How To Make 6 Figures Selling a Digital Product!
Selling thousands of products monthly as well as hanging out with some of the top online marketers, I have been able to see the in’s and outs of what works and what doesn’t when it comes to selling products online.
The top product launches and top selling digital sites have 3 things in common:
- * A great OFFER
- * A Well Thought Out Sales Process that converts
- * Lots of Affiliates – sometimes Thousands of them
People want information and if it’s going to benefit them greatly, they will pay for that information. Think about it for a minute, say you wanted to loose some weight because it would make a HUGE difference to your life style, wouldn’t you be happy to pay $37 for the answer. Of course you would! I hear so often people say to me “I give to much for free, I can’t launch a product” – if you give so much for free, your one up on everyone else because people know what they can expect from you, great content and if they are paying for it, it’s most likely to be even better!
1. Putting Together Your Digital Product
There are so many different ways you can go about putting a product together, depending on your industry and who you are, one may be more your style than another. Ultimately you want it to solve a problem, so If we take the example of losing weight again, the problem being solved is people learning how to lose weight. Personally I believe you should cut out the fluff, don’t think that you need 100 pages in your eBook because you don’t, if you can teach it in 10 pages do that, as long as it’s unique and works, people don’t care! The two most popular solutions for digital products are eBooks and Membership sites, both do the same thing, just are delivered differently. eBooks are usually just word documents which are converted into PDF’s to improve usability / presentation and membership sites usually have video and text.
If you are struggling to brain storm the perfect product idea, here’s some great examples to get you thinking:
- Site Profit Domination - a 6 video module course on how to monetize your website which also includes transcripts and audios. Or how about “Never Fail Pick Up Techniques” – a 6 module video training course on how to pick up women.
- Bullet Proof Blogging Report - 107 Ways To Improve Your Blog. Or “The Fast Track Weight Loss Report” - 34 Ways little known techniques to lose Weight
If you are struggling for an idea, leave us a comment and we will try give you some examples of other products you could model yours on.
2. Delivering Your Product To The Customer
Once you have put together your product, you now want to build your membership area and for me, this was by far the most fun part, seeing everything come together. Firstly, my top recommendation is to you build your membership area or download pages on WordPress. We are all are familiar with the software, it’s also free and it’s known by the majority of programmers. Next you have to decide what membership plugin for WordPress you want to use, there are about a dozen options, after a lot of research (because this is the one thing you don’t want to get wrong!) I found two options and finally decided to use Digital Access Pass ( DAP ) and WOW I’m so happy I did. Here’s a quick breakdown of why you want this:
- Whole membership area, everything you could imagine.
- Build in shopping cart and affiliate program (no more ClickBank taking huge cuts), just integrate with PayPal Pro.
- Small one time payment (again, no more Clickbank huge cuts or software fees).
- Integrates beautifully with OptimizePress (see more below).
Here’s how I set up Digital Access Pass (DAP) for my business: People visit sales page >> Order through DAP shopping cart >> Automatically emailed login details >> Access to Membership Area >> Automatically an affiliate.
The automatic email sent to customers the second they pay. This way you cut out support issues and they have a record of their login details. In my email template I even added the customers affiliate link so that they can start promoting straight away!
This may sound a lot of work but using their software it literally took me an evening to set up my membership site. They also offer a consulting service which is basically them setting up your site with you through a online video share, this was really helpful in saving me a lot of time. (Worth the investment in my opinion -for the time saved) Like I mentioned before, it runs with WordPress so for adding and editing pages in your membership area, you simply login to your WordPress and do it there.
3. Customizing Your Membership Site Design and Layout
Digital Access Pass covers all the programming and technology side of things through WordPress. This means the design can be handled using a WordPress Theme, personally I don’t think using any standard theme will do your membership area justice, however my buddy James Dyson built a theme just to do this (plus lot’s more, see below). You can customize how the whole membership area looks, whatever I write here wouldn’t do it justice, you must watch the video on his site to understand just how advanced and easy to use this WordPress Theme is. Click here to visit OptimizePress.
4. Creating Your Sales Page
As I mentioned above, this is really important, you can send all the traffic in the world to your sales page but if it doesn’t look good you are screwed! Using WordPress again with OptimizePress you can create your sales page in minutes. Just drag and drop all the different things you want on your sales page, add some text and choose your template design and your nearly done. One thing I highly recommend, is get an eCover designed for your product, it’s basically an image to show how your product would look if it was a physical product, this helps you to show perceived value which of course increases your conversions.
Before the Big PRODUCT LAUNCH of your product, you may decide you want to do a Pre-Launch (usually to a small list or via some of your strategic JV partners). The goal here is to create awareness of your upcoming product launch and of course to get more people into a more targeted list prior to launch. Ideal ways to do this is to offer some free incentives / reports etc. Typically this can be a free PDF Report or a video related to your product.
It is essential I find to deliver real value here – give people something that will impress them, get them talking to friends about you and generally excited. And of course when these people join your pre-launch list you have a very targeted list (and high converting list) for when you actually launch the full product proper.
Let me give you an example – with the Popup Domination pre-launch we showed how visitors how to get more subscribers from their blog and how to make money from those visitors. We also highlighted the importance of using a light-box optin to increase your subscribers. And of course when we launched Popup Domination proper that’s what we offered – an easy to install and control Lightbox Optin, that would increase optins.
Another option is to use the squeeze page function for an exit page, using Exit Splash, when a visitor tries to leave your page, you suggest they grab your FREE gift first, this is a great opportunity to sell to them again and build your email list. Most affiliates only send traffic for a short amount of time, you want to take full advantage of that traffic while it’s there.
One thing you are probably aware of by now is that Jame’s OptimizePress looks very good. James has worked with some of the top internet marketers in the world and his designs have been tested on millions of people. Using the date collected from testing, they were able to find which designs and features convert higher then others. That is perhaps the biggest benefit to me – my shortcut to success in that these designs have been A/B tested designs for maximum conversions. You can see my review of OptimizePress here!
5. Adding a Shopping Cart So That Visitors Can Buy
First thing you need to work out is which payment processor you want to use, such as Paypal Payment Pro, Clickbank, Nanacast etc. I personally have tried Clickbank, it’s good but it doesn’t give you full control and I personally am trying to build a business so for the new IncomeDiary site I looked at Nanacast and PayPal Pro. After a lot of research I found that PayPal Pro with the combination of our membership site software Digital Access Pass (DAP) was by far the best combination for me. Like I mentioned above, DAP includes a shopping cart and an affiliate program so you can everything other processors may offer but have more control and better functioning.
Here’s why I decided not to use the others:
- You cut out the big cuts ClickBank take.
- Everything is self hosted (Nanacast hosts everything) which means you rely on them for your system and you don’t have complete control.
You should already have DAP set up, all you need to do is get approved by PayPal Pro which took me 3 days – then integrate it with your DAP which took around 20 minutes (just paste in several different verification codes in the back-end of your DAP). Now you should have your product all set up in your membership area, your sales page should be ready and you can now take payments. The only thing missing is lot’s of affiliates to promote your product!
6. Affiliate Domination (getting 1000′s of peoples to sell your product!)
Affiliates for those who don’t know are other people who have an audience similar to your product that could mention it and if they sell any, get a commission for each sale. I promote a lot of stuff online. When it comes to deciding what products I shall be promoting, apart from making sure it is a good product and adds value to my readers businesses – I also want to see the sales page and be convinced it is going to convert and also that the commission rate (and earnings per click – EPC) is good. Typically with digital products the commission rate is 50% because their are no expenses to the product seller and without the help of affiliates, wouldn’t have any where near the success they would without them.
Using Digital Access Pass, people can sign up as an affiliate to promote you and you can automatically make people affiliates when they buy your product. Don’t ask me how does it track who sells what, it just does, technology is clever! Put together a page on your site outlining all the benefits of being an affiliate, how to sign up and perhaps examples of some of your affiliates (Big Name Marketers are good). Showing other affiliates is great for social proof. Now all you have to do is ask every possibly person to promote you, the more affiliates you get, the more money you will make. My friend who recently did a 7 figure launch who wasn’t really well known before hand, was able to do this partly due to the shear number of affiliates. He actually hired a guy to be his affiliate manager and his job was just to contact affiliates and make sure they had everything they needed to sell as much as possible for him.
Bonus: Product Creation FAQ’s
Where should I host my product files and sales video?
Every marketer I know uses Amazon S3 which is a really cheap hosting solution for big files. Amazon is one of the biggest sites in the world and because of that, they have the best servers, hosting your stuff here will mean download times are as quick as possible.
How much should I charge for my product?
It’s a hard question to answer, I personally look for similar products and make sure I price accordingly. Most people use one of the following prices: $37, $47, $77, $97, $197, $997, $1997.
Should I Use An Exit Popup?
A lot of marketers use them because they do bring in results, on one of my launches I had 40% of people buy at the lower price from the exit popup. Sure some may of come back and bought at full price but I believe it does increase conversions. We use Exit Splash, click here to get it.
Where can I find affiliates to promote my product?
Everywhere, contact bloggers, people on Twitter, anyone ranking or advertising on Google for the key-phrases related to your product, product owners in your category on Clickbank, basically EVERY where. Try interview the big guys or promoting them first, this will give you a connection and them a reason to listen to you.
As always let me know your thoughts, opinions and experiences by commenting below.
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