When I say content, I am referring to things like blog posts, written content, video content, etc.

1 – bonding – this is content you create that conveys a message of “I understand your problem and have been where u are”

2 – social proof – this type of content contains quotes, pictures, stories, etc. From others who have had success using your product.

3 – sample – a sampling of what I sell. A teaser video. A part of the actual product for sale. Some great piece of how to content, but just enough to wet the appetite of your potential customer.

4 – trust and authority – proof you are an expert or that you are trustworthy. This covers your credentials, your background, the story of why you created this product (the problem it solved for you)

Number 3 above also helps with this, because if the sample is really helpful, you have just become a trustworthy. authority.

5 – blueprint- layout of the exact steps that your product covers, but not the “how to” of the steps.

These 5 categories are great classifications of free content you can create that is useful and interesting that will keep readers/viewers interested and also help persuade them to order.

If you like having a definite plan, this will be for you. Hey, even experienced pilots go through a checklist on every flight even though they have done it thousands of times.

This checklist is not static, meaning it changes over time. If I find a better way to do a step, I will add it into my checklist.

Here are the steps. I copied and pasted it and left the “X” marks so you can see how I go through the list. When I complete a step, I just go back and X it out

Website Setup Checklist:

Domain name   X
layout(salesfunnel- optimize press or blog-thesis/genesis/etc.) X
header image X
favicon X
analytics (piwik/GA) X
lead mailing list (aweber) X
Opt-in form

thank you pages

1. lead opt-in thank you page X
2. sale thank you page

content X
monetization methods X

1. advertising areas
2. contextual advertising
3. affiliate products

link tracking (affiliate tracker plugin)

I will go over the parts of the checklist.

1 – Domain:
This goes without saying. You have to have a domain for your website. I get all my domains from namecheap.

They are cheap, like their name says and you can just about always find a coupon code online to get even a little more savings on the domain name.

I like their control panel. It’s easy to use and let’s me go in and point the DNS servers of my new domain to my webhost very quickly.

2 – Layout:
Now, I decide on a layout for the website/blog. First, I have to decide on the tool I will use. That depends on what type of website it is.

If it is a sales funnel website, I use optimizepress which is literally a theme where you can go in and create your sales funnels in a systematic fashion as well. There is hardly a tool I like more than optimizepress

If it is a content website or blog, I will usually use the thesis theme to run the site.

3 – Header Image:
Some sites heave just a picture going across the entire top of the site as the header. Some have a logo. Some even just have words. Both thesis and optimize press let you add an image as a header with a couple of clicks. I actually create just about all of my headers in ipages.

4 – Favicon:
The little picture you see at the top of the browser window. Essentially a small logo. I just find the image I want and take a screenshot that is approximately square. A few clicks to upload with the themes I mentioned above.

5 – Analytics:
You have to track things. Otherwise you’re just taking guesses. Most guesses are usually wrong. I like to use Piwik and install it on my server. Of course there is always google analytics as well.

On a blog, I enter the analytics code once in the Thesis control panel and it appears on every page. The only time I have to have the code different is when I am checking conversions. Such as opt-in rates or sales. If I am using optimizepress, I will add the code manually to the pages. There is a section for that on every page. Funnels are all about conversions to I need the code to be different on the “thank you” pages. Plus funnels, whether they are sales funnels or lead funnels, usually, do not contain a large number of pages.

6 – Leads Mailing List
For just about every site or blog I can think of, I always have a mailing list. In fact, it may help to think of the blog as nothing more that bait to grow your mailing list.

You must have a way to manage your mailing list or you are missing out. Aweber is a wonderful service for this. You create a “leads” mailing list.

6.1 – Opt in Form:
You have to create a form so people can enter their email address and sign up for your mailing list. There are numerous ways to do this. Aweber has a “wizard” which will walk you through the process (the best I’ve seen anywhere frankly). Another way is the way I do it. I combine Aweber’s form creator with optimize press because I like they typography and look of their forms. I’ll explain exactly how I do that in another post. (join the mailing list to be notified when that post is made)

6.2 – Thank you pages
To keep track of your conversion rate (the percentage of people that take the action you want them to take on that page) you need a thank you page for each opt-in form you have. If you sell your own products directly, then you also need to have a “sale” thank you page. These pages get your analytics code with some slight modifications.

7 – Content:
Are you making it yourself, compiling it from other sources, hiring others to create it, etc?

8 – Monetization Methods:
Are you selling your own products? Are you going to rely on affiliate commissions for revenue? Maybe you are going to rely on contextual advertising. Maybe a combination of all 3.

9 – Link tracking:
A way to keep track of your links to monetization so you know what is working, and what’s not. You can use a wordpress plugin for this

10 – Stat Tracking Chart:
I create a spreadsheet to keep track of the numbers for the website. Conversion rates, revenue, etc. I might compile are review the numbers once a week or once a month. Then I can see what’s working, what’s not and make changes.

Extras:

Analytics Code:

I like to put the main analytics code at the bottom of my tracking chart. This way it is always handy without me having to log back into an account to get it again if I need to.

Funnels:
I like to write out the steps to all the funnels of my sites. This way if I make a change, I know all the parts of the funnel that need to be changed.

If you have a blog with 1 main opt-in form your funnel may consist of only 2 pages. The opt-in form and the thank you page. But, maybe you want to sandwich an offer between the opt-in and the thank you page. If you have the entire funnel written out, you know where to make the changes. Such as changing the URL of the thank you page.

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When you have a website, how do you structure the URL’s as far as where the products go (assuming you sell products), where does the blog go, where do the opt-in/squeeze pages go?

It depends where you are starting from.

When you are starting with a product that will be marketed by paid traffic or by relying on affiliates (such as putting the product on clickbank), the Top Level Domain should be the opt-in page and/or salesletter.

You can test combinations of a separate opt-in page, combination opt-in page/salesletter, etc. later on.

For example: Your “beginning computers made easy” e-book for sale would go on the Top Level Domain like www.beginningcomputers.com

Tool for the job: optimizepress

I have found that optimizepress is the easiest solution to use as far as how to set up a website to sell products or build a mailing list.

If you decide to create a blog later on, which is a good idea for lead building, then you can install the blog in a subdirectory of your Top Level Domain (known as TLD for your beginners) such as www.beginningcomputers.com/blog.

This would be a new installation of wordpress, which, when you use a good user friendly webhost like the one I use, will take all of 30 seconds to install wordpress with a couple of clicks of the mouse.

Tool for the job: A blog theme – such as the thesis theme

So you would be running the full domain on 2 installations of wordpress. Your sales funnel would be run on optimizepress theme ( a theme specializing in sales funnels) and your blog would be run on a theme like Thesis – a great blog framework providing better features for a content rich website that most blogs are.

Now, as far as the traffic coming to your website.

When you have controllable traffic – articles, ppc, anywhere where you can control the exact page on your domain where the visitor go when they click a link, you send this traffic to an opt-in page most of the time. There are always exceptions such as when someone uses a very strong buying keyword like “buy book on xxx”. In that case you wouldn’t want to distract them from their obvious goal of looking to buy a book.

Using our example from above, the website structure would be setup this way:

www.beginningcomputers.com/how-to-xx – Using your optimizepress wordpress installation because you are trying to either capture the lead or get a sale.

2 – When you start with a blog and plan to add products later  – business model 2 or 3 (which I’ll fill you in on a little later in another post) – the TLD is the blog homepage

Example: www.beginningcomputers.com

Tool for the job: A blog theme

If you create products later on then you can add the products in a subdirectory, subdomain, or separate domain. Such as www.beginningcomputers.com/products/

Tool for the job: optimizepress – You will create a new installation of wordpress for this.

So each domain, if you have products and a blog, would have 2 separate wordpress installations.

As an example, on one of my websites, the TLD is a blog, but I also sell my own products out of this domain. The members area  and products are done with optimizepress in their own directory and another installation of wordpress – such as www.domain.com/products/

So here are some website URL structure examples using some domains off the top of my head – I have no idea if these are real websites or not and are just used as an example here.

::: Structure 1 – Starting with a Blog TLD

(blog installation)
howtofixdesks.com – Blog Homepage
howtofixdesks.com/painting/article – Blog/category/individual post

(optimizepress installation)
howtofixdesks.com/products/fixdeskscheap – An ebook for sale
howtofixdesks.com/products/toolstofixdesks – Another e-book for sale

::: Structure 2 – Starting with a Product – Sales Funnel TLD

(squeeze and sales installation)
mugsoftheworld.com – Sales funnel
mugsoftheworld.com/europe/ – A sales page of mugs from europe

(Blog installation)
mugsoftheworld.com/articles – the blog, instead of blog you can decide to call the subdirectory something like “articles”

mugsoftheworld.com/articles/europe/article – The blog, broken down into category (europe) and then the article

Using this system, I have no problems about mixing in product sales with an overall content website (blog) where I focus on affiliate marketing and contextual advertising because I follow this website URL structure.

If you think you have installed Piwik correctly, try logging into your control panel. Once you can log in, this means you have installed it correctly.

If you point your browser to the website you installed the tracking code on and see it is not recording any visitors immediately (there is no delay as with google analytics) the solution I am about to cover is probably the answer.

I read about this on piwik’s own site and saw hostgator specifically mentioned as a webhost where this problem might occur.

Here’s the problem: hostgator uses mod_security to block requests containing URLs.

Woah. What the hell does that mean? I’m no techie, but it obviously refers to some security measure.

The great thing is, I didn’t have to be a techie nor fix the problem myself.

hostgator's live support link

All I had to do was go to hostgator live chat (which is available 24hrs and so worth their ridiculously low price of hosting) and ask the live support person to whitelist my domain (or URL) that I installed Piwik on and disable mod_security for that same site.

If you don’t know what this means, you don’t have to.

What’s important is that hostgator’s technical support people do know what this means and they will fix it for you in a minute.

Just tell them that your tracking script won’t work until that’s done. Once the technician tells you they fixed it, point your browser back to the website, then log back into your piwik control panel. You’ll see visitors being recorded.

Let’s break things down about selling something online. In fact, I will break it down into it’s most simple form. This is not theory either, this is from recent real life experience with selling online.

While people search online for techniques or tricks to sell things online…while people are fretting over making the perfect salesletter, I have done the following:

I sold a product to my list through email without any salesletter at all.

I spent awhile gathering an email list, using aweber to manage it, of people who were interested in a certain topic. This is the centerpiece of selling any product. Gather leads that are interested in the topic you are in. Online, one of the best ways to do this is with opt-in forms to collect email addresses.

These people would send me emails asking to buy a certain product. The product was not available so I created it and announced the product to my list. Boom, the sales came in.

I did not do the following that you hear so much about what you SHOULD do.

I didn’t spend weeks preparing the salesletter. In fact, I had no salesletter.

I didn’t spend a long time deciding on price – I just priced it very similar to what other similar products sell for.

I didn’t even do a launch process.

I sold the product right from an email.

I simply wrote an email to my list stating that I have this new product, here’s what’s in it, here’s the link to order it.

And the sales came.

Before I did this, I had, what could be termed, a failure to the same email list.

I created another product that I thought the same list would want to buy. It was (and still is) a great product. Essentially, it taught them how to make the product they really wanted. It was very cheap – Like $7 – and I spent quite a bit of time compiling the instructions and putting it into a logical and easy to understand format.

When I did a survey about this product, some people even told me they would be interested in it. However, people saying they would be interested in a product and people actually parting with money are two different things.

Sales were meager!

The lessons learned is – the easiest way to make sales is this: give (and by give, I mean sell) people exactly what they want. People will expect to have to pay for it. Just let them know exactly what you have. Give a clear concise description of it and they will buy it.

If you give people something related, that you think they would like, I suppose you may have some success, but the other way is so much easier and more profitable.

When I go to starbucks and I want coffee, the worker asks me what I would like. I answer “Coffee” and they give it to me. I expect to pay around $2, which is what I am charged so I happily pay to get what I want.

They ask many people if they would like to try a new “clover” coffee. A few people try it, but most do not because most people came for “their” coffee drink, not something starbucks wants to sell them.

This is equivalent to the example I gave above.

I want to show it you because I want you to get a sense of how I teach. I am going to create a lot of how to videos that give you easy to follow instructions to help run your own online business.

I’ve sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of self published products online.
I sold a website last year for a high 5 figures price
I’ve been doing this over 10 years
99% of my online experience has NOT come in the “How to make money online” niche.

If after watching this sample video, you think you would be interested in any “how to” instructional programs I create, just enter your email in the box below.

Enjoy the video and please leave a comment.

If you just change your mindset, you’ll end up lowering the defense barriers of potential customers a lot quicker by changing your mindset of “salesletter writing” to “try to help a friend”

Answer this question. Who are you more likely to listen to when they discuss a product, a salesman or a friend?

A salesman tries to sell you something.

A friend just tells you a story about why the product is so cool and helpful.

Stop “writing a salesletter” and start “talking to a friend” Yes, sometimes a friend will use words like “awesome”, that may be hype, but it’s fine.

This really is a mindset exercise. Picture yourself talking to someone who would be interested in what you have. Like a product you just bought that you love so much.  Talk to them to persuade them – by being their caring friend who is so enthusiastic about a product and as a friend you just know they would love it would make their life so much better.

Pretend they would answer you back with any objections or questions they would have. Write down all these objections and address them.

This is a great way to start to build salescopy without going into “write a salesletter” mode which can be very cold and detached.

Tell your friend the story of why this product is so great, what you did before you had this product, give an example of how this product helped you.

Just like we do every day. All of us…

Like when we tell a friend about a tv show they missed.

Like when we tell a friend about this great dinner you had.

Like when you tell a friend about this cool new gadget you got.

But, take a step back and re-examine who you are following for advice and take a closer look. The packaging may be great, but you may be making a major mistake and following the wrong person and not know it. This may be causing you to be spinning your wheels and be getting nowhere.

Look at your own monetization model. Or, if you don’t have one yet, what monetization model are you interesting in pursuing?

If your main income stream is, or will be, selling information products online, are the people you look to for blogging advice or for a blog to model yourself after – as far as design, what to include in blog posts, etc. selling products as their main income stream?

…Or do they use their blog mainly to get speaking gigs and get further publicity?

If your main income stream is going to be selling the products of other companies for affiliate commissions, are the people you model your blog after making their income from affiliate commissions or from selling consulting services?

Don’t fall into the trap of copying someone because you either:

1. like how their blog looks
2. like what they teach
3. figure they know more than you and know what they are doing

It is subtle, but it makes a difference. Model someone who is doing something as close to what you want to do as possible.

For example: There are many people who give a way a lot of “How to” information in their blog posts. I mean really detailed, step by step info.

However, if you do this and your main monetization is to sell information products, this can hurt your sales because you are giving away too much. You are training people to just expect to get a bunch of free “how to” information and they then won’t purchase what you are selling.

But, if your main monetization strategy is to make affiliate commissions on a product that is supported by your “how to” information, this may make more sense because you are not giving away what it is you are selling.

Take a step back and take a good look at who you follow for advice and who you model.

…”The Death of…” headline. I guess it’s a little test and a little wink from me to those ridiculous “death of” headlines you’ve probably seen in the past 2 years or so.

Death of salesletters, Death of article marketing, Death of email marketing, etc.

As far as The Death of Product Launches geared toward the “how to make money online” market, it seems the conversion numbers for high ticket product launches are very bad lately. There is no other way to put it.


I received an email from Kelly F of BringtheFresh.com this morning where he talks about the failure of 2 very high profile product launches.

This was a great email for people to read because it gives hard numbers. I really think people benefit from seeing real hard numbers because they can judge themselves against something.

People may be doing perfectly fine with their own conversion rates, but because of some pre-conceived idea they have or picked up after reading some hype online, they feel their efforts are just not cutting it. This can lead to them junking something that is actually working well instead of just ramping up what they are already doing.

Anyway, he mentioned in the email that his promotion efforts to his list, at making affiliate sales on this latest product launch, has produced a whopping 2 sales.

I don’t know for sure how many people are on his list, but I’m sure it’s quite high. Well into 5 figures. But, even if you assume there are only 10,000 people on his list. 2 sales from 10,000 people is a horrible conversion rate.

.02%

This from a seasoned marketer.

But, he goes on to tell us that he is in the top 10 affiliates for this product launch. Read that carefully and think about it.

Very big names in the “how to make money online” market who have 6 figure lists have only sold 1 or 2 copies.

Kelly also mentioned another recent product launch, Eben Pagan’s Self Made Wealth. This latest high ticket launch was not pulling very well either. This was the second place I read about the low numbers for that launch. It seems only 19 affiliate sales was the top getter.

This totally contradicts the HUGE numbers you read about as far as earnings from the big names from their launches. You know, like… in the millions of dollars for a single launch and high 6 figure earnings in only a few hours, and selling out in 3 hours etc.

That’s why I titled this post “The Death of Product Launches”.

As far as I can tell, there are 4 main possibilities why this is happening.

1 – These are products that the market just does not want

2 – The market is getting sick of  very high ticket items

3 – The people marketing these products don’t know how to market

4 – The Universal List is saturated

Reason 1 and 2 are pretty self explanatory. It is possible that people on the lists of the “how to make money online” guru’s just didn’t want these products. Even if they praised the people who created them…said they were excited about them…said they were pumped when they viewed the free content…left comments about how they couldn’t wait for the product…when push came to shove and it was time to hand over money for the product, they just didn’t really want them.

I put reason #3 in there as a tongue in cheek possibility, but there may be a little more truth to it if you think about it.

Many people in the “how to make money online” market are only in that one market. They really have had no experience or success in another market and when push comes to shove, they really are not experts in marketing. They have attached themselves at the right time to a wave that may just be crashing now.

This leads into reason #4

The way most big names in the “how to make money online” market get their message out is by email. How do they build their lists? They rely on joint venture partners who basically exchange lists between each other by emailing their own lists to go optin and join their partners list so they can view that persons free content.

Do this enough times and everyone’s individual list will eventually merge into 1 universal list that is used by most big name people in the “how to make money online” market. Everyone has the same people on their list.

That person can be receiving over 20 emails a day promoting the same product.

The “universal” list starts to become saturated as not enough new leads are added and thus sales start to decline.

I’ve had experience with this myself. If you have a list that is not adding new leads, eventually that list will become stale.

When you split your original list into buyers and non buyers, the buyers will have already bought everything they want to. The same list of buyers can’t keep buying $2000 items over and over.

Your second list becomes the left over non buying freebie seekers. The freebie seekers will most likely never buy which makes that list almost worthless.

The returns from using the same list decrease. Especially when the same list is being pitched very high ticket items multiple times per month (or at least that’s how it seems without checking the hard numbers on that.)

I suspect big changes are in the horizon. I also suspect that, like always, fundamentals will come back into play and things that seemed “old news” as far as “how to sell online” will suddenly become popular again.

Let me know what you think by commenting on this post. And, if you like it, “Tweet it”, “Like it” and do that social media sharing thing.

Sincerely,

Ethan Semmel

Joel Comm wrote a post about it a few days after mine giving tips about the fundamentals to marketing your business online. He summed it up well here:

However, there is a big difference between trying to make money online and running a business online.

The make money online pitch has unfortunately become synonymous with “get rich quick.” The mentality is that you simply create a product and make money selling it.

That’s NOT building a business. That’s trying to make a few bucks. Maybe it succeeds. More likely it fails. Either way, you don’t have a business.

The thing is, I think this trend to go away from building a business to make money is growing, not declining