By Marlon Sanders
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It’s exciting to see those first sales come in online.
I’ll never forget.
I lived out of a 600 square foot apartment. Anthony
Robbins and I would have been tight back then. Actually,
though, I was quite proud of where I lived at the time.
I had a little white, wooden desk my friend Kelli had
given me.
I started out pre-www on AOL and Compuserve. I’ve told
some of those stories elsewhere. You didn’t have affiliate
programs back then but you did have “dropship”
arrangements where people would dropship books for you.
Anyway, the FIRST time I broke the $10,000 a year barrier
was when I was buying ads in these little freebie penny
shopper newspapers with classified ads in them.
People would call from the ad into an answering machine.
You didn’t have voice mail then. So I ran 4 or 5 answering
machines with the sales pitch and an offer to send the
book C.O.D.
I ran ads in 72 cities and grossed $12,000 or more.
I had no back end or repeat business, although I did try
sending along a catalog. It just wasn’t related enough to
make sales.
The lessons I learned were:
1. You have to promote in volume.
You need a lot of ads out there. Or resellers and
affiliate running ads. Emails being sent out to lists. Or
links on web sites. You need quite a bit of SOMETHING
working on your behalf.
2. You need a back end related to the front end
My initial sale (front end) was about buying cars dirt
cheap. That would have made for a logical back end. So
here’s what’s fascinating about that.
The late, great Corey Rudl sold $500,000 a year or
something like that of his car secrets book. And he
devised an email he sent 4 days after the sale
automagically that referred people to a few resources.
He made quite a bit of money on that follow up email.
It’s my belief that Corey created the demand for what
later became known as autoresponders. They didn’t exist at
the time. Corey had custom programming that would send
that email 4 days after the sale.
But when people read his course, everyone wanted to do it.
Thus, autoresponders were born.
The point here is that Corey experimented and found
something AFTER the initial sale that people WOULD buy and
it amounted to quite a bit of money.
My little $12,000 a year business would have been a
$50,000 or $100,000 a year business if I had a few things
that sold on the back end.
Here’s a really FASCINATING idea to test out that I heard
on a seminar from Agora master marketer Porter Stansberry.
Porter says to sell people on the back end more of what
they just bought.
In other words, the ONLY thing you know they want to buy
is what they just bought. So sell ‘em more of the same,
just at a higher price with more value.
That’s something I’ve never experimented with. Not in that
precise manner.
Now, since I am the King of Step-By-Step Internet
marketing with all my Dashboards and so forth, it’d just
be wrong to not give you a step-by-step gameplan for going
beyond $10,000 in sales.
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Marlon’s Step-By-Step
Gameplan To Break $10,000 In Sales
==================================
1. Think in terms of multiples
I ran ads in 72 cities. Not one city.
I have thousands of resellers. Not one reseller.
Now, since $10,000 isn’t that much money, you probably
only need 5-10 decent affiliates promoting for you.
2. Get a front-end product that converts
Your affiliates (the best traffic source) are going to
need a product to promote that sells better than ice in
100+ temperatures.
The way you GET your offer to that point is by split
testing. To start with, you can use Google Website
Optimizer to do your testing. When you get more
sophisticated you can do true Taguchi testing, which is an
advanced topic for another day.
If your offer doesn’t convert well, you have a few
options:
a. Try juicing up the offer
– Add new or different bonuses — Experiment with your
deadlines and scarcity — Try a different guarantee
b. Try a new product
Dead ducks don’t quack.
3. Test the living daylights out of your front-end email
sequence
People go to your squeeze page and fork over their email
and possibly their name and email. The current trend is to
ask for email only, since at the moment this gives your
squeeze page success rate a significant bump.
The idea is that you’re going to turn that autoresponder
series into what the oldtimers called a “greased chute.”
You know, people enter your series and you pull out EVERY
trick in the book to get ‘em to buy.
You know, you got flying pigs, dancing cows, offers that
make the eyeballs pop. That sort of thing. This isn’t a
time to be subtle about your USP, your credibility or
other things.
4. Don’t just hammer. Mix in content.
Some people would disagree with this point. They feel it’s
best to send all offers and no content.
Based on my current experience, I recommend mixing in a
good dose of content or quasi content because you’ll
extend the period of time in which people read your
emails.
The question is whether you mix in true content or the
illusion of content. Do you tell Matt Furey style stories?
Do you do your best imitation of John Alanis? Or do you
send “what to do” but not “how to do it” emails?
I mix in good content.
But this is open for experimentation.
By the way, if you don’t know who Matt Furey is or John
Alanis, you’ve not been reading my ezine long and enough
and you don’t own enough of my products! Or you’d know who
they are.
So just hang in there and I’ll get you up to speed.
5. Get at least one back-end offer that converts.
You’re going to need at least one solid back-end offer.
You’ve got to find a way to make it convert. That might
mean doing webinars or teleseminars, either live or
pre-recorded.
It might mean a really long sales letter. In spite of the
common myth that people don’t read long letters, they DO
if they’re buyers. And do you really care about the non
buyers?
If they aren’t in the market for a more extensive solution
to their problem or want, they aren’t going to read the
copy. If they are, they probably will.
6. Look at the back-end offers successfully promoted by
competitors for ideas.
What do they sell? How do they sell it? What are the price
points? You don’t need to reinvent the wheel on this. Do
what you know works and put your own spin on it.
– Do they have a continuity, membership-type program? –
Do they sell a workshop, seminar or some other form of big
ticket? — How do they sell it?
These are things inquiring minds wanna know.
7. Run the numbers
Let’s see, you need to sell 100 products at $100 to bring
in $10,000. That is 8.33 products a month and 2 products a
week.
Just having your offer on ONE marketer’s thank you page
could give you those numbers, or better.
After you get those 100 sales, look at making 100 in 6
months, 3 months or a month by duplicating what already
worked for you.
Now, you need to get 10% of those 100 buyers to upgrade to
a $300-$500 something or the other. $500 x 10 = $5,000.
Then get one or two of those to spend $2,000 for another
$4,000.
8, Stop pre-judging and ACT
One of the biggest obstacles you’ll have is the paralysis
of analysis and just analyzing everything to DEATH! What
you need is more action and less analysis.
Analysis is great. But those who take action rule the
world. Get busy. Create products. Promote. And make bank.
THEN put it on autopilot. See, you put the whole sequence
in the autoresponder and kick back in the Bahamas. Highly
credible naysayers will TRY to convince you the Internet
lifestyle is b.s.
But realize that they have their own agenda, products,
courses and programs to sell.
Autoresponder marketing worked soon as Corey Rudl invented
the basis for it and it STILL works on auto pilot today,
just like it did back then. We all owe more to Corey
Freaking Rudl than hardly anyone knows.
Gurus today don’t even know that because they weren’t in
the Game back then. They don’t know what they don’t know.
Follow the above 8 steps and you WILL crack the $10,000
barrier.
Have fun and go do it.
———————————————————–
Marlon Sanders is the author of “The Amazing Formula That
Sells Products Like Crazy.”
To get on his killer ezine list, to get cheat sheets and all kinds
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