What To Sell?
What Are You Going To Sell?
It seems to me that you have three main choices:
- Sell other people’s products as an affiliate. In this case you simply use your marketing expertise to create a bigger market and reach more prospects with a product that is in demand. The product owner pays you by way of affiliate commission for expanding his market.
- If you have an existing bricks and mortar business and you want to use the internet to expand that business and perhaps to re-package your products, knowledge, expertise or services so that they can be sold over the internet.
- Develop your own product. This is the hardest and slowest.
The quickest way to market, revenue and hopefully profit is the first, selling other people’s products as an affiliate. To find products to sell you can visit several sites that act as a publisher/marketer interface. These include:
- Clickbank
- Commission Junction
- Shareasale
- LinkShare
- DirectLeads
Clickbank is probably the best known of these. It handles digital products only whereas the next best known is Commission Junction which also handles physical products. Beware of a quick selection of products from Clickbank without doing your market research and considering whether products are well known, have saturated their market or are past their sell-by date.
www.cbengine.com is a useful site to help with selecting products from Clickbank. $39.95 will give you access for a full year. You’ll have full access to ClickBank product graphs, stats, history tracking, ClickBank Ad Builder, bookmarking system and other great features.
However, if you simply Signup you can try CBengine for 15 days absolutely free. This should be more than enough time for some diligent research to pick one or two products to start with. Bear in mind that you should have your own selection criteria of traffic and sales conversions with which to select products to market. Only select those products that meet the criteria. This may mean that you do lots of research and dont find anything. All the same don’t waste your efforts on products that are never going to sell well. Have the patience to wait for a good, marketable product.
What Do Your Prospects Want?
That’s a good question to ask. There is no future in offering the most brilliant product that you can imagine when the rest of the world is on another wavelength. Don’t forget; the customer is always right. The simplest way to find out what they want is to ask them with a survey or questionnaire. Survey Monkey is one service that will do this for you.
Product Offers
It’s important to consider your product in the right place in the sequence and not rush straight to this aspect of internet marketing. You need to consider your Strategy first and make sure that everything you are doing is aligned to your strategic objectives.
But once you have that sorted out then you must examine your product offer critically to ensure it contains the following elements.
1. Do unto others..
In your sales letter, treat the customer as you would like to be treated. You sales letter is going to be conversational as though you are talking to a friend. It’s going to be personalised as far as you can make it, you are going to offer valuable information with evidence/proof and if it does not meet your friend/customers requirement you will take it back and return their money.
All the elements that you have been told make up a good sales letter:
• Added value
• Proof
• Guarantee
• Testimonials
• Personalisation
• Quality
• Privacy
2. Why You?
Why should the prospect buy from you? What is unique about you or your product so that the prospect cannot buy the same thing from someone else?
With a unique offering you can ask and achieve higher prices
3. Overwhelm them.
Bonus overload! You can never have enough additional ‘product’ to add to the package.
4. Optimize it!
When it starts selling then never be satisfied. Test and tweak everything. Small percentage gains accumulate into massive profit improvements. Use Google’s Website Optimizer to split test your pages.
5. Value
Make sure you provide real value during the offer process. If you are going to offer some inducement to get visitors to your site to sign up then make sure you really are delivering valuable content. An audio recording is a good example where you could provide an interview with the author of the product you are eventually going to offer. During that interview you need to expose enough of the potential of the product to excite your prospects and drive them on to the next step of giving you even more of their time to view the sales page.
Once you have your product offer sorted out – and only after numerous critical reviews, then you can consider the multitude of tactics that are available to generate traffic and bring prospects to your offer pages.
