Questions for which I haven't found answers

These are merely my opinions:

1. If you are selling your own product, set up an affiliate program - let your affiliates do the review page - concentrate on a solid sales page for you product that has no external links - just a buy button.

2. There are a ton of made-up abouts pages floating around. You can just do a generic about page without attaching a name, but if you are looking to be an authority you should probably keep it real. I don't know about you, but keeping up multiple online personas isn't my idea of a good up and up business practice.

3. The internet is the wild west and things are constantly changing, so you are correct that a start-up IM businesses will have a hard time creating a business plan with projected earnings. My best advice is to create the plan and a budget and do what you can to make it profitable. Adjust it quarterly as needed. The fact that you'd even make a plan puts you light-years ahead of most people...

I agree with hawaiidave on his 3 points and thought I would give you my 2c. An affiliate program for your information product is the only way you will create a viral aspect around your product. You must remember, traffic+offer = MONEY. Depending on your list and social media efforts combined reflects a large percentage of your marketing efforts.

1. Using your competitors (not really competitors, but marketing partners), you can set up a jv venture with them. JV partners can send an enormous amount of traffic to your offer if the offer is worth their time. I would suggest knowing your specific analytics and track and test everything so you can be specific. For affiliate promotion of their products, you can offer or just join their affiliate program. Most IM will allow you to promote their products. Now, the best way to implement their programs into your promotion is to find products of potential partners that compliment your product. The big idea is to cross-sell those products in your own promotion through upsells. This can be easily done. Just PM if you don't know how to do this.

2. You mention if your product doesn't sell. Back to 1. Test and Track everything and run a small test promotion. If you are interested in launching a product, you could run a product launch (pre-launch videos, launch, post-launch promotions). Monitization is where you will make most of your profit. The most important thing is to make sure you have a market to sell in and that the market is responsive. Target a very specific individual and stay away from generalization.

3. Targeting specific clients: Personally, I do not create seperate identities for myself in my marketing, but rather create a specific client identity. Read that last sentence again. Although I do have many friends who run businesses in many niches under different aliases, some of which are very successful but all in all they may only have one other alias and this mostly falls within the dating niches. Stay yourself and market yourself and you can enter any market as an authority once you are established.

4. Big Dreams - Yes IM is about selling a dream, but there are those who sincerely care about the success of others. They are far and few between, but when you discover them do not disregard their teachings. Hype (AKA Copywriting) is just that. In order to sell anything whether it be online or offline, you must use psychological triggers to build a potential customer to the point to buy from you. Without trust and a display of those fake accounts, you will never make a sell. Word of advice - Do NOT take this route as you will get greedy and in the end not care about the relationship you have with your customers. These are what I label the political gurus. It is about who knows who in that area and they will not work with you unless you follow their rules. Well, that is not owning your own business. That is somebody else telling you how to run your business and ultimately doing it for you by taking control of your marketing. Yes, you will make money, but is it worth it in the end?

5. My philosophy is to offer free informative information to my customers to build that customer relationship aspect of trust and loyalty. Once a client becomes a customer, the playing field changes and I only provide my customers with the knowledge I have aquired, am still aquiring (as we never stop learning), and do everything I can to help in the learning process as well as the sales process. When you truly care about your customers and prove that (not through hype or made up account screen shots), you have a real business that is not only rewarding in your lifestyle, but rewarding in your happiness as well.

I hope that this has provided you with the answers to your questions. If you have any further questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to PM me or visit my site and post a comment with your questions. I look forward to hearing from you!

Your Marketing Comrade,

Johnathan Hayes

I have never understood the obsession with "proof of income" - all of which is easily faked. If you were selling a printed book, offline, you wouldn't expect to include a copy of your business accounts with it - why should online be different.

If you have sound knowledge, good experience and a good product, a well put together sales page should sell - proof of income and fake testimonials are not required. Once your product starts to sell the testimonials WILL come - so will the income.

Hi Quarl421,

Welcome to the forum.

It's good to see that you've got your focus on how to make real sense of your actions within an overall plan - many people don't do this and waste time doing things with no real idea if they'll help.

You can approach this in a similar way to an offline business.

So yes you can do projections - but only once you have done your research to identify the most effective strategies to accessing your market. If you know you have 50 potential partners and will do one JV a week for the first year, you'll quickly get a sense of what results to expect.

People like to think IM is all guess work and trial and error but you don't have to be so vague about it.


The truth is - you don't need all the techy stuff with link wheels, profile links, rss, bookmarks and all that jazz.

The thing that will make the most difference is - understanding your market.

If you have a clear idea who your target audience are and you know you can access enough of them to make selling your products/services achieve your desired goals - it's all about focusing on how to get in front of them.

There are many ways of accessing your market without giving a hoot about trying to compete in organic search results.

It's trendy to talk about SEO like it's some sort of secret weapon to making money online but the truth of it is - it's just one way to do things and not necessarily the best at that.

People tend to focus on seo because you can do it for free and many people getting in to IM don't want to spend money and they don't value their time - so spending hours chasing links makes sense to them.

This is not how you could begin to make a normal business profitable.

There are 4 basic ways to approach getting results that you might want to consider:

1 - Finding people who already have access to your target audience and leveraging that access.

This can be with JVs, paid advertising, ad swaps etc. etc. and these could be via websites, forums, youtube, facebook, yahoo groups, ezines etc.. etc..

2 - Paying for traffic

PPC is hands-down the quickest and most powerful way to get started. You get immediate traffic, you have complete control over it and you can test it to death before spending time and money getting it with other techniques.

3 - Plugging yourself straight into your audience.

Your own youtube channel, twitter, facebook, forums, linkedin etc.. etc... there are a lot of places where you can find people in your niche and communicate with them quickly. Twitter is a classic example as you can find people quickly, get some followers quickly and start building a network of people who are tapped in to your niche. You could put a book on Amazon and in Clickbank to get exposure to affiliates and customers.

4 - Find affiliates who are already marketing to your target audience.

Again, this is about leverage. If you find people promoting related products (you can start with looking at current PPC ads) and give them a no-brainer way to make more money by including your product in their marketing mix.

You don't need anything more than your common sense to do well - no info products or tools needed.

Good luck

Andy

Here are some responses to your questions -

Your Question #1: Yes, you certainly can setup a review site and review your own product along with competitors...this is actually quite a savvy marketing technique, one I have used on occasion and I know others that have built a huge income around this model

Your Question #2: You should have an identity and be consistent - that identity could be made up or it could be real, I have seen both methods work. In the made-up case, chances are you are going to have to come clean as your success grows anyway - but you can go that route in the interim as you build if you want.

Your Question #3: First, treating your business as "Real" means that you do set targets, you do factor in costs as well as revenues, you do plan for growth and how you will scale your business, and you do spend enough time and energy and patience to make it grow. Second, on projecting earnings - with infoproducts it is not really that tough...I like to plan on what my desired income will be from a given market, then I work backwards in terms of a realistic number of units (anywhere from a few hundred to a few dozen depending on the price point and phase of business) and then set a price point that would be required to achieve that end goal...which then brings you back to product planning to figure out how you will achieve those price points.

I often share the example, with our members, of having a $100K goal and a plan to develop a $17 ebook - when we break down the # of units required, it becomes extremely tough (not impossible because I know it has been done,,,but tough). So, instead we factor in a low-end entry product of $17, a mid-range offering (bundled package with videos, membership site or physical manual/home study course) at $197-$397 and a high-end offering around $1K which involves more customization or personal coaching/service. Then we balance sales of these over 12-24-months and get a much more realistic view of what it takes to achieve their goals.

Great questions by the way...getting past these into taking action should be your next priority.

Jeff

Hello Carl.

From a noobie to another,
mine humble experience
only can provide this hint:

For the review sites, it works better when the review includes a top-o-the-tops product, then a more affordable option, then a cheapest one.

If prospects are really interested in the information/service provided, some will check for the first, but mostly will get to the second option.

If you prefer to sell your own product (mainly, because you get a greater piece of the cake), then just over-deliver: put in action some free bonus... differenciate... anything you think will fit