Editor’s Note: This is the fifth in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

The best favor you can do for your­self and your busi­ness is to always focus on one task at a time, and always finish what you start.

How the heck do you do that on the inter­net, when there are dis­trac­tions everywhere you look, and in affi­liate mar­ke­ting… when there are new offers every day ripe for you to promote?

The ans­wer is: if you’re going to pro­mote a new affi­liate offer, write all your emails and blog posts in one sit­ting, before you get bored or dis­trac­ted with another offer.

Sounds inti­mi­da­ting? It doesn’t have to be.

Remem­ber that when you pro­mote someone else’s offer, they tend to give you at least one cut-​​and-​​paste email. Sche­dule it as a future broad­cast and paste it in as-​​is, because time is limited!

If the email they pro­vide is more than a page long, I’ll split it up into two parts and sche­dule the second email to go out a week later.

Once you have those first cou­ple of emails, look at the sales let­ter and see if there are any huge chunks of sales copy you can paste into an email to further pro­mote the offer.

Any decent sales let­ter usually has an inte­res­ting story, a bene­fit list and a fea­ture list… so there’s three more emails right there.

After chec­king out the sales let­ter, I’ll tend to think of one or two things the sales let­ter hadn’t thought of, and I’ll write two quick emails explai­ning each one. Emails don’t have to be long, just a cou­ple of para­graphs will do, with a call-​​to-​​action at the end to get peo­ple to click on your affi­liate link.

And finally, I’ll type up a cou­ple of remin­der emails for peo­ple who might have mis­sed the offer and need to see it again.

Now you have 7 or 8 emails to pro­mote the affi­liate pro­duct. Don’t save them in a text file for later… sche­dule them in your auto­res­pon­der right now to send out a month apart.

Using this tech­ni­que, you can sche­dule over six months of email pro­mo­tion for just one pro­duct, in 10 to 30 minutes.

If you were really moti­va­ted, you could find the hot­test con­ver­ting pro­ducts in your niche (I pre­fer to look at the Click­bank mar­ket­place since those sort by the best pulling offers first) and in one day, fill up your auto­res­pon­der with affi­liate email promotions.

Or simply make it a point to add one new offer to your auto­res­pon­der every Mon­day mor­ning, before you do anything else.

If you have a blog of your own, you only need to write posts and sche­dule them on the same dates the emails get sent out… don’t overthink it.

That’s the key to finishing what you start: work in sprints so you can sche­dule it on a timer and not have to work on that promo, or even think about that promo ever again!

I hope you enjo­yed this series on affi­liate mar­ke­ting. Please leave your com­ments below so I know peo­ple like it and I can write more of these. If you want back-​​issues, here they are!

1. Add Your Own Unique Slant to the Offer.
2. Interview the Originator or Add Your Own Bonuses.
3. Bring Something to the Table: List and Traffic.
4. Invest in Your Business: Don't Ask for Review Copies.
5. Write Affiliate email and Blog Posts in One Sitting.

I know your time is valua­ble so I’ll get right to the point.

Pro­duct owners and affi­lia­tes for the last cou­ple years have lived a happy co-​​dependent exis­tence. In the begin­ning, affi­lia­tes had limi­ted choi­ces. Today, it’s an ocean of opportunity.

The rea­son I’m wri­ting you today is because I feel the industry needs a wake up call.

Here are the problems…

1. Affi­liate mar­ke­ters are beco­ming less depen­dent on pro­duct owners
2. Affi­lia­tes have more choi­ces then ever before
3. Affi­lia­tes have evol­ved with the times but pro­duct owners have not
4. Pro­duct owners are rel­ying too hea­vily on affiliates

Affi­lia­tes Don’t Need You Anymore

In the old days, an affi­liate could simply link to a pro­duct owner and that was enough.

Then over time, more and more affi­liate mar­ke­ters were crea­ted by the pro­duct owners — so many new affi­lia­tes that, in order to start making sales, you had to offer some sort of bonus or incen­tive that no one else was offering.

Now in 2009, you need to go even further than just bonu­ses, because almost everyone’s doing bonu­ses at this point.

To com­pete with the mas­sive amounts of affi­lia­tes, you now have to cap­ture leads from your traf­fic, offer a bonus, and then point the pros­pect to the pro­duct owner.

Don’t for­get that more and more peo­ple every­day are lear­ning that they can sign up as an affi­liate them­sel­ves and buy through their own links.

Affi­lia­tes are now gene­ra­ting their own leads, crea­ting their own offers, and then sen­ding the cus­to­mer to someone else. How long before the affi­liate thinks: “If I’m gene­ra­ting the lead and crea­ting the offer, then why am I sen­ding the cus­to­mer to someone else?”

Basi­cally, to com­pete in today’s world of affi­liate mar­ke­ting, an affi­liate has to do all the same things a pro­duct owner nor­mally does.

Most affi­lia­tes become affi­lia­tes to avoid the res­pon­si­bi­li­ties of a pro­duct owner. You must alle­viate some of the work your affi­lia­tes are having to do or risk losing them or worse gai­ning them as a competitor!

There’s a Net­work On Every Corner

Back in the day, Ama­zon, Click­bank, Linkshare, and a hand­ful of others were the only affi­liate net­works on the scene. Now you’ve got over 32 “major” affi­liate net­works, not to men­tion all the small or start-​​up networks.

It gets worse, too, because new net­works are cons­tantly sprin­ging up and these net­works are offe­ring much more then the typi­cal pro­duct owner.

Inside any one of the 10+ affi­liate net­works that I’m a part of, I’ve got all kinds of affi­liate tools and a dedi­ca­ted affi­liate manager.

The ave­rage pro­duct launcher just scra­pes by with a basic affi­liate pro­mo­tion kit. Ban­ners, emails, key­words, and some links are not enough anymore.

Today, affi­lia­tes need bran­da­ble videos, lan­ding pages, reports, e-​​courses, inter­views, and artic­les… The Inter­net in 2009 is a con­tent beast — your affi­lia­tes need content!

If your eyes are ope­ning and you’re seeing the pro­blems, then you should check out what the adult industry is doing for their affiliates.

The adult industry offers their affi­lia­tes free hos­ting, dedi­ca­ted mana­gers, a plethora of bran­da­ble lan­ding pages, even whole mem­bership sites that the affi­liate can pro­mote the pro­duct owner with.

Inde­pen­dents can beat the big net­works by offe­ring more cus­to­mi­za­tion, uni­que tools, and per­so­nal touch. If they don’t, then they’ll lose their affi­lia­tes. Which actually leads me into the third pro­blem I see happening…

Affi­lia­tes evol­ved and opti­mi­zed their methods for their product-​​owning part­ners. Howe­ver, the pro­duct owners are still offe­ring the same resour­ces they offe­red 4, 5, and 6 years ago. Not only that, but it seems pro­duct owners have got­ten gree­dier and lazier.

Pro­duct Owners Should Be Res­pon­si­ble For Conversions

In this last part, I’m going to speak for myself, and if anyone is fee­ling the same thing they can let me know in the comments.

The other parts I’ve already spo­ken with many other affi­lia­tes so I was com­for­ta­ble spea­king for the majo­rity. This next part could pos­sibly just be a weird fluke I expe­rien­ced and could be totally alone in it.

But I doubt it!

Here goes…

Lately, I have been making some sho­wings in the top 10s of dif­fe­rent joint-​​venture lea­der­boards, which sounds great. Howe­ver, for most of them my con­ver­sions have been almost totally depen­dent on my offe­ring a bonus.

“Wait,” you’re saying, “you make more sales by offe­ring a bonus to your subsc­ri­bers who buy through you?” No!

What I’m saying is, if I don’t offer a bonus, then I don’t make sales. I know because I tried it on the last JV lea­der­board I got on. I was in the top 10 for leads, and then when it came time for sales, I never offe­red a bonus.

Sure enough, I got an egg in my sales column as my reward for that test.

In the pro­duct launch right before that, I offe­red a great bonus and came in top five in sales, making seve­ral thou­sand in com­mis­sions plus win­ning a 52″ flat screen TV.

Here’s my pro­blem though…

I could have just emai­led my list, char­ged for my bonus, made the seve­ral grand myself, and not sha­red my cus­to­mers with the pro­duct owner.

If the pro­duct owner’s sales fun­nel requi­res that the affi­liate offers a bonus in order to make sales…

… Then what does the affi­liate need the pro­duct owner for?

(Read that again.)

I unders­tand there is a “game” to be pla­yed, but this is not the ideal situa­tion for affi­lia­tes. And as a pro­duct owner you want to take care of your affi­lia­tes as best you can. For exam­ple, I’ll never pro­mote for that guy again.

In my eyes, he char­ged too much money for his pro­duct and the price see­med lar­gely based on kno­wing his affi­lia­tes would offer a much big­ger bonus to com­pen­sate for it.

Meanwhile, the affi­liate is only get­ting 50% of reve­nue. Yet the affi­liate is moti­va­ting the crowd, gene­ra­ting the leads, crea­ting the hot offer, and gene­ra­ting the sale…

… While the pro­duct own just crea­ted the product!

Crea­ting the pro­duct is a big piece of the pie, but what I’m saying over and over again, here, is that, if I have to offer such a great bonus in order for your pro­duct to make sales, I might as well just sell my bonus!

More and more of the top affi­lia­tes are get­ting fed up with this.

Lazy launch days are num­be­red because affi­lia­tes are get­ting sick and tired of the pro­duct owners not evol­ving their methods to keep the affi­lia­tes hard work secure.

Here’s a quick solu­tions list so you can easily iden­tify what you need to be doing to make sure your affi­lia­tes are happy.

What You Must Do To Keep Affi­lia­tes Happy

1. You must offer something uni­que to your affi­lia­tes or risk losing them to the networks.
2. You must pro­vide every resource an affi­liate would need to make the sale, inc­lu­ding a variety of dif­fe­rent bonuses.
3. The more you update your affi­lia­tes tools (e.g., emails, videos, reports, lan­ding pages, etc), then the more they will go out and pro­mote those new tools.
4. As your affi­lia­tes’ job requi­re­ments evolve, so should yours as the pro­duct owner to make sure the affi­liate has what’s nee­ded and is doing what’s required.
5. Pro­tect your affi­lia­tes’ com­mis­sions during launches, and make their job as easy as you can — you are the CREATOR, they are the PROMOTER.
6. Never steal from your affi­lia­tes by den­ying com­mis­sions on bac­kend sales, espe­cially during the launch.

I’m not saying I’m the per­fect pro­duct owner, either, since I’m mis­sing a few of these ele­ments in my affi­liate pro­gram myself. Although, you can bet I won’t be let­ting much time go by before I start making sure I have them all.

Thanks for lis­te­ning to my rant. And please post your com­ments and tell me what you think of this situa­tion. I’d love to hear them!

Editor’s Note: This is the third in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

Affi­liate mar­ke­ting is not a “push but­ton solu­tion”… it’s just a dif­fe­rent type of selling than pro­duct launch mar­ke­ting or AdSense marketing.

You are not going to be able to just sign up as an affi­liate to some pro­gram and expect to make money… you have to DO something with that link!

The big for­mula for inter­net mar­ke­ting is:

List + Traf­fic = Offers.

When you sign up for something as an affi­liate, that affi­liate pro­duct or ser­vice is your offer. Once you have that offer, you need a list and you need traf­fic if you ever expect that offer to convert.

You’d be sur­pri­sed at how many peo­ple for­get this step!

For this rea­son, I don’t recom­mend pro­mo­ting affi­liate offers right out of the gate in inter­net mar­ke­ting. Build up a list first, even if it’s built from a small $7 report or a free ethi­cal bribe.

Join list buil­ding givea­ways, place your sig­na­ture link at the bot­tom of your forum posts, com­ment on blogs, leave tes­ti­mo­nials for pro­ducts you own, publish artic­les about your niche… do wha­te­ver you can to get as many eye­balls in your niche in front of that opt-​​in box. Add an e-​​mail subsc­rip­tion box to sites that need it, such as your blog.

Bot­tom line: build a list first, and then send offers to that list once you’ve built up 100 subsc­ri­bers or more. Does that sound like a lot? Okay… then focus on 8 subsc­ri­bers a day.

Do you think that with forum, article, blog, and givea­way mar­ke­ting, that you could get a measly eight subsc­ri­bers in a day? If you can, then keep it up for 12 days and you have your­self 100 subsc­ri­bers pri­med and ready to receive your affi­liate offers.

Editor’s Note: This is the second in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

As someone who runs affi­liate pro­grams for over 50 of my own pro­ducts, I can tell you 99% of affi­lia­tes are worthless.

They’ll sig­nup and send no traf­fic, or send traf­fic and only bring in a cou­ple of sales. What’s the com­mon thread behind all these affi­liate fai­lu­res I see again and again? It comes in two parts: not making an effort, and not brid­ging their mai­ling list to your offer.

I would be thri­lled if an affi­liate came to me and said:

“I want to inter­view you for 20 minu­tes about (a topic directly rela­ted to both our pro­ducts and skills). My list con­tains (size of list) subsc­ri­bers, and the last offer I pro­mo­ted con­ver­ted at (this per­cen­tage) and brought in (this amount of sales). I’ll record the inter­view, con­vert it into down­loa­da­ble form and get it out to my subsc­ri­bers within 24 hours, with a link back to your offer with me as the affi­liate, at the end of the inter­view. What’s a good time for me to call you up?”

Do you see all the points this e-​​mail hit?

Most impor­tant: this affi­liate already brings in results. He has a decent sized list, already had a pre­vious suc­cess pro­mo­ting affi­liate offers in this niche. He’s doing most of the work: he chose the topic, he will be inter­vie­wing you, calling you, and recor­ding the call.

He’s also going to take imme­diate action once the inter­view is finished, and pro­mote this offer to his subsc­ri­bers within 24 hours.

When you inter­view the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor with you as the affi­liate, it shows that you care about giving your subsc­ri­bers a good offer, and not just cut­ting and pas­ting the e-​​mail he gave you.

It shows you have an “in” with the ori­gi­na­tor so if your buyers aren’t get­ting sup­port or need a refund, they can get to that per­son through you… they trust the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor because they trust you.

Finally, it simply injects your per­so­na­lity into the offer. This offer isn’t being made by some outside source, it’s from you and the ori­gi­na­tor at the same time.

If the ori­gi­na­tor isn’t avai­la­ble or you just don’t want to go the inter­view route, offer one of your pro­ducts as a bonus to that affi­liate offer, that way it’s a blen­ded offer.

If your subsc­ri­bers trust you but don’t trust the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor, they can still order from the ori­gi­na­tor with con­fi­dence… because if that pro­duct doesn’t deli­ver in value, your bonus will.

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of five quick affi­liate tips by guest blog­ger Robert Plank. Videos of each are also pos­ted at the end of this article. Enjoy!
– Michel Fortin

Stop being so lazy with affi­liate marketing!

An affi­liate pro­gram is where you can link to someone else’s offer with your spe­cial ID and get paid com­mis­sion every sale you make. This pro­cess “seems” really hands-​​off and easy because there’s no pro­duct crea­tion or cus­to­mer sup­port invol­ved… just send traf­fic to a pro­ven offer!

Here’s the problem.

Most mar­ke­ters are lazy and don’t rea­lize that affi­liate mar­ke­ting has its own disad­van­ta­ges. It’s tougher to build a list using affi­liate mar­ke­ting, tough to con­vert and split test, and you have to devote most of your effort to pre-​​selling and mar­ke­ting that affi­liate product.

What the heck do you need to know about affi­liate mar­ke­ting in order to pull in decent results?

If you’re serious about affi­liate mar­ke­ting, setup a squeeze page that gets peo­ple on a mai­ling list first and redi­rects to the affi­liate offer. Send traf­fic to that page using forum posts and articles.

Even if they don’t buy right away, you can keep broad­cas­ting to that list every day with remin­ders about bene­fits for that offer… things they might have mis­sed or even things you thought about the ven­dor didn’t.

For exam­ple, once I pro­mo­ted an affi­liate offer about how to create iPhone apps and I wrote a quick follow-​​up asking peo­ple… what if you thought of eBay or AdWords before anyone else? What if you regis­te­red even one or two English-​​word domain names like Busi​ness​.com or About​.com before anyone else? What would those be worth today?

What’s great about this is the pro­duct ori­gi­na­tor prac­ti­cally wrote your e-​​mails for you. You can copy huge chunks of the sales let­ters and add them as e-​​mail follow-​​ups… then add a call-​​to-​​action at the end of the e-​​mail so peo­ple can click your affi­liate link to get back to the page.

Even if they don’t buy that offer, you can even­tually hit them with a dif­fe­rent but rela­ted affi­liate offer as well.

It ticks me off when peo­ple spend too much time on headshots, graphics, and other name recog­ni­tion devi­ces when they should be focu­sing more on web sites that actually make money!

Bran­ding is one of the last things you should worry about — so if you really want to get to the point where you’re wor­king on bran­ding to get that extra 5 per­cent boost in sales, get through these steps first…

The big for­mula is: List + Traf­fic = Offers.

Step 1: Choose Your Niche and Skill Level.

A niche is an area of exper­tise like copyw­ri­ting, stress relief, PHP, article wri­ting, etc., and a skill level is how you will turn that exper­tise into a ship­pa­ble pro­duct. A skill level might mean free­lance pro­jects, affi­liate mar­ke­ting, or site building.

Before you do anything you need to know what your area of exper­tise is. Every­body has one, because every­body has read books, had a favo­rite job, had a favo­rite sub­ject in school, subsc­ribe to cer­tain niches of magazines.

If this is your first time choo­sing a niche, make it a skill you can prove. If you haven’t made any money online, don’t make your niche the “make money online” niche!

Not only that, you need to make up your mind about what your offer will be. If you are brand new, choo­sing free­lan­cing since that is how you will make some quick money.

You might be an article wri­ter for your niche, create videos, make graphics, write auto­res­pon­ders or copy — but it needs to be limi­ted to your niche so that you can esta­blish your­self as an “expert” in that niche and charge more.

Maybe some­day you can move onto site buil­ding, affi­liate pro­mo­tions or even your own pro­ducts, but don’t make that leap until you have some free­lan­cing expe­rience under your belt.

Step 2: Create a Squeeze Page.

Pre­sent an ethi­cal bribe to sign-​​up to a mai­ling list so you can start follo­wing up with pros­pects about your future offers.

This means you’ll have to sign up for an auto­res­pon­der like Awe­ber and paste the sign-​​up code to a very sim­ple HTML page that also lists a cou­ple of quick bene­fits explai­ning why they should get this infor­ma­tion in the first place.

You do this to get peo­ple on a list, so you can send them offers later. These offers aren’t neces­sa­rily pro­ducts but could be entire sales for sale or your free­lance services.

You don’t even need to create the content.

Find the 7 best artic­les in your niche and grab them off article sites, lea­ving the byli­nes and resource boxes intact so the wri­ter still gets cre­dit. Com­pile all those artic­les into a Word docu­ment, put your con­tact info at the begin­ning and end of the book, espe­cially if you are going the free­lance route.

Then con­vert the Word doc to a PDF using either Mic­ro­soft Word 2007, Ope­nOf­fice or a free online tool (you can Goo­gle search for many great “doc to pdf converters”).

Step 3: Fill Your Follow-​​up Sequence With 7 Offers.

This might be 7 more artic­les in your niche and set them as e-​​mail follow-​​ups spa­ced 3 weeks apart. This will keep the leads fresh, and ready for when you have offers for them.

Do you offer free­lan­cing article wri­ting in a cer­tain niche? Your offer then might be that three slots have ope­ned up at a spe­cial price. Or the offer might simply be an affi­liate pro­gram you are pro­mo­ting in that niche for peo­ple who want to pay for the even bet­ter information.

Step 4: Create Spe­cial Offers, an Affi­liate Pro­gram, and Joint Ventures.

Here is the fun part. Now that you have made a cou­ple of sales, you can offer spe­cial deals to your list and repeat customers.

Maybe you want to order a “rush order” option to your article wri­ting ser­vi­ces so for 50% more, peo­ple can get their artic­les from you in half the time. Maybe you’ll give a 30 minute telephone con­sul­ta­tion to each per­son on your list who buys a par­ti­cu­lar pro­duct through your affi­liate link.

Next, you’ll want to setup your OWN affi­liate pro­gram. Most peo­ple think that an affi­liate pro­gram means you offer an e-​​book for sale, peo­ple refer traf­fic, and get a com­mis­sion. But you can also offer an affi­liate pro­gram for your free­lance work!

Just get an account with an affi­liate pro­ces­sor like Click­bank, setup a pitch page explai­ning your ser­vi­ces, a pay­ment but­ton where peo­ple can pay you for ser­vi­ces. Now you’ve given your friends and busi­ness part­ners a rea­son to pro­mote your ser­vi­ces — because they get a cut of the profits!

Take affi­lia­tes to the next level — find joint ven­ture part­ners. Co-​​host an inter­view or webi­nar to pro­vide con­tent (with a link back to your web site).

Con­tri­bute to their con­tent by giving them a ridea­long pro­duct (a report of yours they can bundle with their paid pro­duct). Write a guest blog post.

Create a spe­cial offer just for that joint ven­ture that they can place on their thank you page after they’ve made a sale, where they can get com­mis­sion. Basi­cally, cus­to­mize an offer for them and make it as plug-​​and-​​play as possible.

Step 5: Brand Your­self.

Once you’ve got your niche and skill level, squeeze page to build a list, offers, affi­liate pro­gram and joint ven­ture part­ners, it’s finally time to esta­blish your brand.

But it’s not as hard as you think. If the domain name with your name is avai­la­ble, for exam­ple, Michel​For​tin​.com, regis­ter that domain name and add a blog to it.

You don’t have to make a big deal about your blog. To be honest, for the first few months I had only my resume on my blog. Later on I added a cou­ple of artic­les, but it’s not worth your time until you get some traffic.

Let’s recap…

• Step 1: Choose your niche (copyw­ri­ting, stress, blog­ging, etc.) and your skill level (free­lan­cing, affi­liate offers, site buil­ding, your own products)
• Step 2: Get an auto­res­pon­der, and add a squeeze page using a report com­pi­led from free artic­les as an ethi­cal bribe. Then use even more artic­les as follow-​​up messages.
• Step 3: Create seven offers for this list which might be affi­liate pro­grams, your own report for sale, a site for sale, or even your ser­vi­ces for sale.
• Step 4: Create an affi­liate pro­gram and joint ven­ture sys­tem to reward peo­ple for sen­ding traf­fic over.
• Step 5: Regis­ter Your​Name​.com if it’s avai­la­ble, add your pic­ture and post a cou­ple of your articles.

That’s all you need to know about branding.

Yes­ter­day, Ed Dale posted an article to his blog that kind of struck me. In it, Ed sub­mits that hard-​​sell mar­ke­ting is bet­ter than soft-​​sell, even when peo­ple are jaded and anno­yed with such aggres­sive approaches.

If you think I’m saying this because I pre­fer soft-​​sell approaches, think again.

The rea­son it struck me is that, and with all due res­pect to Ed, his post may be a tad misleading.

I agree with the fact that peo­ple today are anno­yed, jaded, and even frus­tra­ted when buying pro­ducts online — spe­ci­fi­cally, pro­ducts in the Inter­net mar­ke­ting industry. But I don’t think peo­ple are anno­yed with hard-​​sell mar­ke­ting at all.

They’re anno­yed with something else enti­rely.

Before I dive in, please unders­tand that Ed Dale and I are friends.

In fact, when Ed pos­ted about his recent deci­sion to dump all his friends on Facebook and pro­mote a “fan page” ins­tead, not only was I one of the first ones to agree with him and applaud him, but also I follo­wed in his footsteps.

My com­ments here have nothing to do with Ed Dale as a per­son or even as a mar­ke­ter. They are strictly my opi­nions on the stra­tegy he poin­ted out and appa­rently endorsed.

First, to put this in pro­per con­text, let me quote a few pas­sa­ges from Ed’s article…

It’s a bit sim­plis­tic to desc­ribe like this but it’s the online equi­va­lent of “Do you want Fries with that”

Now here’s the thing. Some peo­ple get SUPER anno­yed when (inc­rea­singly a baby boo­mer) McDo­nalds ser­ver asks this question.

Your like, “Dude, if I wan­ted the Fries with that, I would have orde­red them!!!!”

If this is sooo anno­ying — why do they keep doing it?

IT WORKS.

It works really, really well.

Really, Really, Really, Really with sugar on top well.

“Upse­lling” and “Down­se­lling” (as we say in the biz ) works (…).

First off, I totally agree with this statement.

If you’ve been around this blog for some time, you’ve pro­bably seen my wife’s video on Upsells, Downsells, And One-Time Offers in which she desc­ri­bes the process.

Upse­lling is not only an impor­tant aspect of mar­ke­ting and par­ti­cu­larly Inter­net mar­ke­ting, but it’s also one that so many mar­ke­ters fail to capi­ta­lize on. Mar­ke­ters are lea­ving an insane load of cash on the table by not asking their cus­to­mers to buy more.

Some of our stu­dents have lite­rally dou­bled and even tri­pled their income by simply adding an upsell offer to their sales fun­nel, which took only minu­tes to implement.

Jay Abraham, one of the world’s most pro­li­fic mar­ke­ting experts, is often quo­ted as saying there are only three ways to inc­rease your business.

1. Inc­rea­sing the number,
2. Inc­rea­sing the frequency,
3. Or inc­rea­sing the size of purchases.

The first one invol­ves get­ting new clients. That’s just good old mar­ke­ting. You want to find new, hungry pros­pects who will buy your pro­ducts for the first time.

The second is new purcha­ses from the same client base. It’s making follow-​​up and addi­tio­nal offers to your current cus­to­mers, and get­ting them to keep buying from you.

The last part is the one peo­ple often miss the boat on. It’s upse­lling, where you get peo­ple to buy more or inc­rease the size of their orders as they are buying from you.

Sim­ple enough, right?

The spe­ci­fic issue I have with Ed’s article is not the pre­mise but the ana­logy he used. Upse­lling is indeed akin to a McDonald’s ser­ver asking, “Do you want fries with that?” And it’s cer­tainly something we should incor­po­rate in our offers.

I also agree with Ed that the mar­ket is defi­ni­tely anno­yed and jaded.

But the issue I have is that the mar­ket is not anno­yed with upsells as Ed Dale seems to imply. It’s anno­yed with the type of upsell offers, which has more to do with withhol­ding your customer’s order than it is with just asking them to buy more.

Huge dif­fe­rence, here.

For exam­ple, my wife wrote Internet Marketing Sins a few months ago, in which she covers 15 of the most egre­gious sins per­pe­tra­ted by online mar­ke­ters. In it, she covers this par­ti­cu­lar sin in great detail in a chap­ter entit­led “Upsell Hell.”

(I pre­fer to call it “Upsell Jail,” because that is pre­ci­sely what it feels like when one stum­bles onto an offer of this kind. You feel hel­plessly loc­ked in, una­ble to break out.)

As my wife noted so well, the issue is about hol­ding the cus­to­mer — i.e., their cre­dit card infor­ma­tion, their money, and yes, even their order — hostage.

The pro­cess works this way.

A cus­to­mer comes to a web­site, reads the copy, and deci­des to buy the pro­duct. She clicks on the order but­ton, fills in the cre­dit card details, and sub­mits the order form.

But before acces­sing the pro­duct she just orde­red, she’s pre­sen­ted with an upsell offer.

She’s a bit anno­yed, but it’s sha­do­wed by the fact that she’s quite exci­ted about her ori­gi­nal order. So she takes the time to read the addi­tio­nal offer, deci­des she’s not inte­res­ted, and clicks on “no thanks” (hope­fully, when such an option exists).

The pro­cess so far is not that bad. But here’s the rub…

If she stum­bles onto an offer by some very aggres­sive mar­ke­ter, things unfor­tu­na­tely don’t stop there. Before she can access or down­load her pro­duct, even before she recei­ves a con­fir­ma­tion that her pay­ment went through suc­cess­fully, she’s hit with another upsell offer. And then another, and another, and another.

In some cases, we’re tal­king three, five, eight, even 10 upsell offers or more!

Anno­ying? You bet!

Again, the issue has nothing to do with making an upsell offer. If it were me, I would have made the offer before the cus­to­mer ente­red their cre­dit card details (it’s no dif­fe­rent than adding a pro­duct to a shop­ping cart), or after they’ve reached the con­fir­ma­tion page.

But to force a cus­to­mer to wade through a barrage of upsell offers while hol­ding their order — and their money — hos­tage is, in my opi­nion, the real pro­blem, here.

Think about it.

The cus­to­mer purcha­sed your pro­duct after they have built up enough trust and con­fi­dence in you to buy what you ori­gi­nally offe­red. They pro­bably took a long time to read your copy, perhaps even watched your video, loo­ked you up on the web, and, with exci­te­ment mixed with a bit of tre­pi­da­tion, deci­ded to go ahead.

Howe­ver, when you hit them over the head again and again with a flurry of upsell offers, there’s no ques­tion the con­su­mer will doubt you, get anno­yed, never buy from you again, even hate you, or worse yet, tell others about you.

As I said at the begin­ning of this post, I’m a fan of aggres­sive mar­ke­ting. I believe that you must ask for the order, and ask for it as many times as pos­si­ble. In fact, I don’t mind mar­ke­ters who are even more aggres­sive than I am.

But the sen­ti­ment some of these mar­ke­ters share is what sca­res me somewhat.

Most of these aggres­sive mar­ke­ters don’t care. Why? Because during these huge, mega-​​launches, these “drive-​​by” mar­ke­ters only intend to sell one-​​hit pro­ducts (i.e., not ever­green, long-​​term pro­ducts with sus­tai­na­ble growth).

Their sole aim is to milk as many pros­pects as pos­si­ble for all they can during a finite period of time. Sadly, some of them don’t even care if their cus­to­mers ever buy again.

As one mar­ke­ter called it, it’s a “churn and burn” mentality.

Admit­tedly, one rea­son may be because many of these mar­ke­ters offer con­ti­nuity pro­grams, which on the sur­face may appear as a long-​​term stra­tegy. (Howe­ver, some con­ti­nuity offers are for­ced in the bac­kend of the same, huge launches.)

Plus, many of their pro­ducts are indeed of high qua­lity and very good.

But another ana­logy that comes to mind is that of snake oil sales­men. The para­llel is osten­sibly there. Snake oil sales­men drive into town, sell their entire lot as fast as they can, and skip town as soon as they’re done.

In fact, this brings me to another issue Ed brought up in his post. Ed said this…

Yet in this so called “depres­sed” (more on this in a minute) eco­nomy — Inter­net Mar­ke­ting stuff is being sold at RECORD numbers.

Record num­bers?

Yes, if you want to count unit sales. And during mega-​​launches where ever­yone and their neighbor’s pet parrot is emai­ling you with the same offer, it’s no won­der that such sales incur huge, record-​​breaking numbers.

But in this case, as it is in many cases of late, the offer is cheap or even free — the pur­pose being to force peo­ple onto a con­ti­nuity pro­gram. Let’s not for­get affi­liate com­mis­sions for the launch and on the recu­rring income afterwards.

So record-​​breaking sales doesn’t neces­sa­rily trans­late into record-​​breaking profits.

(That’s a whole dif­fe­rent issue for another day, although I must add that some mar­ke­ters are overt and clear about their bac­kend con­ti­nuity offers. They may be for­ced con­ti­nuity, which is per­fectly fine, but they’re not hid­den or slip­ped under the radar.)

So the num­bers are there, I agree.

Howe­ver, what about long-​​term, resi­dual income? What about Jay Abraham’s point #2, “fre­quency of purcha­ses?” Well, that’s a non-​​issue for many mar­ke­ters because their clients are for­ced onto a con­ti­nuity pro­gram, anyway.

But will they buy more from the same mar­ke­ter? Of their own volition?

Maybe. Maybe not.

But I dare­say, reten­tion of their ini­tial order, if these mar­ke­ters don’t go out of their way to coddle those cus­to­mers suf­fi­ciently, or at least offer exce­llent — not ave­rage or above ave­rage, but truly exce­llent — con­tent, will likely suffer.

So when some mar­ke­ters pur­port to make millions with their sales on launch day, are they actually tal­king about gross reve­nue? Or are they tal­king about unit sales or their pre­dic­ted reve­nue over the long term based on 100% reten­tion of their new customers?

Something to think about.

As Frank Kern’s grand­father once said to him (from a pre­sen­ta­tion Frank gave at a semi­nar) when he used to work in his grandfather’s used-​​car busi­ness, after Frank was all exci­ted about a sale he made that wasn’t quite finalized…

“It ain’t sold ’til you got the money!”

Finally, let me come back to the ana­logy Ed Dale made. To me, asking “Want fries with that?” is a wrong ana­logy. A bet­ter one is, after you asked for a bur­ger the ser­ver says:

“A bur­ger? Sure, that’s $3.00.” (You hand over a $20 bill.) The ser­ver, hol­ding your bur­ger in one hand and your $20 in the other, continues:

“Now that you’ve given me $20, how about fries with that? No? How about an apple pie? No? Then how about an extra bur­ger for only half off, and you bet­ter decide now because this is the only time I’m making you this spe­cial offer!”

Remem­ber, you’re hungry. You paid for the bur­ger. You see the ser­ver hol­ding both your change and your bur­ger, almost taun­ting you. Natu­rally, you’re get­ting anno­yed by now. Just when you think you’re finally get­ting your food, the ser­ver quips:

“OK then, I know you’re hungry, but before I give you your bur­ger and your change back, may I inte­rest you in our burger-​​of-​​the-​​month club?”

Can you see the frustration?

So when a mar­ke­ter says, “It works!” I cringe. Why? Because they’re using results — spe­ci­fi­cally, they’re using super­fi­cial, short term, prediction-​​based, best-​​case-​​scenario results — to jus­tify their mar­ke­ting efforts.

Well, of course it works! It’s no dif­fe­rent than saying “Want money? Go rob a bank! Why? Because it works!” Need­less to say, when you hold someone hos­tage at gun point asking for their money, you bet that it works.

Now, I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say:

“But Michel, isn’t your ana­logy extreme and just as far off as the fast-​​food one?”

Sure, my ana­logy may be a little extreme. What some of these mar­ke­ters do may be enti­rely legal and, unlike a bank rob­bery, no one can get phy­si­cally hurt.

But when it comes to the ethics of the thing, it’s not that much dif­fe­rent. Because, while it may be legal, saying that “it works” when it has no choice but to work because you’re for­cing it to, then it’s not so far off the mark.

In short, it may be legal but it doesn’t neces­sa­rily mean it’s right.

Plus, the bank ana­logy is dead-​​on in other ways, too. For exam­ple, unless that bank’s secu­rity has been rein­for­ced, con­su­mer con­fi­dence res­to­red, and the bank rob­ber apprehen­ded, chan­ces are those con­su­mers will never go back to that bank.

They’ll likely close their accounts and take their money elsewhere.

When you sell anything on the inter­net… whether you do it using e-​​mail mar­ke­ting, forum mar­ke­ting, blog pos­ting… if you sell e-​​books, phy­si­cal pro­ducts, e-​​classes, even a news­let­ter… the best way to sell anything is using direct res­ponse sales copy.

But not all of us can be world-​​class copyw­ri­ters like Michel For­tin. I con­si­der myself a pretty sloppy copyw­ri­ter, and althought I can whip up a head­line, quick story, bullet point list of bene­fits, test­mo­nials, fea­ture list, gua­ran­tee and a call-​​to-​​action… I will never be a great copyw­ri­ter.  Gary Hal­bert can’t hold my atten­tion for lon­ger than a few minu­tes, I’ve never read Scien­ti­fic Adver­ti­sing, so how do I scrape by wri­ting ave­rage sales copy?

The ans­wer is: prac­tice and resour­ces. I’ve writ­ten enough sales let­ters that I know what my audience wants and how I can pre­sent it to them to maxi­mize sales.  I rarely spend more than a cou­ple of hours wri­ting even 5 or 10 page sales let­ters, and some have con­ver­ted as high as 19 per­cent for me.

Even if you don’t have the skill or the prac­tice, you can still hit the follo­wing sites to pro­duce an ave­rage sales let­ter, enough for a copyw­ri­ter to rew­rite it or cri­ti­que it.

Site #1: Digg​.com
As far as I’m con­cer­ned, Digg is THE best place to find niche head­li­nes from popu­lar, spe­ci­fic and benefit-​​oriented, but funny news items.  Go to Digg​.com, type in your niche key­word and click Search.  Then refine the search to search by the title only (so your key­word is in the title), show all sto­ries (not just front page sto­ries), and sort by most diggs (so the news items “the peo­ple” like float right to the top).  Using the Digg tech­ni­que, I hel­ped a copyw­ri­ter come up with this head­line: “Man Wins Divorce Without a Law­yer In Sight!”  Makes you want to find out more, right?

Site #2: Hard​To​Fin​dAds​.com
Michael Senoff’s Hard to Find Ads is like an ins­tant swipe file.  He shows you ran­dom ads, most of them deca­des old, writ­ten by the most famous and best con­ver­ting copyw­ri­ters that ever lived.  You can take cle­ver head­li­nes, ideas and bullet points from these ads and rew­rite them as your own.

For exam­ple, the first ad I found reads like this: “Top Medi­cal Doc­tor Speaks Out!  An Open Let­ter to Anyone Who Wants to Lose Up to 20 Pounds in Two Weeks the Easy Way.”  If you were wri­ting copy for gro­wing orga­nic toma­toes, you might say: “Top Orga­nic Gar­de­ner Speaks Out!  An Open Let­ter to Anyone Who Wants to Grow 15 Pounds of Toma­toes in 8 Weeks the Easy Way.”  Obviously you’d change the num­bers to wha­te­ver you can prove, but that head­line is bet­ter than anything I could come up with from scratch.

Site #3: Ama​zon​.com
Amazon.com isn't just for buying books. You can use Ama­zon to find out seve­ral things: what KINDS of books in your niche are hot sellers right now.  You can also choose the top selling books and most of the time take a peek at the table of con­tents.  Bingo, ins­tant list of bullet points you can hit on with the sales let­ter.  Ama­zon also gives you a list of key­words rela­ted to that book, to give you even more ideas for bonus reports, videos, and emo­tio­nal hot but­tons.  If all that wasn’t enough, you can read through reviews of the book and make a note of the ter­mi­no­logy peo­ple in that niche tend to use.

Site #4: Archive​.org
Look at one of your com­pe­ti­tors’ sites in your niche.  Then look their site up on the Internet Wayback Machine to see how their page has chan­ged over time.  The other day I was watching the TV show “Mad Men” about adver­ti­sers in the 1960’s.  In one epi­sode, the men in the ad agency are tal­king about a maga­zine ad by Volks­wa­gen.  The ad was ugly, and the car was ugly, and the guys were baf­fled because Volks­wa­gen kept pla­cing the same ad… so it must be pulling in money!

This is the inter­net equi­va­lent of that.  If you know a site pulls in lots of sales, and it was writ­ten by a copyw­ri­ter who tests the head­line, phra­sing, bullet points, call-​​to-​​action, offer, and so on… you can open up the web page as it looks now, and the web page as it loo­ked 6 months or a year ago, and see what chan­ges have been made.  If a copyw­ri­ter kept twea­king the head­line over time but kept switching back to one in par­ti­cu­lar, you know it’s a money-​​maker and you can look at what makes it such a great headline.

Site #5: Goo­gle Ans­wers, Goo­gle Alerts, and (Your Niche) Forums
These sites “should” be a no-​​brainer for any copyw­ri­ter, but so few peo­ple pay atten­tion to them and as a result write very “flat” copy.  When you’re selling something, you’re selling a solu­tion, which means you’ve fixing a pro­blem.  Peo­ple are in pain whether that pain means not having enough money, gro­wing tiny toma­toes or not being able to play the piano.  Look at what ques­tions peo­ple are asking in question-​​and-​​answer sites like Google Answers and in the forums in your niche by searching for your niche key­word plus the word “forum.”

Site #6: Goo­gle Insights, Goo­gle AdWords, Yahoo! Search Mar­ke­ting, Quantcast

Can you tell I’m a fan of Goo­gle?  The fact is, simply searching for your key­word in a search engine and seeing what ads appear on the right side is the per­fect way to see what head­li­nes pull the best.  That’s the most logi­cal place to go and works won­ders com­pa­red to pulling out a head­line or a hook from thin air.

With those six free resour­ces at your dis­po­sal, you have finally run out of excu­ses.  You can write half­way decent copy for your next promo e-​​mail, blog post, or sales let­ter just by seeing what great copy is out there, and “cop­ying” it!

One of our Twitter friends asked this question:

Q: “What’s the dif­fe­rence bet­ween a one-​​time offer (OTO) and an upsell? I was taught they were the same thing, and if you can re-​​educate us on the sub­ject, I’m all for that!”

A: We thought that was a great ques­tion because the dif­fe­ren­ces are some­ti­mes very subtle and easy to con­fuse. So we deci­ded to record a brief video and do a direct com­pa­ri­son bet­ween them, as well as shed some light on how down­sells work.

Please unders­tand this is our pers­pec­tive, and it’s enti­rely pos­si­ble that your pers­pec­tive will vary. We wel­come your com­ments and value your opi­nions, so please share them in the com­ments below.

Don’t for­get to down­load your free copy of Internet Marketing Sins if you haven’t already done so.

If you’ve ever been stuck in “upsell hell,” then you need to read it. It also helps shed light on how to make upsells and one-​​time offers work much bet­ter for both you and your customers!

Wel­come to Mar­ke­ters Board. Recently, a mem­ber of one of our coaching groups asked this very inte­res­ting question:

Q: “Have you seen Google’s new Search Wiki? Are you aware of this? Using this? Pro­mo­ting this?”

A: Google’s new Search Wiki allows you to con­tri­bute your input and review based on search engine results. But this is something that’s rela­ti­vely new. We do not pur­port to be SEO spe­cia­lists, but with a little com­mon sense this is huge!

So we deci­ded that the best way to ans­wer this ques­tion is to record a brief video and show you how it works — and how you can use it to your advantage.

What do you think? Do you think it’s going to even­tually affect search engine results? Goo­gle has neither con­fir­med nor denied it, but why wait? This could become an area that may poten­tially affect our search engine rankings.