites of the sellers themselves, scroll down to the very bottom and look for the Affiliates link that will direct you to the signup page.

3. Sell the product to your email list

The final part of this post is all about selling your product, or your chosen affiliate product, to your email list. This topic could be studied for a lifetime, but here, let’s look at a rough game-plan.

Pre-launch

The first step is to generate some interest among your subscribers around the product launch. You want to prepare your readers for the big sale day. There are lots of different ways to do this, and many different schools of thought as to what works and what doesn’t. Some ideas include:

• a free give away
  Having a free give away that is related to your product launch can be a good idea because people circulate the free part to their friends and on their blogs. It can also help you capture more email addresses to use for the actual promotion.
• a time-sensitive signup area
  Something else that can work is to have a time-sensitive signup area. For example, if you are releasing a membership site you might only want to release it to 100 members. Having an earlybird signup area on the blog a week in advance can get people motivated to join, rather than risk missing out.
• create an affiliate program
  Around this time, if you’re selling a product you’ve created yourself, you also want to set yourself up as affiliate seller so that other bloggers can sell your products. Email your list of high-profile blogging contacts, letting them know about the product launch and the affiliate program, and ask them to help you out.

Whatever you decide to do, make sure it really does generate some buzz. The idea is to get as many people talking about the product, and sharing news about it, as possible.

Launch

The launch stage is where you actually send out the email to your list promoting your new product. You should also do a post on your blog to ensure your RSS readers hear about what’s going on. Make sure your launch email:

• has a strong call to action
• details all the specs of the product
• uses social proof
• focuses on benefits, not features.

As I said, this is only supposed to be a rough game-plan. There are some amazing articles out there that give you specific details on this process. I’d recommend starting with Copyblogger’s landing pages tutorials, Darren’s video on product launches, and Yaro’s article on creating an ebook.

Automate follow-ups for affiliate products

One thing to remember is that if you’re promoting someone else’s product you don’t have to do all this launch stuff. You can actually just set it to be entirely automatic. How? Well remember we talked about Aweber’s automatic messages earlier? What you can do is create a series of follow-up emails that go to every subscriber that you get on a sequence of set days.

For example, let’s say you subscribe to my Dog Training blog. On day one I might send you an automatic email thanking you for subscribing. Then on day three, you get an email with a highly useful dog training tip or tutorial. A week later, you get another training tip and then, maybe a day after that, I send you an email with an affiliate product that relates to the tips and tutorials, and really helps you solve the problem. It’s all automatic, and it works extremely well.

Remember, don’t flood your subscribers with emails, and don’t send anything out unless it’s highly valuable and useful to your subscribers. Don’t risk compromising your relationship.

Have you done it? Will you try it?

I’d really like to open up the comments now and ask you guys for any advice from your own email campaigns. Have you tried these kinds of approaches before? Did they work well? I’d also really like to know whether you will give this a try on your own blogs. Do leave a comment and let me know.

The Blog Tyrant is a 25 year old guy who makes a full time living from blogs and online businesses. He has sold several blogs for $20,000 plus and answers every comment he gets on his blog. Subscribe by email or follow him on Twitter, Facebook or

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Should You Use Affiliates to Promote Your Products?

Last week I shared my answer to a common question that many people getting into online product marketing ask: “Should I offer a money-back guarantee?” Today I want to tackle two others:

“Should I start an affiliate program to promote my product?” If so, “how much should I pay affiliates as a commission?”

I had this conversation only yesterday with one blogger who was launching his first ebook. He had decided to set up an affiliate program but was unsure about what percentage to pay. He were leaning towards 10% commissions, mainly because he didn’t want to eat into his profit margins too much. I’ll share the response I gave that blogger here.

But first, let’s take a step back to look at some pros and cons of affiliate programs.

Why an affiliate program could be worthwhile for your product

The main reason that you should consider an affiliate program for your product is simply that it will increase the potential reach that you will have as you promote your product.

Whether your blog is big or small, there’s always room to increase your reach and have your offer seen by more people. Pretty much every topic has other blogs, sites, forums, and individuals interacting on social media. To set up an affiliate program increases the incentive that these sites and individuals have to promote your product.

Of course, not everyone will be motivated by an affiliate commission (some bloggers don’t use them at all), but you will find that some are definitely moved by them and those people could open up a considerably larger audience for you.

Another benefit of affiliate programs is that they help to grow your own list of customers. This benefits you in the here and now with the product you’re promoting at present, but also offers potential for future products.

A new customer that comes in from an affiliate promotion today can turn into a life-long customer if you develop a relationship with them. A $10 sale from an ebook could end up leading to five more $10 sales in the coming year—or it could end up generating a $200 sale if you launch larger products down the track.

Why you might not want to start an affiliate program?

I think it’s important to note that having an affiliate program isn’t always the best option for everyone. There are some costs to consider along with the opportunities they open up.

• Decreased profit: Let’s start with the most obvious cost—affiliate programs eat into your profit margin. When someone recommends your product they do bring in new business, but you share the benefit of that business with them. A $20 ebook sale effectively becomes a $10 sale if you share a 50% commission. For some bloggers this is a stumbling block, and not something that they want to do (I’ll speak more about it below).
• Time: One of the big hidden costs of an affiliate program is the time that it can take to manage. I’ve not found it to be a huge time commitment, but there are some extra logistical tasks that you might find yourself doing when you introduce affiliates into your strategy. These include paying them (depending upon the system you use), providing them with sales material, motivating them, helping those who have limited technical knowledge to set up links, and so on. You will find that some affiliates need a bit more hand-holding than others—and some can be quite high maintenance!
• Loss of control: Another hidden cost of affiliate programs is that you lose a little control over the way your product is promoted. Not everyone will promote it in the same way you do. I can think of a number of times when this has been a problem—particularly when affiliates have used hype and built products up to be better than they actually are in order to get sales. In doing so they created false expectations in buyers that the owner of the product had to then manage.

How much should you to pay affiliates?

This is one of the most common questions I’ve been asked on this topic, but of course there are no real wrong or right answers. You’ll want to consider a number of factors:

1. Price of product: As someone who promotes a variety of products through affiliate programs, I know that it’s not just the percentage commission that I look at, but also the price of the product. For example, 50% of a $5 product is certainly not as attractive as 50% of a $100 product. There may not be a lot you can do about this, but it’ll be a factor for those considering promoting your product.
2. Size of the untapped market: If you’re just starting out and don’t yet have much of an audience of your own, you might want to consider a higher commission in order to give an incentive to affiliates to work for you to get things going. However, if you have a large audience of people who trust you already, you might not be as reliant upon affiliates to help you make your product successful.
3. Future product releases: Some people use affiliate programs more as lead generators than anything else. I know of a number of people who actually offer affiliates 100% of sales to give them a big incentive to promote the product. The hope is that, while the affiliate is the only person to make money from the initial promotion, the sales will generate a list of buyers to which the product owner can promote future products.
4. Tiered commissions: One strategy that some product producers use is to offer bigger affiliates a higher percentage than smaller affiliates. In this way, they increase the incentive for those who have larger audiences.
5. Physical vs virtual products (and other overheads): Many information products offer affiliates 40-50% commissions. This is in part because there are limited overheads on virtual products. To sell a $20 ebook only really costs me a few cents for hosting and bandwidth, and a small amount in PayPal and shopping cart fees (after the cost of design and so on). On the other hand, a physical product will have a much smaller profit margin. I have one friend who has an online camera store, and he’s only able to offer his affiliates 4% commissions, because his own profit margin isn’t high.
6. Consider your expenses carefully: Even if you’re selling virtual products, keep all of your expenses in mind. I had an interaction with an ebook seller recently who didn’t realize what the PayPal fees would be on his $5 ebooks. He offered affiliates 60% commissions on the sale price and, once he took out PayPal fees and his design and proofreading costs, he realized he wasn’t really making more than a few cents per ebook.

Why I pay 40% commissions instead of 10%

Let me finish with my answer to the blogger who was going to offer 10% commissions on his ebooks. He was concerned that commissions would eat into his profits, and was struggling to justify why he should really pay more to someone for simply promoting his ebook when he’d done all the work to make it.

I can see where he was coming from, but my philosophy for paying higher commissions on my own products (I pay 40%) is that any new customer that an affiliate brings in is a customer I’d probably never have had otherwise. So earning 60% (or $12 on a $20 ebook) is $12 more than I’d have had in my pocket than if I hadn’t had an affiliate promoting my product.

I also take into account the fact that that person buying my ebook might also buy future products from me (both my own and affiliate promotions that I promote). They may also recommend my products to their friends and may become a regular reader of my blog (and help to increase advertising revenue). So the inital $12 profit could end up being considerably more in time.

Do you have an affiliate program for your products?

I’d love to hear from others who sell products from their blogs. Do you offer an affiliate program? Why, or why not? If you do, what commission level do you pay, and how did you come to that figure?

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The Financial Cost Of The Egyptian Revolution

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While everyone around the world was concerning themselves with the quest for freedom by the Egyptian revolutionaries, there were other matters that needed to be taken into account. There was some quiet talk about the financial fallout from the uprising by those reporters who wondered what happens to any economy when the web goes down, but the real consequences weren’t known until recently.

Now at least some of these numbers are coming in and the cost is staggering and should be a lesson to any of those depots out there who think the best way to getting their way is to repress people’s freedom of speech by shutting off their Web. Read Write Web has recently reported the money number is $90 million for the financial cost of the Egyptian Internet blackout, and they think the real tally might be much higher.

Reporting on that number does not suggest the revolution was in any way unnecessary or counterproductive. There’s no way people in North America should criticize those that need to go to extreme measures to get the basic freedoms we all enjoy. In fact, those numbers should be a lesson to all the despots around the globe that think shutting down the Internet while they line their own pockets is the way to keep their riches flowing.

The point here is that cutting yourself off from the rest of the world might seem like a good idea but everyone needs to take a more long range view of what the internet means to a modern society and that includes what social media can cost when you lose it.

It’s important to keep in mind these are people who rely on tourism, sure, but there’s more to it than that. There have been estimates that place damage to the outsourced call centers that the country relied on for part of their income that serviced overseas customers in the millions.

Forbes even made some calculations that include commerce lost on the fact that Egypt’s ecommerce industry was out millions a day. The point here is clear in that while everyone was getting excited about how the Internet was driving a new social fabric for Egypt, they forgot about how important it was going to be to the new economy when that starts to arise.

It’s worth remembering the web has worked its way into many different areas of life right across the world and while social media is the big driver for change, the tools that are emerging to change history will also be needed to help rebuild and support economies after that change is accomplished. The people of Egypt started a revolution based on their knowledge of what social media was about and they’ll be there to implement it into their financial institutions as well.

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